Chrono Trigger

 It's about time.   

I played the PS1 port of this on my PS3.

Chrono Trigger is a game I've been hearing about for ages. To be honest, it wasn't something I was super aware of before starting. I knew it was a JRPG and I was vaguely aware of what system(s) it came out on, but pretty much everything about this came as a surprise to me.

So, it's a JRPG, but it doesn't strictly stick to what you'd expect from one of those. On a surface level it doesn't look dissimilar to, say, the Final Fantasy I just played, but it complicates things by taking positioning into account for certain attacks and, more importantly, through the inclusion of a mechanic known as "Active Time Battle". While I believe you can play it without this, I left everything at their default settings so my experience with the game was a bit of a surprise.

For starters, every enemy attacks periodically rather than the clear back-and-forth of other games. Additionally, each member of your party has a meter that will fill (depending on their speed) and will allow you to act when that meter is filled. This effectively means that each character is operating on their own rhythm but, importantly, while you're moving through these menus time keeps marching on and enemies will continue to move on a set timer. This means you're incentivized to make your selections as quickly as possible so as to act before the enemies and to get your next cooldown (and thus your next move) ready sooner. I realize this all sounds a bit complicated, and I'll admit it took me a while to get the hang of it, but the end result is something that reminds me a bit of the way Pokémon Legends Z-A handled its real-time combat, and this was a cool middle ground between that and a traditional turn-based thing.

The gameplay has a party system where you choose two members (out of an available five) to join Crono in the field. These characters have unique "Dual-Techs" (and later, "Triple-Techs") that allow you to have two characters join forces and attack in-tandem. Different combinations of characters have different synergies, so sometimes I'd swap people out just to see if I'd unlocked any flashy new attacks. The rest of your characters effectively have an EXP Share from Pokemon, where they'll level at a slower rate (and also not earn valuable TP, which you need for unlocking new abilities). This again encouraged me to swap out my party regularly to make sure everyone was adequately prepared, and it also allowed me to notice that there are minor variations to many scenes that depend on who I had with me. During story scenes, as Crono is a silent-protagonist, you'll usually hear some sort of back-and-forth between the villain and whoever else is with you, and each character typically has unique dialogue. Most of this is fairly superficial and won't dramatically change any sequences, but it colors events in a way that reminded me of the way Bioware games do things.

Now, I mentioned I played this on PS1, and despite the fact I had an amazing time I can't exactly recommend this version. For starters, there are load times before every fight, menu, and scene transition and while almost none of them are particularly long, the whole game is constantly stopping and starting, interrupting basically everything you do. It's pretty rough. It's my understanding this isn't an issue (or it's less of one, anyway) on the SNES version, and I imagine modern emulation could all but eliminate these stutters if one were to go about it that way.

There are animated cutscenes done in Akira Toriyama's style and while that was actually one of the reasons I chose this version, I'm not sure if I like their inclusion. Sure, they look great and I can imagine, on a replay, wanting to see some of these scenes redone in higher-fidelity, but for a first playthrough I found their addition a bit jarring. For major story beats, there'll be a fade-to-black followed by an anime cutscene showing something happening, then it'll fade back into the "real" game where you'll watch that same event play out as it did on the SNES. Often, I actually preferred seeing how they were able to portray these events with pixel art over their fancier remakes. Obviously this is down to personal preference but for these reasons (as well as a late-game puzzle that is uniquely unintuitive on PS1) I'd advise you to play this game elsewhere.

This is how the cutscene first appears (on the PS1 version)...

... before immediately being followed by this.

While I feel the "plot" is fairly straightforward and simple, I'd say the "story" of this game was shockingly good. That might sound like a meaningless distinction, but I think it's a necessary one here. For the most part this is your standard fantasy story about a silent-protagonist swordsman leaving home and going on an adventure to save the world, but the way it's told elevates it. There's a reactivity to things that only becomes apparent when you're in control that I deeply appreciated, but I don't really want to say too much because finding out how the game responded to my actions was insanely cool and I don't want to spoil anything.

I know this sounds a bit silly for me to say this deep into a blog post, but it's been hard for me to understand just why I enjoyed this game as much as I did. Active Time Battle, along with flashy combat animations, make battles feel good. The story is pretty basic on its surface but it seems reactive and rich due to how it's told. The music is good. It's very easy for me to come up with reasons why a thing is bad, to explain a work's shortcomings, but justifying how something succeeds at what it set out to do is more difficult.

The rest of this blog post is going to cover stuff I'd consider a spoiler, so stop reading if you haven't played this game. I highly, highly, highly recommend giving this a shot and, maybe this is just recency bias talking, but I feel like this game could be an all-timer for me. It's that good and I wouldn't want to ruin any of it for anyone.

From here on out, you're in the spoiler zone.

I mentioned earlier that the story was reactive and what I mean by that is that there are moments and even mechanics that respond to your actions in a really fun way. Relatively early on, your character is put on trial for kidnapping someone. During this trial, you're asked a few questions about your involvement and your answers can dictate how the trial goes for you. More interestingly, however, is the fact that the game calls back to (and shows a flashback of) those earlier events and reveals that you're being judged for how you acted earlier. Did you talk to an NPC before or after picking up their things? Did you try to sell a valuable object that didn't belong to you? The game, in this moment, shows that it's willing to judge how you chose to act when you didn't realize you were being watched. That's really dang cool!

 Additionally, there are multiple endings to this game. While I was aware of that going into this game, the way these endings are divvied out is interesting to me. This game has, in essence, a similar structure to last year's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or, in a somewhat similar vein, Breath of the Wild. There's an open-endedness to things that I only realized fairly late into my time with the game. At almost any point when you have the ability to travel through time, you can choose to challenge the final boss. When you choose to do this (and what you've done in the game up to that point) will change how the ending plays out. 

The menu even has a cute graphic to help explain the notion of branching paths.

The game also uses time travel as a core idea, both as part of the story and also, in some ways, in the gameplay itself. The story has you jumping between time periods, first at-random then at-will, and while I knew about and expected that, what I didn't anticipate was how much the game would allow you to, well, mess with history. There's a puzzle that involves getting an item from a selfish person, and the solution requires you to do a good deed for his ancestor so she'd instill good morals and values into her children (and they'd presumably do so for their children, and their children's children, and so on). When you meet this selfish character again, he's incredibly generous and decides to let you have the item. 

There are a number of puzzles that ask you to do something in the past so that the future plays out a certain way, and those are cool, but the game also allows for paradoxes (of a sort) in a fun way. Some locations, and the items within, are accessible from multiple time periods, and I eventually became aware of the fact that, say, taking an item from the future doesn't remove that item from the past. So you can, in essence, loot the same chest twice if you open it in 1000AD and then go back to 600AD to open it again (because it still has its contents in that era).

The story for the most part is fairly straightforward fantasy stuff, but the above wrinkles, as well as the elephant-in-the-room, the final act change-up, made me realize I really liked what the game was doing. Even though the game almost immediately undercuts it by all-but-telling you that there was a way to bring him back, losing Crono was a gutpunch. Admittedly he's not much of a character as far as the narrative is concerned, being a by-the-books action-hero/fantasy protagonist, but he's also the bread-and-butter of your team mechanically and seeing how both the story and gameplay shifted without him kept things interesting. As he was the main character I'd been relying on I (temporarily) lost a fair amount of my best gear along with him, but team compositions no longer need him in the first position, so you can really go wild.  

Man. Seeing this hurt.

Magus (who I chose to spare and recruit) is also an interesting addition to both the gameplay and story as he has a very diverse moveset and some valuable dialogue in the later sections of the game. Due to his role in the story, I immediately thought of the "secret Companion" in Dragon Age: Origins and realized this was almost certainly an inspiration for that. He doesn't mesh super well with other party members (he has no Dual-Techs and only a handful of Triple-Techs) but I kept him around because I, frankly, thought his inclusion was cool.

I've included a screenshot of my last save. If you add the 45 minutes or so it took for the final boss/ending, the game took me about 36 hours in toto. I got Ending 1 ("Beyond Time") if you were curious, and I'm currently debating whether I want to jump back in to see another one.

I already sort of did my wrapup earlier so I'll say it again: this game is fantastic. I know it shouldn't have come as a surprise that a game lauded as being one of the best of all-time is, actually, maybe deserving of that title, but I'm still giddy. I'm very glad I played this and I'm almost certainly going to try Chrono Cross at some point.  

I'll leave you with a picture of a minor villain from this that I enjoyed.