The first time I encountered Chrono Trigger, I was fifteen and broke. I’d been saving up for Final Fantasy VI (or Final Fantasy III as my American self knew it then), but when I walked into Electronics Boutique at the mall—the one next to the Orange Julius where my friend Tom worked and would sneak me free drinks—I saw this other SNES game with box art that stopped me in my tracks. A spiky-haired protagonist with a katana, a frog-man wielding what looked like the Masamune, and was that… a robot? All drawn in a style that reminded me of Dragon Ball Z, which I’d watch badly-dubbed episodes of whenever I could find them. I counted my cash twice, realized I was still $10 short, and called my mom from a pay phone (yep, it was that long ago) to negotiate additional funding in exchange for cleaning out the garage that weekend. Some sacrifices are worth making.
That night, I popped the cartridge in, heard those first haunting notes of Yasunori Mitsuda’s “Chrono Trigger” theme, and fell headlong into what would become not just my favorite JRPG of all time, but a game that would fundamentally change how I thought about storytelling. I played until my eyes burned, until my mom knocked on my door three separate times with escalating threats, until finally at 4 AM I reluctantly saved at a bucket and dragged myself to bed. I dreamt of time portals.
What I couldn’t possibly appreciate then—because I was fifteen and depth perception isn’t exactly a teenage specialty—was that I wasn’t just playing a game; I was experiencing the collaborative masterpiece of what fans now reverently call “the Dream Team.” Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of Final Fantasy; Yuji Horii, the mind behind Dragon Quest; and Akira Toriyama, the artistic genius who gave the world Dragon Ball, had somehow all worked on this single project. It would be like if Spielberg, Scorsese, and Tarantino decided to make one movie together—the kind of creative collaboration that shouldn’t work but somehow produces something greater than the sum of its already impressive parts.
The time travel mechanics blew my adolescent mind. I’d seen Back to the Future (approximately 37 times), but this was different—multiple eras spanning prehistoric times to a post-apocalyptic future, all interconnected in ways that actually made sense if you were paying attention. And unlike most games where time travel is just a fancy way to change levels, in Chrono Trigger your actions in 12,000 BC had actual consequences in 1000 AD. The first time I realized I could plant a seedling in the past and find a fully grown tree with treasure in the future, I literally called my friend at 1 AM to tell him about it. His mom was thrilled.
The battle system was revolutionary too. I’d cut my teeth on turn-based combat where your characters stood in a neat little row on one side of the screen, patiently waiting their turn to swing a sword. But Chrono Trigger’s Active Time Battle system combined with positional combat was something else entirely. Enemies moved around, your attacks had areas of effect, and if you timed things right, your characters would execute these devastating combo techniques. The first time Crono and Frog performed X-Strike on a boss, I think I actually stood up and cheered. My cat, the only witness to this moment of pure gaming joy, was unimpressed and continued grooming herself.
And the characters. My God, the characters. Frog wasn’t just “knight but amphibian”—he was Glenn, a swordsman transformed by a curse, seeking redemption and vengeance with this formal, almost Shakespearean way of speaking that teenage me found impossibly cool. And Magus! What a masterclass in how to turn a villain into something more complex. When I finally got him in my party after initially trying to kill him (sorry about that, buddy), it felt like the game was rewarding me for seeing beyond the simple “he’s the bad guy, whack him with your sword” approach that most RPGs trained you for.
Let’s talk about the multiple endings because they quite literally changed how I approached games afterward. When my friend borrowed my copy after I’d finished it once, he returned it a week later with a smug look on his face. “Did you know there are different endings? I got one where Frog turns back into a human.” I didn’t believe him. This was before widespread internet access, remember—game secrets traveled by playground whispers and the occasional tip in a gaming magazine. I snatched back my cartridge and discovered New Game Plus, which blew the doors off what I thought was possible in an RPG. You mean I can keep all my levels and equipment and play through again to see different stories unfold? You mean there are THIRTEEN potential endings? I spent the entire summer hunting them all down, mapping out decision trees on ruled notebook paper that I kept in the game case.
The music deserves its own paragraph, hell, its own essay. Yasunori Mitsuda was apparently hospitalized from overwork while composing Chrono Trigger’s soundtrack, and as someone who would literally leave the game running overnight just to listen to “Wind Scene” (the 600 AD overworld theme) on repeat, I can believe it. There’s a reason people still perform Chrono Trigger concerts today. I went to one in Chicago about eight years ago and found myself sitting next to a guy probably in his late thirties, like me, both of us with this stupid nostalgic grin when the orchestra hit those first notes of “Corridors of Time.” We didn’t speak, just nodded at each other in silent acknowledgment of shared emotional experience. That’s the power of this game’s music.
The time periods themselves were so distinct, so full of personality. 2300 AD remains one of the most effectively depressing post-apocalyptic settings I’ve ever encountered in any medium. That first moment when you emerge into the blasted future landscape, the music sparse and haunting, the colors all blues and grays, and you realize that this wasteland is what becomes of the world you’ve been trying to save—it hit me harder than any cutscene ever could. I was no longer just playing to beat the game; I was playing because I genuinely didn’t want this future to happen to these pixels I’d grown to care about.
And can we talk about Lavos? Not just as a final boss, but as a concept—a parasitic alien that crashes into a planet, burrows deep, absorbs DNA and technological knowledge over eons, then emerges to destroy everything before sending its spawn to continue the cycle elsewhere. That’s not just “big scary monster” territory; that’s legitimately unsettling sci-fi horror done in 16-bit graphics. The day after I first learned Lavos’s true nature, I remember staring up at the sky during baseball practice, thinking about how fragile civilization actually is, how one extinction-level event could reset everything. Pretty heavy stuff for a game marketed to teenagers.
Chrono Trigger vs. Final Fantasy isn’t really a fair comparison, even though people always want to make it. It’s like comparing a perfect single album to a legendary band’s entire discography. What Chrono Trigger accomplished was taking everything that worked about JRPGs, refining it to its essence, wrapping it in an innovative time travel narrative, and somehow avoiding nearly all the frustrating elements that even its most ardent fans admit the Final Fantasy series sometimes struggles with. No random encounters! No pointless grinding! A New Game Plus that actually gives you reason to replay! Character development that happens through gameplay, not just cutscenes!
The fan community that sprung up around this game tells you everything you need to know about its impact. While official sequels were hit-or-miss (we don’t talk about certain aspects of Chrono Cross in my house, though that soundtrack also slaps), fans have created everything from full-blown ROM hacks with new stories to symphony-quality musical arrangements. I once went down a YouTube rabbit hole of Chrono Trigger cover songs and emerged four hours later, wondering where the time went—which feels appropriately meta for a game about time travel.
I’ve replayed Chrono Trigger every few years since that first summer, on increasingly different hardware. SNES, PlayStation, Nintendo DS, mobile phone, and now on Switch. Each replay hits differently as I bring more life experience to it. As a teenager, I thought Lucca was kinda boring compared to the literal knights and cave-women and robots you could have in your party. Now in my forties, I appreciate her practical genius, her devotion to her parents, the way she approaches each era with scientific curiosity rather than bewilderment. During my last playthrough, the scene where she has the chance to prevent her mother’s accident hit me like a punch to the gut. I’m pretty sure I had something in my eye for that entire sequence. Probably dust or something. Definitely not tears over a decades-old sprite-based game. Nope.
There have been other time travel RPGs since—some quite good—but they always feel like they’re building on Chrono Trigger’s foundation rather than creating something entirely new. The character designs, distinctive thanks to Toriyama’s unmistakable style, still hold up in a way that the polygon monstrosities of the early 3D era simply don’t. The blend of medieval fantasy, science fiction, and prehistoric adventure feels just as fresh now as it did when I was swapping theories with friends between classes. The battle system strikes that perfect balance of strategic depth without needless complexity that modern JRPGs often miss in their quest to add yet another subsystem for players to master.
I don’t know if games like Chrono Trigger can exist anymore—games made with seemingly unlimited creative freedom by the biggest names in the industry, willing to take risks on bizarre concepts (a singing robot who joins your party after you repair him, anyone?), lacking the cynical monetization strategies that plague even single-player experiences today. But I’m grateful that for one brilliant moment in 1995, the stars aligned to create this perfect time-traveling adventure that still holds up 25+ years later. Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel a sudden urge to go see what Gaspar is up to at the End of Time. The Epoch is gassed up and ready to go, and somewhere across time and space, Lavos is waiting.
