In my opinion, the Super Nintendo (SNES) and the original PlayStation were the golden era for the JRPG. We had so many good ones such as Final Fantasy 7, Xenogears, and Secret of Mana. One of my personal favorite RPGs of all time is Chrono Trigger for SNES. For this week’s throwback, I will be discussing Chrono Trigger and my memories playing it.
Chrono Trigger was released in 1995, developed and published by Squaresoft (now known as Square Enix). At the time, three of the most influential Japanese developers and artists collaborated on this game together:
“Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Square’s Final Fantasy series; Yuji Horii, a freelance designer and creator of Enix’s popular Dragon Quest series; and Akira Toriyama, a freelance manga artist famed for his work with Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger)
The art style is immediately recognizable to anyone who has seen Dragon Ball. The main character, Crono, reminded me of a Goku like character. One of the features that stood out at the time were that the enemies were visible on-screen and upon touching them, you initiated a turn based battle. The turn based fighting in Chrono Trigger used an active turn based system. This meant that each character on your team had an energy bar that when full, gave them a chance to attack. The rate at which this is refilled is based on the character’s speed statistic.
What intrigued me the most about Chrono Tigger was the time travel aspect of the game. The way that the player played the game and what they did when they travelled to past or future locations affected the game’s ending. There were 13 different endings based on how you influenced the world in your time travelling adventure. I am a big fan of time travel stories and this was the first time travel heavy game I played. It was also the catalyst to why I love time travel stories so much to begin with. Each character that joins your quest is from a different time era and features different traits. My personal favorite was Frog, a character from 600 AD who was turned into a frog by villain Magus. Depending on what you do both Frog and Magus are optional characters in the game that you may not unlock as playable if you don’t do specific events.
I did not play this game the year it came out, I do remember my trip to pick it up though. It was still in the 90s and my cousin who had his driver’s license took me to the mall to go to Funcoland to search for a used copy of this game. Interesting side note: Funcoland was bought out by GameStop and I worked there for about a year in my 20s while I was in college, the store is officially closed now. They had one copy of the game so I bought it and we drove back to my house to start playing. My cousin and I bonded a lot over video games, Star Wars, and music. He has been a major influence in the style of music I like and the person who introduced me to the Star Wars Universe. He was the best man at my wedding and more of a brother than a cousin to me.
Chrono Trigger has a fantastic story, memorable characters and an intriguing time travel mechanic. It’s still the RPG I compare all other JRPGs to. If you have not played this game I highly recommend trying it if you are a fan of old school JRPGs from the 16 or 32 bit era. It was re-released on Nintendo DS as well so there are multiple ways to play this gem.
Whenever I think about Chrono Trigger, I think about that day when my cousin took me for a ride to pick it up. We went on many adventures and still go on plenty to this day. It was a game I played during the summer drought and loved every second of it.
