Chrono Trigger

The Good
Innovation and interactivity have long been what I find most valuable in games, and Chrono Trigger is almost completely deficient in both. Why put this in the "good" section?

Because narrative-driven RPGs rely almost solely on passive content. Attempts to bloat up the interactivity or innovate on the tried-and-true "plucky heroes against the foozle" formula are not necessarily good or bad on their merits, but rather live or die by how they fit with the old standby of the genre--passive content. What I mean by "passive content" is the scripted plot and its supporting graphics, music, and atmosphere--stuff I like to rail against as having usurped resources from gaming's most valuable and unique quality, interaction. Taking time to think about what games I actually -enjoy- the most, however, I find that in certain genres interactivity is the last thing I care about, and an inappropriate focus in that direction can actually spoil the game.

How does it happen? The crucial factor here in narrative-based games is that the player's motivation is not at one with the avatar's. The avatar might care about a random girl's slow vaporization via temporal dissonance, but the player doesn't, not to anywhere near the same degree. The player is invested in advancing the plot, and experiencing the passive content. This is why the player will reload to play out unexplored branches of a scripted plot, to try all the significant available paths, without much regard for the avatar's established motivations. Who cares about my supposed squeamish "goodness" when there's more delicious content to experience?

Which brings us to Chrono Trigger's interactivity--there's not much, and that's fine. You don't have to schmooze with some King Guardia simulacrum for hours, carefully massaging his "personality" stat-bundle while mowing mindlessly through a vast plain of mostly barren dialogue menus--you get all the content written for His Guardia-ness just by waltzing up and hitting a button. This is less interactive than an exhaustively subtle dialogue system complete with procedural NPC personality stat matrices, sure, but let's be honest--for some genres, it's better not to have all that crap.

Why? Because NPCs have no agency in a narrative RPG. They have no life outside the player. They simply stand around and wait for you to throw logic switches, then provide you with the requisite quest/bauble/info to throw more logic switches. They're boolean vending machines for the game script. They're never going to break free, form goals, and alter the gameworld in any significant way. They have no agency or life in the world outside of the player, and thus asking the player to relate to them emotionally via subtle mechanics is ridiculous. They are soulless robots in terms of mechanics--to ask the player to navigate a comprehensive conversation system with them would be akin to having blowup dolls require thoughtful gifts, stimulating nights out and long foot rubs from their sad misfit owners. Some reasonable facsimile of life is necessary to justify any game's demand for a player to relate to its NPCs on a more human level. Complex mechanics should not be a shameful disguise for playing tea-party with empty mannequins.

So why not give them more agency, more life? Because that kills any well-structured RPG narrative dead. The player need only waltz into the world and kill vermin for six hours before killing the foozle--if NPCs are equal agents to the player, then -anyone- could have killed such a pushover foozle at any time. Why not allow the player more freedom then? Because the amount of plot-branches would quickly become staggering, precluding the highest levels of quality in the passive content, or making all paths drably alike. If Crono could decide "nuts to Frog; screw that guy, I'm not taking him along," then all the work on the 600AD Magus sequence goes up in smoke, all Frog's passive content characterization is for naught, and alternate paths must be scripted and fleshed out with passive content to an agreeable standard. Now imagine this necessity repeated for every major plot point in the game--if there are only ten major yes/no decisions, that's 1024 discrete paths. You could lower the standard of content, make it more abstract and modular, merge the paths into only a few fleshed-out endpoints, etc.--but then many of Chrono Trigger's NPCs and much of its drama would be as faceless as some of their counterparts in Wasteland, and something valuable, for me at least, would be lost.

As great as Wasteland is, if the passive content is good enough to justify a heavily scripted narrative I don't mind at -all- if I'm led by the nose through an exclusively linear plot. If the signpost NPCs are charming, well-written and relatable even in the most non-interactive sense, then I don't care if I can't micromanage the inflection of my greeting. I don't care if the conversation always goes the way the script demands. I don't care if my avatar is mute! If the content's good enough, exhaustive interactivity isn't the be-all end-all.

Chrono Trigger's content is definitely up to that standard. This is the absolute pinnacle of 16-bit art--sprites are well-designed via Akira Toriyama, environments are lush and evocative, the music is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and the time-travel plot, complete with varied and lovable characters, reaches mind-boggling levels of fun and JRPG charm. The battle system is remarkably versatile and deeply strategic in design, even though (as usual for JRPGs) its full subtleties are never required of the player by the actual encounters. All these isolated components are derivative, but who cares? If you can do derivative to the highest standard, then count me in. I won't praise you as innovative, but I -will- praise you as good!

The game's few innovations (and there are some) serve mainly to streamline delivery of that wonderful content. Gone are many of the random dungeon fights--a surprising number of monster encounters are realistically visible and may be avoided, drawing down the tedium of sidling up to those logic switches, keeping the focus on the content. Side quests are kept to a bare minimum prior to having an easy means of locomotion, and the main motivation for completing those that exist after the Black Omen rises is--you guessed it--a better ending! The large number of endings and constant accessibility of the final battle go hand in hand in emphasizing the value of passive content--who wouldn't want to see Nobuo Uematsu in sprite form? :-P Even the "New Game +" option's primary value is in providing the player an easy way to march merrily down those almost wholly non-interactive alternate paths, and I would wager most people who enjoy this game have done exactly that. I have!

This game was designed and fleshed out with love and awe-inspiring talent. To experience it is worthwhile even if you're dead-set against kiddy, derivative, linear RPGs. You can't stab Frog to death and take his stuff, sure, but he's a lot more memorable than Mayor Pedros, and that may well encapsulate the trade-off heavily narrative-based games are forced to make.

The Bad
There's very little I didn't like. A few sequences are tedious, such as the aftermath of the "soup-eating" contest where you must follow little footprints through a jungle of slow, unavoidable monster encounters. The Reptite palace is similarly slow in pacing, with (again) too many unavoidable encounters, complete with some backtracking. Catching the rat and the bike race in the future are reminiscent of action sequences in Sierra adventures--not exactly thrilling and incredibly frustrating if you can't hack them. The bike race is pretty, though!

The Bottom Line
Chrono Trigger epitomizes the best qualities of the 16-bit era JRPG. Sometimes, a lack of interactivity and a "childish" theme are exactly what allows for passive content of the highest quality. When the non-interactive art is at such a high level, even the most utterly linear gameplay feels somehow justified.

The Good
Chrono Trigger is a Role Playing Game by Squaresoft, released originally for the Super NES in 1995. It was only released in Japan and USA. It was also re-released on the PlayStation, but again Japan and USA only (and I did never get any chance to play that version). We Europeans had to import carts for a ridiculously high price to get a change to play the game, but fortunately we found another way to do it, and I really fell in love for it a long time ago back then when I was about 14. Although nobody could understand me because not many people would have played it on their SNES.

Because CT was very successful, and because Square Enix just remade all older Final Fantasy games a ridiculous amount of times, they thought it would be a good idea to remake another game and that due to it's high reviews, and they had to remake Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS in 2008. In 2009 the game finally made it to Europe, officially. Although I'm often sceptical for those remakes (why can't them release originals instead ?), I can finally say that I'm a hardcore fan of a game that was released, so that's a good thing. A remake must satisfy two rules to be worth buying. First it must not ruin anything that was good in the original in any way. Second, it should add new content that is significant and don't feel displaced. Chrono Trigger DS does follow both of these rules.

Note that I assume you already have some idea about what Chrono Trigger is. If you don't, please check my review for the SNES version, which will go into details about how good the story and gameplay is. I will focus this review on the remake only.

First of all, I'm very glad that during gameplay the graphics and the sound are intact. The font had changed to become smaller (which is good because the screen is smaller too), but that's pretty much the only graphical change I've noted. And that's a good thing, because the graphics are absolutely awesome ! They are probably some of the best 2D graphics in the top-down perspective ever made ! Because most games stopped to use the top-down perspective after the PlayStation / N64 area came (games were either 3D, isometric or side-view 2D, which cannot be compared because not the same thing). The GBC was inferior to the SNES graphically so it couldn't compete with it, and the GBA would be the only competitor, but developers somehow forgot the way to do 2D top-down graphics between 1995 and 2001. The only competitor could be the Golden Sun games for the GBA which have awesome graphics. Being surpassed by only two games in 14 years is really some accomplishment not many games can claim.

The sprites are so detailed that they look exactly like on the artwork, and animate smoothly. Some of the best spells/techs are still absolutely awesome to watch. The backgrounds are detailed too, but they're not up to the modern DS standards, but anyway that doesn't matter because they looks very good. I'm very glad Square Enix did not remake this game with 3D graphics like they did for FF3 and FF4, because the DS have weak 3D capabilities, and they would probably end up with lame results. So thanks Square to have keep the original 2D graphics.

The only complaint I'd have is for the fake 3D in the motorcycle minigame. On the SNES that cheap fake 3D was the standard and the only thing the console was capable of in the 3D department, so there were nothing to complain about. But on the DS, it really looks horrible to have such cheap fake 3D when the console is able to render actual 3D graphics ! They should have quickly remade that scene using some true 3D graphics at least for the characters.

While the gameplay happens on the top screen, you also get a map on the touch screen which is nice. The menu has changed to a different interface that uses both screens, and after you get used to it it works very well, there is nothing to complain about that. You can access to the sub-menus directly by touching the screen on icons if you want. In battle you can choose between new and old interface, which is a good thing. I choose new because it frees the top screen from the battle menus. I remember it was an annoyance in the original how much the menu would hide some large area on the screen. Now it's fixed !

For the sound it's exactly the same as on the SNES, and I'm very glad about that. The FF5 and FF6 advance games really sounded like insults to their SNES counterparts with horribly aggressive instruments, and I'm very glad to see CT wasn't doomed to the same fate, because the soundtrack of Chrono Trigger contains not only some of the best game music ever, but some of the best music ever composed by humanity. You need external headphones to get good quality with basses tough, which is in my opinion preferable to the "aggressive slapping bass method" used in FF5 and FF6 advance. There is even 5 brand new pieces of music in the game, and this is awesome !

What is a very good thing to note is that they re-translated the game to get some things cleaned up and more detailed. The story of CT is really awesome while being simple enough. With the new translation it seems more clear at some places, but some items and tech were renamed weirdly. Overall I prefer the new translation for cut-scenes, but the old for items, tech and enemy names. That's somehow subjective tough.

Unlike the FF-advance games, the new content, other than the few improvements stated above, is really worth mentioning. The best content comes first : You get some awesome FMV cutscenes, and with orchestrated music ! This is SO sweet !

Then they added a new detailed bestiary with a list of what any enemy can do to attack you, a new arena where you can build a monster to fight against other monsters (for some reason I didn't find it that entertaining), and a bonus mode. This mode features original artwork of the protagonists, a music player, a big library of all items, equipment and all techs and combos with screenshots is available. Finally there is a list with all endings you completed with screenshots, and a view mode where you can explore all maps of the games with the touch screen and see the treasures you could have possibly missed.

That's not all, there is 5 new areas to visit, that are cool, don't feel too much out of place, contains new treasures and I won't tell more because it could be a spoiler.

The Bad
Nothing really.

The Bottom Line
Even 14 years later, Chrono Trigger is still the best game ever made in my opinion. In fact it should just as well be the best work of art ever made by humanity. Even if you played the SNES version countless times (I guess I beat it about 5-6 times) the DS version is worth a buy for the new content.

In most RPGs it's great to beat it once, but you have no reason to return doing the whole quest. At best you'll just load your last saved game and try to kill the final boss again to watch the ending again, or just go to some places to remember the good times when you were actually playing that game actively. But Chrono Trigger is an exception to that. Because cutscenes vary in function of who you have in your party, and because the battle system is so awesomely good while being very simple, and because not 2 battles engage the same way, the game is incredibly fun to play again and again even if you know everything already.

So in fact, everyone, from the guy who never played a video game in his life, to the hardcore fan of the SNES version and beat it 20+ times while being very sceptical to the remake, must absolutely get this game for the DS, to either discover or re-discover it. There is no excuse not to buy the game. Unlike the FF advance games, nothing that was good before was ruined, and there is actual new content worth mentioning. The new dungeons don't feel completely out of place like they did on the FF advance games. There is new FMVs and new pieces of music, and a bonus mode any fan of the game will love.

The only excuse you may have to not get this is that if you played the SNES version and hated it, then you probably won't like it more on the DS because it's the same. Even if you don't like Japanese RPGs at all, at least borrow this game from someone and see how you like it, because it's really the best of the genre in my opinion, so you may completely change your mind after seeing it.

The Good
This game is beyond criticism. It was made during the few years when SquareSoft was in it's prime, before it moved to the PlayStation and started focusing on its Final Fantasy series.

The graphics are beautifully rich, with some of the best use of Mode 7 graphics this side of Super Mario Kart. The story is the best I've ever seen in an RPG (yes, that includes all of the Final Fantasies). An innovative concept and control system puts this game heads above the rest in it's genre, and kicks the asses of every "best RPG ever" that came before it, like Earthbound and The Secret of Mana.

The Bad
If anything remotely bad can be said about this game, it's a) the game is too short (with only about 15 hours or so needed to fully complete the game form start to finish, the ending can slip on you pretty fast), and b) with sixteen possible endings, you can be constantly plagued by wondering what might have been if you'd said no to a question instead of yes, because in this game, even tiny choices like that can result in the butterfly effect.

The Bottom Line
If you've never played an RPG, play this one. If you love RPG's play this one. If you consider yourself an expert of RPG's but have never played this, go out in your backyard and hit yourself in the head with a hammer. Then play this one.