Chrono Trigger Revisited? Well, my first visit was cut short in the end. Like Final Fantasy VI (or Final Fantasy III, if you will) this was a game that had been on my list for a while. I was one of the heretics who barely acknowledged JRPGs in the 16-bit era, and we grew up with a Sega Mega Drive rather than a SNES, so I was even more in the dark when it came to FFVI and CT. I’ve been aware of their impact ever since the 1990s, and I think at one point I even had a friend install both games onto a modded Xbox… but I was too distracted by Super Mario World and R-Type III to give Square’s RPGs any attention. Over the years I made a few half-hearted attempts to play through Chrono Trigger, but I often find the time investment for JRPGs somewhat intimidating. Even so, FFVI and CT are two games I’ve always wanted to play through, and I think that finishing FFVI last year motivated me into retrying the other game.

Chrono Trigger Revisited – a series in a single game

Chrono Trigger settles you in for a classic example of science going too far – as Lucca demonstrates a teleportation device at the Millennial Fair, the pendant of willing volunteer Marle interferes with the device and sends her through a time portal. This sets up the ensuing journey – going through the portal ourselves so that we can find Marle and get back to the present day safely. However, what makes CT so uniquely enjoyable is that this is just the first “quest” for our heroes. Before embarking on Chrono Trigger Revisited, I’m not even sure how much progress I made during my previous attempts… but I found that this wasn’t a simple “rescue the damsel” premise designed to set up the rest of the game. Instead, it was just one of the many adventures our party would have before the credits rolled. Like I said, the time investment needed for old JRPGs can be really off-putting for me, but CT’s structure and format is built in such a way that it feels less like an epic quest and more like around 20-25 “chapters” of an animated adventure series. What this means is that I ended up spending just under 32 hours playing through the game, and throughout that duration it rarely felt like a chore – the story was regularly going to different places, and whenever I spent an evening with the game I felt like I was ending one smaller adventure and beginning another. (Even at the end of the game, you have a series of optional sidequests to perform, but the game is very polite at arranging a to-do list for you; just speak to the old man at the End of Time.)

Chapters and spikes

Admittedly, this is nothing new – most classic JRPGs drop you into one location and establish a miniature quest as part of the main arc – but it lends itself so well to Chrono Trigger. It even extends to a system level as well. Not only are you travelling through time to resolve a problem and then moving on, but each miniature adventure is given its own name in the save files. Each time you save your data the text for the save file displays a chapter name; this is never shown during gameplay, but it has the effect of making your adventures feel self-contained. It’s a simple but effective way of reinforcing a sense of progress. Now, it’s still fair to say that you’ll be spending a lot of time in each of these chapters – there are minigames to complete, and plenty of battles and levelling to be done – but even then, your progress isn’t delayed for long. Over the course of the game your characters learn “techniques” that are your MP-governed skills used in battle, and these can be learned naturally through play or brute forced by grinding in areas – it’s up to you. As you’d expect, MP is only limited by the number of Ethers you can carry, and you’re continually making money as you battle. The game always finds a way to accommodate your time.

These chapters are also prolonged by certain bosses that can feel a bit like difficulty spikes at first, but I don’t think I really spent more than one play session where I was struggling against the same boss. At one point during the “Fated Hour” chapter I was so alarmed by my defeat at the hands of a boss (during the “Black Omen” sequence) that I levelled up my main party around ten times (the area leading up to the boss had lots of battles that rewarded generous levels of experience.) Admittedly, this may have been overkill, because I cruised through most of the rest of the game, but generally the difficulty spikes are few and far between, and you don’t need very many grinding sessions to overcome each obstacle. (Again, spending lots of money on support items – Mid Ethers, Revives – also helps.) At other times, it might feel like the dice rolls simply aren’t going in your favour; you’ll be trying to recover from a boss’ ultimate attack and they’re already charging it again… but perseverance, levelling and preparation helps. (Or if you just want to have more turns available, I found that having someone with the Haste skill was often beneficial.)

Chrono Trigger Revisited – wrapping up

There were a couple of other nitpicks I had during my Chrono Trigger Revisited project – some of the minigames felt a little fiddly (visiting an ice world and avoiding strong wind currents by standing behind rocks sounds fine in theory, but the game is very particular about where you stand), and some exploration sequences had fairly dull gimmicks (guiding Robo through a maze of conveyor belts and switches in order to carry an electric current before it is lost.) However, the rest of the game makes up for these moments. I ended the game with my main character levels at between 67 and 69, and with between 31 and 32 hours on the clock, so it took me fewer hours to complete than FFVI. I’d rather not rate one game over the other, but I feel like CT has a much better structure, whilst FFVI has more potential for silly balance-breaking in a traditional structure. FFVI doesn’t let you tie a bow on a chapter, but it does let you annihilate enemies with Cyan’s Bushido and Sabin’s Blitz techniques, or cast Ultima on foes for 1MP with a relic you found on the world map. That being said, I think that more RPGs can benefit from looking at CT’s tidy, manageable structure. Oh, and both games have pretty great soundtracks – my main standouts in FFVI were the Gestahl Empire theme and the “Awakening” theme… in Chrono Trigger, the Undersea Palace theme stood out as a bold and atmospheric piece that immediately sets the tone in the areas where it’s used.

That’s pretty much all I have to say until my next mammoth retro game undertaking, although this and FFVI were the “big” ones on my personal bucket list. Thanks for indulging me, and let me know in the comments if you have any particularly fond Chrono Trigger memories.

Chrono Trigger was originally released on the Super Nintendo, and re-released through various updates on PSOne, Nintendo DS and Steam.