When I was young, in grade school, and when I visited my grandma, my uncle lived with her at the time and had an SNES, while I had a Genesis. He always played 3 games when I visited: Super Mario World, Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. I think this memory is what kicked off my love of RPGs but I remember Chrono Trigger always being the one that always eluded me in trying to find ways to play it. It wasn't until I got my PS1 where I got the chance to play Final Fantasy 4 and Chrono Trigger in the Final Fantasy Chronicles pack. And over 20 years later, I decided to give Chrono Trigger another try to see if It still held up. I picked up the Steam version which is the most accessible version at this time, So let's see if one of the best RPGs of all time still holds up today.
Chrono Trigger is a JRPG made by Square Enix (Known as Squaresoft on original release) back in 1995. It had the Dream Team of RPG developers at the time: Hironobu Sakaguchi As Designer, Yoshinori Kitase as Director/Writer, Akira Toriyama as the Character Artist, Yasunori Mituda and Nobuo Uematsu as Composers, and Tetsuya Takahashi as graphics director. For an old-school JRPG fan, this is a fantastic lineup.
You play as Crono, a red spikey haired swordsman who visits a fair to see his friend, Lucca’s newest invention. On the way you bump into a woman, Marle, and bring her along. When Marle uses the invention, her pendant lights up and transports her through a portal, Crono following suit to find out they had been transported 400 years in the past. After a while, you get transported to the far future and see a world in ruin. After a bit of exploring you find a console that shows how the world was destroyed and see the culprit: Lavos. You then set out to find a way to stop the apocalypse, by going through different periods of time and changing the future. The pacing of the story is top notch, not a single moment feels wasted. After you learn about Lavos, everything you do is aimed at destroying it. You're not side progressing to help a farm in need or need to help a developing love between kingdoms. You help a frog knight learn his potential and regain his honor to stop a wizard from summoning Lavos. Or you do tasks that you learn that Lavos is involved in. It's kept at a constant pace that doesn't feel like it's wasting your time.
However a story in a game can only be held up by its gameplay right? Since this is a JRPG, you engage in semi-random battles. Semi-random because all battles have specific areas to fight in and you don't transition to another screen. Plus, some battles you can avoid altogether by just walking around the enemy and not engaging them. You can have 3 active party members and each enemy and party member has a bar that fills up over time. When it fills up you can select one of 3 options. You can use a physical attack, use an item, or select a Tech. A Tech is this game’s magic/skill system, which you upgrade using Tech points. These can either attack/status effect enemies or heal/revive your group. However, if you have enough techs unlocked, you can have 2 or even 3 teammates unlock Dual or Triple Techs. These are extremely powerful spells that require both or all 3 teammates to be active. These techs can also matter in the enemy placement on the battlefield. Enemies will move around to get close and attack or move erratically. Certain techs will have an area of attack, such as throwing a bomb and any enemies within a circle will be affected by it as well, or if an attack launches a character on a horizontal line across the battlefield, any enemy that's in the way will be hit by it as well. This can create some very tense battles and create strategic planning on the fly. Say an enemy is charging up their attack, do you wait for your teammates to be ready and unleash a triple tech to end the battle before the attack, wait for all 3 enemies to be in just the right spot for your double tech or should you use up a turn to heal when you know a big attack is coming but lengthen the battle?
You may want to lengthen the battle anyway because of the presentation. The visuals of the game look fantastic. Every bit of the game looks iconic and memorable. The overworlds could use a bit more work with sprite placement since some of it looks obvious where the grid placement is for the movement. The Menus and UI all have a classic JRPG feel to them with the stone background and blocky text. Menus are easy to navigate and the options are fairly straight forward. It just feels right. Though there is a bit of an asterisk to this. Everything feels right….in the original version. The version I am reviewing is the Steam version, which is just a repackaged mobile version. As such, they had to update the visuals to an “HD” version, meaning they applied a 30% smudge filter. It may have looked fine on a phone or tablet, but on a big computer screen it just looks terrible.
Standard Version
"High Definition" Version
Thankfully they do give you the option to switch it to the original graphics. But sadly you can't switch to the original UI which is far and beyond the better looking of the two. The UI in the new version feels sterile and generic. It may be easier to navigate, but its lost the personality of the original.
What hasn't lost its touch is the music which is honestly the best thing about the game. If there's one thing to take away from this is that you need to listen to the entire soundtrack. Every piece of music fits perfectly with each area. From the soothing chill “Secret Of The Forest” when you are exploring the first enemy filled area of the game, to the The Bombastic epicness of Magus’ theme when you face off with him.The uplifting heroic feeling of Frog’s Theme makes you feel you are in the presence of a nobel knight and the dark futuristic sounds of the Ocean Palace. However my favorite piece has to be a tie, and it's with two pieces of music that go together very well, Corridors of Time and Schala’s Theme. If I said anything about them it would be in spoiler territory so ill just say play the game to understand why these are my favorites. This soundtrack is so good that I actually listen to it constantly while I'm at my day job. The remixes and covers of this soundtrack all sound amazing because Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu did a fantastic job at creating an iconic list of soundtracks. The steam version does lose some points though because the mixing does not sound right on a few tracks and sometimes the sound effects do get either cut off or go missing.
Overall, I highly recommend you play this RPG, especially if it's a genre you are iffy on. It's a great entry level RPG with its low numbering system, easy to follow story and amazing visuals and soundtrack. The steam version though is less than perfect, but is the most widely available version, and includes the DS version extra levels (though you're better off just skipping them since they can be tedious). If you can, try to play the original version, either with the SNES cartridge or through…..other means coughemulatorcough.
