Chrono Trigger was a certain time of my childhood. A fantastical, wondrous time that will never be captured again. To that, there is some amount of regret lingering about how videogames cannot live up to my childhood any longer. Perhaps I’ve become too old for the medium of my childhood. When exploring, taking on the role of the adventurer, the fearless warrior, there are a rare number of games in which adventure takes on a candor that exemplifies what it means to be within the realm of fantasy.
Nothing about Chrono Trigger is sensical, from the music to the artwork to the interactions. Yet within the realm of fantasy, that feeling becomes a hypersensitivity. So much of any game world is nonsense that fully exploring the nonsense of the world, in many ways, helps us to make sense of our world from a creative perspective. What is so compelling about fantasy is that it captures our desire to make sense of everything and the joy of the individual incoherently chortling about a world they can never really understand.
After all, there’s really no reason a perfect cadre of companions should come to an individual’s aid. If anything, with more interests involved, all the more likely for tensions to pull the group apart at the seams. Yet fantasy allows us, more so than any other genre, to explore all things outside ourselves. From impossible futures, to impossible recapturing of the future, to fractured pasts and disjointed memory. There is nothing outside the flow of what we put into the vessel we are given, the river of time flows outward in all directions.
Rather, the movement is interrupted. The breaking of the fantasy happens often in the genre, as capturing the delicate strands of character and those which lack character is a subtle process, one that needs more concise methods of rendering than those which are presented today. In short, videogames are simply too loose, too unable to decide what they want to be, trying to fulfill every wish. Every genre spills into every other genre, every game trying to become a game it isn’t. Chrono Trigger is just as it should be. An unabashed fantasy, with a focus on exploration within the environment, and on the periphery, aligned with its token battle system.
Another problem of the fantasy industry, seems to be the concern with power, but not qualified power. Quantified power is perhaps a greater bane to videogames than anything else, weaseling into the development of games that are about the subtlety of power. Fantasy functions entirely on subtlety, and that which is extant becomes boring. Unfortunately, entire genres on making such quantified power extant has become a greater flaw of today’s industry. Yet Chrono Trigger is not about its battle system. Chrono Trigger is about joyously realizing the exploration of a world through space and time.
Recommended: Yes