I’ll be honest—when my daughter first mentioned Chrono Trigger back in 2011, I figured she was just throwing another retro game title at me that I’d probably never get around to playing. I mean, I was still trying to wrap my head around this whole “16-bit graphics can be good actually” concept she’d been drilling into me since I’d gotten hooked on Super Metroid the year before. But she kept bringing it up, kept insisting it was different, kept saying things like “Dad, this one has time travel that actually makes sense” and “the music will make you cry.” Yeah, right. A video game was gonna make a 42-year-old construction foreman cry.
Well, joke’s on me, because she wasn’t wrong about the crying part.
I finally picked up a copy at a retro game store in Denver—paid way too much for it, probably fifty bucks for a loose cartridge, but the guy behind the counter gave me this knowing look when I told him it was my first time playing it. “Oh man,” he said, “I wish I could play this again for the first time.” I get that reaction a lot when I tell people I’m experiencing these classic games fresh, but something about the way he said it made me think maybe this one was gonna be special.
That weekend, I fired it up on the SNES I’d bought a few months earlier. Those opening notes hit—this haunting, beautiful melody that somehow felt both nostalgic and mysterious—and I knew immediately that this wasn’t gonna be like the other RPGs I’d been trying. I’d struggled through parts of Final Fantasy VI, found it interesting but kinda slow, too many random battles interrupting the flow. But Chrono Trigger grabbed me from minute one and didn’t let go until I’d seen the credits roll about forty hours later.
The time travel thing was what hooked me initially. I’m a practical guy—I build things for a living, I understand cause and effect, I know that if you don’t lay a proper foundation everything falls apart later. So when a game shows me that planting a seed in 12,000 BC creates a forest in 1000 AD where I can find treasure, that’s the kind of logical consequence that makes sense to my brain. It’s not just “magic portal to different level”—it’s actual time travel with rules that work.
What really impressed me, though, was how the game never talked down to me or held my hand. I’d been worried that these older RPGs would feel primitive compared to modern games, but Chrono Trigger felt sophisticated in ways that a lot of newer games don’t. The battle system was this perfect blend of strategy and action—characters moving around the battlefield, combo attacks that required timing, enemies with actual positions and weaknesses. Coming from someone who’d never played a turn-based RPG before, I expected to be bored by combat. Instead, I found myself looking forward to fights just to see what new combination attacks I could pull off.
And the characters… man. I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d end up caring about these pixelated people. Frog became my immediate favorite—this cursed knight with his formal way of speaking, seeking redemption for past failures. As someone who’s made his share of mistakes over the years, watching Glenn’s story unfold hit me harder than I expected. The scene where he finally confronts Cyrus’s death, where he has to choose between revenge and doing what’s right… that’s heavy stuff wrapped up in a 16-bit package.
Then there’s Robo. A robot who’s spent 400 years alone in a ruined future, slowly dying, but who still maintains this optimistic outlook on existence. The first time he talked about wanting to understand human emotions, I thought it was gonna be cheesy sci-fi nonsense. Instead, it turned into this genuinely moving exploration of what it means to have purpose, what it means to care about others even when you know you’re different from them. Hell, the scene where you find him after he’s spent centuries reforesting the world by himself nearly broke me.
I should mention the music because… Jesus. I work construction—I’m around noise all day, machinery and shouting and the general chaos of job sites. When I get home, I usually want quiet. But I found myself leaving Chrono Trigger running just to listen to the soundtrack. There’s this track called “Wind Scene” that plays when you’re exploring the medieval world, and it’s just… peaceful. Made me understand why people collect video game music on vinyl, something I never thought I’d comprehend.
The multiple time periods were brilliantly done too. Each era felt completely different, had its own personality and problems and visual style. The prehistoric age with its tribal conflicts and dinosaurs. The dark ages with knights and castles and magic. The apocalyptic future where machines have taken over and everything’s gone to hell. Most games, when they do time travel, it’s just the same basic level design with different skins. Chrono Trigger made each time period feel like a completely different world with its own rules and culture.
That post-apocalyptic future, 2300 AD, was particularly effective. Walking around those ruined cities, seeing what happened to civilization, understanding that this is what you’re trying to prevent… it gave weight to everything you were doing. This wasn’t just “save the princess” or “collect the magical MacGuffin”—this was “prevent the literal end of the world.” The stakes felt real in a way that most game stories don’t manage.
Lavos, the main antagonist, scared the hell out of me in a way I didn’t expect from a Super Nintendo game. This alien parasite that crashes into planets, burrows deep, absorbs everything it can about the world’s life and technology, then emerges to destroy everything before sending its spawn to continue the cycle elsewhere. That’s legitimately creepy cosmic horror, the idea that Earth is just one stop on this creature’s reproductive cycle. Learning about Lavos made me look at the entire game differently—every time period you visit, it’s already there, underneath everything, influencing events from below.
What impressed me most was how the game respected my time and intelligence. No random encounters interrupting exploration. No grinding required to progress. Multiple endings that actually changed based on your choices and when you decided to face the final boss. The New Game Plus feature that let you carry your characters’ progress into subsequent playthroughs to see different story outcomes. These were innovations that solved problems I didn’t even know RPGs had until I played games that didn’t solve them.
I ended up playing through Chrono Trigger four times that first year, seeing different endings, making different choices, discovering new dialogue and character interactions. Each playthrough revealed new details I’d missed before. The game was dense with content but never felt bloated or padded. Everything served a purpose.
My daughter was thrilled when I called her after finishing it the first time. “So?” she said, and I could hear the anticipation in her voice. “You were right,” I told her. “It’s special.” We spent an hour on the phone talking about our favorite characters, favorite moments, comparing notes on which ending we thought was canon. It became one of our shared touchstones, something we could bond over despite the decades between us.
Since then, I’ve played other time travel RPGs, other classic JRPGs that people say are essential. Some are excellent. But none of them have captured lightning in a bottle quite like Chrono Trigger did. There’s something about the combination of Toriyama’s character designs, Mitsuda’s music, and the storytelling that just works perfectly. It’s the kind of collaborative magic that rarely happens in any creative medium.
I’ve bought it on multiple platforms since then—DS, mobile, Steam. Each version has its quirks, but the core experience remains powerful. Playing it on my phone during lunch breaks at job sites, seeing Crono and friends adventure across time while I’m sitting in my truck eating a sandwich, never stops being surreal. But that music still gives me chills. Those character moments still hit hard. The time travel mechanics still feel clever and logical.
People ask me sometimes if Chrono Trigger holds up for someone coming to it without nostalgia, if it’s actually as good as its reputation suggests or if it’s just childhood memories talking. I can definitively say it’s the former. This is a masterpiece that transcends the era it came from. It’s proof that with enough talent and creativity, you can make something timeless—which feels appropriate for a game about time travel.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think it’s time for my annual replay. The Epoch is fueled up and ready to go.
Timothy discovered retro gaming at forty and never looked back. A construction foreman by day and collector by night, he writes from a fresh, nostalgia-free angle—exploring classic games with adult curiosity, honest takes, and zero childhood bias.
