Occasionally the stars align and a once-in-a-generation group of creatives come together to make something spectacular and ahead of its time. That’s how Chrono Trigger was made, an RPG for the SNES that came out 30 years ago this week and still blows me away. Playing it was a formative gaming moment for me and one I’m grateful to have experienced firsthand.
Classics, by definition, stand the test of the time, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always hit the same way twice. Especially in gaming where technological progress and innovation moves at breakneck speed relative to other mediums, playing something even just five or 10 years after it released can dramatically alter its impact. But I didn’t have to struggle to unearth the virtues, charms, and joy of Chrono Trigger’s turn-based combat, pixel art sprites, and 16-bit music decades after they became relics of the past. I was there before they became buried beneath massive open worlds, 4K textures, and cinematic storytelling. It is both my Citizen Kane and my Rosebud.
The shortest version of the tale of the game’s legendary development is this. Talent from the two biggest Japanese RPG franchises in the 90s—Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest—got together to make a cutting-edge mashup for the SNES that would break new ground on multiple fronts. Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama made the art and Yuji Horii contributed to the writing while star developers from Square like Takashi Tokita, Yoshinori Kitase, and Kazuhiko Aoki directed and produced. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi oversaw the project, while Yasunori Mitsuda composed the game’s unforgettable soundtrack.
For those who have never played Chrono Trigger before, its an epic, time-hopping adventure that weaves in and out of medieval fantasy and futuristic sci-fi as its characters fight to save the world from an extraterrestrial evil. In addition to time travel, there’s plenty of magic, and an emphasis on the ineffable will to persist that can only be derived from deep bonds of love and friendship. Events begin at the Millennial Fair, an event celebrating the 1000th anniversary of the founding of a kingdom called Guardia. It’s here that a science experiment gone awry opens up a portal to the past, sending the titular Chrono on a collision course with the apocalypse and beginning a quest whose twists and turns deftly dodge cliché and defy expectation. One minute you’re fighting a giant dinosaur dog, the next you’re in a floating kingdom in the sky. And at the end of it all is showdown with the alien Lavos in one of the most epic turn-based, multi-phase boss fights in the genre’s history.
The moments that resonated most with me when I was younger were the dramatic story beats and climactic battles. Very early on you save a princess, only to end up on trial for your deeds. The famous court scene spares no expense. An ominously front-lit judge oversees the proceedings with a massive stained glass sculpture behind him. Fellow citizens in the wings howl and grumble at each new accusation. But most ingeniously, the verdict ultimately hinges on random, innocent actions at the beginning of the game like whether you accidentally stole someone’s lunch or helped rescue a kitten. That you still inevitably go to jail whether proclaimed guilty or not only serves to underline the injustice of the whole thing. It’s still a master class in video game storytelling.
Part of Chrono Trigger’s enduring legacy is that it’s full of moments like this. Your party becomes much more powerful after it learns to use elemental magic attacks that open up new multi-character combos. Those exact same attacks then get wielded against you in a fight against the evil wizard Magus, who’s been leading monsters in their war against humans. He has his own special boss music that includes the 16-bit version of someone laughing/wailing in the background. Only later do you learn that Magus is a temporal interloper from hundreds of years ago that accidentally got thrown through a time portal as a child because his mom became obsessed with harvesting magic from Lavos. He’s an asshole but you feel bad for him. He can even join your party later if you beat him in a one-on-one duel. This happens after Chrono dies and before you bring him back to life, unless you choose not to and beat the game without him, unlocking one of Chrono Trigger’s many hidden endings.
The lesson here is that things go off the rails very quickly in this game, and then they keep going farther and farther into unexpected, uncharted territory, but without ever crashing. Chrono Trigger never feels like a series of fetch quests or to-do lists stitched together while your real objective keeps taunting you from just over the horizon. Each time it pulls some wild shit that makes you think you know where things are going, it then pulls some more wild shit that points you in a completely different but equally evocative and compelling direction, and each time it’s totally earned and makes complete sense. All of it is conveyed with beautiful art, razor-sharp writing, and an immaculate score.
As I get older, though, I find myself appreciating other aspects of Chrono Trigger even more: all of its little nuances, innovations, and details that make it still feel nimble, fresh, and unique even five console generations later. For instance, combat is turn-based but there are no random encounters. Everything smoothly transitions in the environment when exploration shifts to fighting, including the enemies who each have animated attacks rather than simply being static sprites. While some scenes are scripted, other dialogue flashes by as you explore, letting you freely move around even as some of the heaviest-hitting lines in the game are delivered.
Then there’s the time travel mechanic itself. While the story proceeds linearly until the endgame, the act of shifting eras is full of small nods to the past and future that make Chrono Trigger feel like an intricate, living world. That sensibility carries through in details ranging from special treasure chests that only offer the most powerful items when opened up as far in the future as possible to entire side-quests that change the future or reveal the past (I’ve spoiled a lot in this tribute but I’m not going to spoil those). And of course there’s the fact that Chrono Trigger was willing to kill its titular hero while also letting players try to beat Lavos less than halfway through the game. It turns out that being unburdened by the traditional hero’s journey feels incredibly liberating, even if you end up following through on it anyway.
Chrono Trigger is one of those games that has a special magic all its own, one that fans keep waiting for someone else to recreate. Why hasn’t it ever happened? Even games that look the part like Sea of Stars are just echoes (albeit great in their own right). There are all sorts of theories one could posit, including the possibility that my rose-tinted Coke bottle glasses are obscuring my vision of the past. But my own guess is that recreating the result of a group of masters collaborating together in a small team and developing for great hardware they were intimately familiar with is next to impossible. You can’t manufacture the past, and while we’ll keep getting plenty of games that are as good as or better than Chrono Trigger, we’ll never get its peak fusion of tech, art, and design again. And 30 years later, I still can’t believe how good it is.
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