Few games are as beloved as Chrono Trigger. In 1995, Square Enix released this time-traveling RPG, and it has since enthralled audiences with its incredible storytelling, fantastic gameplay, and memorable characters. I’m part of the generation that got to play this gem in its original cartridge format on the Super Nintendo. The generation after me might remember CT as a classic game they played on an emulator or a Virtual Console. But even people who have had to resort to plugins and ROMs to play CT all seem to love it. Why? What about it is so captivating to an audience that has now spanned across multiple platforms and 20+ years?
The initial meeting with Chrono Trigger was pure enchantment. The year was 1995, and I was a tender 12 years of age. My closest friend, Mike, had a Super Nintendo, and he’d recently acquired a fresh game for it. The game was Chrono Trigger, and he was all but foaming at the mouth to show it to me. So, being an amiable sort, he did just that. ‘Come on over, and I’ll show you what the fuss is about,’ said he. And so I went and was duly impressed by the game, as any young man is wont to be when he sees something described as ‘fresh’ and ‘exciting’ and ‘revolutionary,’ which are all words that 1995-era Mike used when talking about the game. And, to tell the truth, 1995-era me would have used them too, for Chrono Trigger is a game that is still every ounce as enchanting as it was back then.
When I got to Mike’s house, he’d already set up the Super Nintendo in his living room. The first thing I saw was the unforgettable opening to Chrono Trigger, world-renowned composer Yasunori Mitsuda’s name appearing alongside Square Soft and “Spring 1995,” followed by the beloved Renaissance-esque visual style of Akira Toriyama, taking to mind what many believe to be one of the greatest (if not the greatest) Japanese role-playing games of all time. From the protagonist, Crono, 1999’s appearance on the front cover of the American release to the Evangelion-level plot involving Lavos—an overgrown creature whose ultimate manifestation on the planet the seemingly endless player fights against, in what has come to be known as an… excuse me, I have to go: this fight is really grating on my nerves, and I don’t have the patience to let my characters die a third time.
The early moments of the game held a powerful spell. The intricate construction of the Millennial Fair, where young Crono first encounters the lively, silken-voiced Marle, gives little in the way of prescriptively linear structure. There’s just an endless possibility for peripheral engagement, to such a degree that the fair itself might as well stand in as a sort of mini-diorama of the surprising narrative that helps Chrono Trigger off to such an auspicious start.
Every era in time that was worth the first game had to offer up to some serviceable illusion of human society. Each scene within each illusion, then, had to deliver on the work of the playable art that developers give the players in those early moments.
Going further into the game, I was captivated by its lush, bright world. This wasn’t just a stage for us to play on; it was a world with a real sense of presence. The characters were real in that world. They had their own personas, their own problems, and their own lives that they were trying to lead. And they weren’t just a vehicle for the story to be carried forward. They had their own identities—noble knight Frog with a tragic past, for example, or the fierce, pit-venerating loyalty of Ayla. All of them were refreshing window dressings for a sharp-edged, character-driven world. The story straight-up sizzled with great storytelling presentation.
What makes Chrono Trigger truly amazing is how it uses time travel to tell its story. You’re not just going to different time periods because you can; at a certain point, the game’s plot only moves forward because of time travel. There are a few worlds, like the End of Time, that are sort of hubs where you can choose to go to different eras, but for the most part, the story has a definite sequence of events that you have to go through.
And what the story and the gameplay mostly have in common is that the moment-to-moment stuff you’re doing matters.
The time travel aspect of the game wasn’t just about moving the story along; it was a means for the player to learn about the results of their choices in separate timelines. I recall the delight of realizing that what I did in one time period would change something in another. I could grow a forest by starting things off with a single seed in the Middle Ages. I wasn’t responsible for anything like saving the world, but I was still making a huge mess that had the potential to alter history.
It is indeed unforgettable for me that in the game, we are assigned a mission to rescue the realm of Guardia from the evil wizard Magus. The plot extends over several eons. It begins in an age when human beings have not yet arrived on the scene but seem to be in an ape-like state of evolution, and continues through the Middle Ages, where the magician coming to power signifies an arrival of human society at a kind of zenith of its pre-science achievement. This is much more than just a geographic tale with a good kingdom to the north and a bad kingdom to the south.
Also running through Chrono Trigger, like a bright, shiny thread, is the human drama. Here, too, time plays an essential role. Some heroes have more time to live because they inhabit a bygone era; some have less time for the same reason. However, when it comes to the personal stories and personalities of the characters, the drama lies not so much in the time itself as in the initial conditions that time brings to the stage of the unfolding human story—in the portion of the story that is set mostly in the times past, in the era of lavishly mustachioed. Overall, the game is shot through with the ‘personal emotional responses’ factor.
Not only was Chrono Trigger a narrative tour de force, but it was also a masterpiece of gameplay mechanics. The Active Time Battle (ATB) system was one of several plot devices used. It was a battle mechanic that made players feel as if they were on the battlefield alongside their characters, rather than being puppeteers from some halfgod’s combat theater. And yet, as revolutionary as those mechanics felt in 1995, Chrono Trigger was not unique in its use of ATB.
Exploring the game’s many environments and uncovering hidden secrets was one of the most enjoyable parts of playing the game. The game was packed and bursting with optional areas you could traverse, super tough enemies, and rewards you could find for beating them. I felt accomplished when, for instance, I found the hidden catacombs beneath the ruins of Zeal or when I defeated the big, was-it-really-that-simple Black Tyrano on the boss’s platform. There was always a sense of what was at stake; I felt involved and sometimes frustrated. But in the end, I always thought, “Man… what a fantastic game!”
What made Chrono Trigger such a standout game, especially for its time, was the people in it. These were not just little avatars with a different arrangement of pixels for their faces; these people had lives and backgrounds. They had abilities, like Crono being able to do lightning magic and being generally awesome with a sword. They had personalities, like Marle, who was our own portable support system. And, god bless her, Lucca could kill a robot with a look and explode any part of a huge monster with a well-placed fire spell. What was more, these people in our party didn’t just look different and move provocatively different; they were much more, and much more fun to play with, than the insipid Fighters and the mildly interesting Red Mages of games that came after Chrono Trigger.
My all-time favorite video game character is Frog, the knight cursed with a past that would make Oedipus blush. If you’ve never heard of him before, I imagine it’s because you’ve never played Chrono Trigger, the legendary game released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and reissued on the Nintendo DS, in which Frog—as well as gameplay!—is awesome in nearly every possible way.
His tale is a salient one. He is a top knight in the kingdom, serving the fictional King Guardia in the year 600 A.D. He is unmatched in his chivalrous nature, and he possesses the powerful magic of water, a “Hydro” magic that makes for a very cool elemental attack and a essential raft of healing spells.
The villains were highly memorable, too. You had the opposite counter of Frog: the Mage (known in Japan as a Maō, or demon king), who had an awfully poignant backstory and emerged as a figure of towering pathos. You had the unfathomably freaky Lavos, the eldritch abomination that was going to awaken and tear the cosmos asunder (vocab word!). Each of these “evils” was completely believable and even sort of relatable, in a way that only underscored the poignant drama unfolding on the screen.
Chrono Trigger left a decisive and enduring mark on the role-playing game genre. Its influence, like the branches of a sturdy and deeply rooted tree, has stretched and wound its way through the video game landscape. That tree’s roots are in the mid-1990s. In terms of the role-playing game (RPG) genre, there were many trees budding when Chrono Trigger first dropped in 1995. That’s a big reason why Chrono Triggers legacy—its impact on many games that came after it—is seen as so massive.
Chrono Trigger has been acclaimed by fans and critics as one of the greatest video games ever made. It orients itself in the “golden age” of jRPGs, a special era during the 16- and 32-bit consoles. CT is commonly appreciated for its “New Game+” feature, which not only has a potent structure but also allows for engaging and eye-opening distortions of that structure. Chrono Trigger was the first game to be honored with this feature; it is not a coincidence that a certain ending of this game is the most challenging among them all.
The game was the first to truly incorporate time travel into every aspect of both its story and its gameplay, and that was the secret to its success. While the onscreen narrative might have thrown our minds back to a medieval-style era with knights and sorcerers, the conceptual plot advanced the story through to the future—and, in turn, to the end of time and then beyond!—by means of players twiddling with a now-iconic clock pendulum. Then and only then, in the game’s climactic finale, do we get the whole panoramic backstory. This deceptively simple plot device.
Chrono Trigger’s characters have certainly left their mark. Their vibrant and distinct personalities that were way ahead of the flat and lifeless iterations of the 1990s loom large. What’s more, the individual components that make up almost every single character in the game are sheer cliff-face stuff that you’d think only a child could buy into, except that I think the characters of Chrono Trigger can be unbelievably magnetic to both children and adults (of which I’m now one) of every single stripe.
The impact of Chrono Trigger goes beyond its top-notch storytelling and memorable characters, evidenced particularly in its strong-yet-subtle theme of consequence. The game’s real-time battles and computer-controlled team members introduce a level of strategy and dynamism within each encounter, unlike the lumbering procession of still-image screens dealt by most RPGs of its purported ilk. In Chrono Trigger, attacks from team members sometimes serve as a combination, and players learn very quickly that a double tech or triple tech does a lot both of foiling the plans of the various bosses encountered and reaching the end.
In retrospect, Chrono Trigger appears to be a precocious child of games, one that did not know the limits that even very good games are supposed to respect. It certainly did not know what an ordinary console RPG is supposed to look like or act like, and it most definitely did not understand that these games typically should not (and do not) leave much room for innovation if they are to be successful with that somewhat persnickety and hard-to-please core fan base.
To me, ‘Chrono Trigger will always occupy a cherished corner of my heart. This was a world, rendered in pixels, that seemed as real and as full of adventure as any place I could walk to. The image, the music, the player’s very progress, the innovative combat system, everything dovetailed into one of the most immersive experiences that a pop culture product could provide in the mid-’90s. The creators, the voice actors, hell, even the impresarios who made the port to the Nintendo DS all deserve a round of applause rivalling any given to the console RPGs of the past.
Now that I’m here, thinking back on my relationship with Chrono Trigger, I’m plumb filled with an acute nostalgia and downright thankfulness that verges on the indescribable. That game was more to me than a simple pastime. If anything, it was a veritable experience, one that has since made me the person I now am—a person who is absolutely bonkers about adventures and the art of video games. But this experience has also set my mind thinking about what resonates with me when I am spending time in these immersive worlds.
An RPG classic of the very highest regard, Chrono Trigger set the standard in gameplay for its time-traveling genre. With its move away from the purely turn-based mechanics of games like Dragon Quest 4 and landing much closer to real-time RPG territory than an old-school game had any right to do, Chrono Trigger enthralled players with knight, magic, and monster-stocked quests as their heroes hurtled through time-traveling adventures. A point of personal privilege. This game was and is one of my most-cherished gaming experiences, creating and playing CENTER_STUX_ to my all-time favorite gaming moments.
