Chrono
Trigger
Developer:
Square
Publisher:
SquareSoft (1995, SNES)
Nearly
fifteen years after its release, longtime JRPG fans still point to
Square's Chrono Trigger as one of the best of the best.
Although it was hardly a point of interest at its American release,
Chrono Trigger resulted from the combined efforts of Hironobu
Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii -- in other words, the masters behind Final
Fantasy and Dragon Quest, the two most popular JRPG series
in the world.
By combining Square's talents at storytelling and
aesthetic design, along with Horii's skillful scenario design and
knack for simplicity, they almost created the perfect game.
One
of Dragon Quest's greatest strength is its reliance on
tradition. It's also its greatest failing, forcing the development
team to keep at variations of the same theme, simply because that's
what Dragon Quest is. In essence, Chrono Trigger is
essentially a Dragon Quest game that's allowed itself to step
outside of the limitations of the series and do something a bit more
daring.
For
the longest time, Akira Toriyama's character artwork was confined
into tiny, little, barely distinguishable sprites -- never clearly
visible until after Chrono Trigger. With Square's talented
artists, the trio of heroes -- spiky-haired country boy Crono, feisty
would-be princess Marle, and bookish scientst Lucca -- came to life
in ways that Dragon Quest never had. Koichi Sugiyama is an
extremely talented composer, but his music stylings rarely go beyond
Western-style symphonic orchestrations.
Here, Final Fantasy
composer Nobuo Uematsu is free to rock out with a few contributed
tracks, but a bulk of the soundtrack composed by the talented
Yasunori Mitsuda, who made his name on this game. Whereas Dragon
Quest always felt a bit low budget, Chrono Trigger is one
of the most gorgeous looking, gorgeous sounding games on the Super
Nintendo.
Certain
other elements from Dragon Quest have been carried forward,
most notably the existence of a silent protagonist. It also,
unfortunately, affects the battle system -- the only method of
character customization come in the form of stat enhancing seeds,
another carryover from Dragon Quest.
For some reason, the
number of playable characters has been cut down to three. At least it
implements a battle function called Double and Triple Techs, where
two or three party members can combine their magic spells for extra
special attacks. In some ways, it's a step down from both Final
Fantasy's and Dragon Quest's respective systems, but it's
not enough to really matter in the long run.
The
DQ series is also known for its snappy scenario design, full
of memorable events and NPCs. Chrono Trigger is a nonstop ride
through numerous setpieces -- Crono's accidental trip to the past,
his subsequent trial and resulting escape, the discovery of Lavos in
the post-apocalyptic future, the drunken celebrations in the
prehistoric era, the raid on Magus' castle and the lead-up to the
fateful battle.
Pretty much the entire game is series of climaxes,
one after another after another. It's also quite compelling to see
how the relatively small game world changes in all of the different
time periods. Near the game's end, a handful of subquests really show
off how cool it is to amend the mistakes of the past to change the
future.
Time travel is such a fertile ground for interesting
storytelling that it's a shame few games explore it. Even Horii
himself tried it later in Dragon Quest VII, with far less
interesting results.
The
only real downside of cutting down all the treacle is that the
overall quest is pretty short -- one can probably beat it in maybe
fifteen hours. To counteract this, Chrono Trigger introduced
the New Game+, which allows you to restart the game from scratch but
carrying over the stats from when you beat the game.
After a certain
point in the plot, you can time travel directly to fight Lavos, and
depending where you are in the story, defeating him will reveal over
a dozen different endings. All of this helps expand one of the most
intriguing stories found in Japanese RPGs.