Intro

Chrono Trigger is NOT my favorite game. The story was interesting and handled time travel well, but lacked strong emotional beats. “Optional” content wasn’t really optional as the final boss would delete your party if you weren’t 5-10 levels above the previous dungeon’s expected level. That being said, if I played this game when I was 13, this would 100% be my favorite game. I had a blast playing it and despite these small issues, I could easily see myself replaying this bad boy every couple of years.

Where is the fun?

The real joy I got from this game was the different party setups. From chapter 5 onward, you are always given a choice as to how to compose your party. The Tech or combo moves system makes every party composition feel different and interesting. The innovative onscreen battles for a turn based combat system made the game flow where an hour would feel like 10 minutes. Chrono Trigger’s 16 bit art style and excellent score really help it stand the test of time.

The following is mostly spoiler free from a plot perspective, but involves gameplay and mechanical spoilers.

Gameplay

One of the biggest charms of Chrono Trigger is that simple choices create large impacts. Between party member selection and item slot choices, you’re given just 12 choices to compose your party, but each of these choices radically changes your approach to battle. While weapons and armor start off simple (3 armor > 2 armor), later in the game side effects are added to gear. This gave me choices like, do I want significantly less armor but not have to worry about status effects? I think putting off these questions until later in the game gave the player time to really understand the impact that these decisions have. If these were posed earlier, it would be confusing and overwhelming. Trinkets, items that give special bonuses like extra speed or a chance to counterattack, exist throughout the game and always feel like they help accent your character’s role in a party composition.

15 hours was enough time to enjoy the scenery and get out, but you definitely could see that there were a lot of interesting decisions to be made. This game oozes replayability and the game designers expected this and added 13 endings! I was really happy to find out however that the regular ending is also the True ending.

Because this was an older game, there was no line or arrow telling you where to go next. You have to read the dialog and talk to the townsfolk to figure out where to go next. It’s something that has been streamlined in modern games, but wasn’t a big deal here. All npcs had useful dialog to chat with everyone was fun and not a chore. I think this played into the enjoyment of the side quests as they were short, manageable, and meaningful to the story!

Combat

Coming in, I was a bit concerned about the real time/turn based combat system. I think searching through menus while your enemies are whacking you in the face is more anxiety inducing than fun. Luckily, I found that there is a ‘wait’ setting for battle style. This option really reduced anxiety. It gave me the real time experience while also giving me space to slow down time while you made a decision when needed. The ‘wait’ setting pauses time in a battle, but only when you’re in an item or special move menu.

I really liked how the game introduced the idea of timing your attacks when a monster is in a certain position. For example, to cast a cyclone move that hits all targets in a small area, you have to wait for monsters to clump together as they move around. I think this is one of the things that makes each party composition feel different. Ayla and Chrono were in my main party and they had a powerful move that only affects targets in a horizontal line, so you’d have to wait for many enemies to line up for a devastating attack. If you didn’t want to engage with this system Chrono Trigger can accommodate that too. There are even combos that don’t care about positioning of enemies, they just hit everyone on the screen.

In the moment to moment decision making of combat, it definitely felt like you would start to plan moves in batches as all of your characters would recharge at similar rates. This leads to questions like: Am I safe enough to use all my moves on a huge combo that uses all 3 turns? Do I need to recover one person or the whole party? Am I making long term progress on reducing the enemies health? I would find myself asking and answering these questions within a few seconds after picking my previous moves.

The boss and enemy design was also great. Because timing was important, random encounters felt like a small puzzle. My favorite boss was the Masamune character who required you to cast a specific ability in order to counter his move, but the only way you find out about this is by talking to NPCs in a nearby town! This trick turned an impossible fight into something more manageable but not trivial. I also really enjoyed the 9 mode final boss that would test your memory of all 9 previous bosses.

World Exploration

On screen battles are the same as the world exploration

All I can say is I wish that on screen turn based battles was an adopted feature into the turn based JRPG space. Rather than bumping into an enemy and then fading into a new combat view (think: walking around the world and then the battle view in Pokemon), Chrono Trigger had the walking around and combat system take place on the same map. It was a really small thing that made a HUGE difference in my enjoyment of the game.

Story

Overall good story. I really liked the exploration of time. They even used the grandfather paradox as a plot device in the first chapter of the game! I think the game dropped some good time travel twists and turns at great times. I normally don’t like multiple endings but the gameplay loop of this game was so good I could easily see myself replaying this game in a year or two.

Score

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the score/music in this game SLAPPED. When relistening to the OST, there is a DS and Orchestral version on Spotify, I enjoyed versions from each. Listening to some Orchestral versions of songs felt like I was hearing them as they were intended to be played. The power of 16-bit consoles audio compression gave some interesting restrictions, but sometimes you just need a full orchestra.

The range of emotions in this game is also epic given those limitations. You have sad songs like, “Bottom of the Night’’, the “Main Theme” feels epic, “Peaceful Days” is the most accurately named chill track, and you can’t forget the foot tapping battle music (aptly named “Battle 1”). You can view my video game playlists here..

Takeaways

Chrono Trigger really made me think about the legacy of games and how people perceive their favorites. It also made me rethink what grinding means in single player games.

Playing Favorites

I’m really not surprised there is a widely held belief that this is, “one of the best games ever.” If I was 10-13 when this game came out it would easily be my favorite game as well. There is so much replayability that lends itself to someone who has a lot of free time. As a kid all you have is free time. This got me thinking how these early experiences really shape your interests and tastes as you get older.

Super Mario Sunshine, Donkey Kong 64, and World of Warcraft are my favorite games, but that has a lot to do with being 10-13 when I played them. WoW itself is incredibly demanding on time and I can’t enjoy it the same way that I did 10 years ago. WoW has even adapted to that by optimizing solo content for 20-60 minute play sessions.

If I was 10-13 today, there would be no question that my favorite game would be Minecraft. The ease of creativity it offers is fresh enough to be modern, but simple enough to easily engage with. The thought that I could make my own platformer? My own castle? Sign me up! But I played Minecraft in college and it was so far from what I had loved in those earlier developmental years. I could see the potential but it wasn’t for me.

I noticed that this isn’t just limited to games. My favorite movie is Pulp Fiction, because I watched it in high school when I first learned what ‘good’ movies were. My prior favorite was Napoleon Dynamite. If I had never seen Pulp Fiction until today, it probably wouldn’t even be in my top 10. Even when I rewatch it today, I have to skip over Bruce Willis in the pawn shop because the scene just hasn’t aged well. Tastes change with the times, your age, and your overall maturity.

Overall finding your favorites in a medium is probably a product of when you watched it, how old you were, and how modern that media was relative to the age of the medium (50 year old books are more palatable to 150-500 year old classics, but a 50 year old game is literally Pong).

The Grind

Grinding has always been really uninteresting to me. You are essentially doing something boring to make the game permanently easier. But in Chrono Trigger, I decided I was ready to end the game and wanted to skip half of the optional side quests. As soon as I stepped up to fight the final boss I was absolutely crushed, my entire party would be 1 shot by his first move.

I looked it up and my measly level 45 party was not close to the expected level of 50-60s that the boss wanted you to be. I think at this point I had 3 options, reconfigure my party to see if I could overcome this with different tactics, complete the rest of the optional objectives, or grind.

To do the former, it seemed apparent that I would have to really manipulate status effects like Stop and Defensive buffs to survive the onslaught. This is what I did with FFX, but in that game I felt I had a very strong grasp on the options I had. I didn’t have that same familiarity with all of the party members in Chrono Trigger (Robo is apparently OP, but I wouldn’t know because I never used him :smile:).

I had already made the decision that I would like to skip the optional side quests for the characters that weren’t in my main party (Ayla, Chrono, and Frog), so I opted to try… grinding. I looked up a good grinding spot on reddit, put on an audiobook, picked a level to shoot for (55), and just optimized my loadout for this.

This was honestly really enjoyable for a few reasons. Optimizing my loadout was really interesting and I learned about the combo on Chrono’s Luminaire (expensive powerful area of effect ability) and the MP cost reduction trinket. This forced me to think about the game in a different way than I had before. It was also ok because I had a finite destination of level 55 or 30 minutes (whichever came first) in mind, so it didn’t feel like an endless treadmill. And honestly, watching the numbers go up was really satisfying.

I went back to the final boss and absolutely crushed him which was quite satisfying. I felt like Goku training in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber preparing myself for the big battle.

I was not expecting to have favorite games and grinding be the things I thought about the most while playing a 25 year old game, but it makes sense in hindsight. I really loved my time with Chrono Trigger and I’m looking forward to replaying the game in the future!