Retro Views: Chrono Trigger

When video game requester Eric suggested that I play Chrono Trigger for this series, it was an opportunity I knew I would reIlish, despite having played this game approximately ten times since I first picked it up in 1998. This is the pinnacle of games, an absolute masterwork that handily avoids any grandstanding or self-importance. It's as breezy as Back to the Future, as tightly plotted as a spy thriller and as fun to play as any Mario game. It is, indeed, a wholly unlikely mix of JRPG and action game, and it very comfortably sits at or near the top of both of those genres by being almost nothing like the rest of the genres. It is, and should continue to be, the benchmark by which narrative-based games are judged; even if there have been enhancements to game-based storytelling, Chrono Trigger got there first, with an excess of style and polish to boot.

When I first played this game back in grade 6, I had no idea what I was in for. All I had been told was that this was one of the best SNES games ever made, and so I decided to play it. Inside, I found a completely delightful world, one that was both expansive and a little obscure to the boy who had never played a console RPG in his life before. I didn't understand that Chrono Trigger was subverting what were already tropes by that point; indeed, Chrono Trigger still plays exactly like how I think an RPG should, with a beautiful mixture of tightness, linear exploration that feels so much more expansive than it should, and a story and characters to get invested in.

It's a strange elixir; much like Final Fantasy VII, describing what makes Chrono Trigger so absolutely essential seems a little difficult to do without resorting to the last resort of "if you play it, you'll understand!" But here it goes anyways: what I think Chrono Trigger boils down to is the triumph of video game design, made even more unbelievable considering the genre restrictions the designers worked within. Vigigames is a website dedicated to finding games where every element of a game's design contributes to the meaning of the whole, and if that ends up coming across as a little bit of a staid, New Criticism-y argument for a game's success, well, I'm guilty as charged. I wish I could say that it's because Chrono Trigger does cool, innovative things with games, and truth be told, it does, especially compared to what came before it (and afterwards too, if we're being totally honest), but it's so much more than that. Chrono Trigger emphasizes two things which have been lost in translation for at least a decade now, and that's the game's attention to detail and craft.

When discussing a retro game, context is absolutely crucial, and that's no different for Chrono Trigger. Holding up the game to some sort of modern standard would be a foolhardy decision; rather, the game has to be considered within the context of the year it was released in, and its charms have to be transmuted to our era. I'm doing this out of consideration for the reader, because I could (quite obviously) rant about how, by and large, design decisions from 1995 regularly outstrip what we do now in terms of inventiveness and quality, but that would get pretty tiresome I'm guessing.

In 1995, what Chrono Trigger represented was the absolute apotheosis of good game design, especially as it existed within the Japanese Role-Playing Genre, put into one game, and done without any feelings of needing to stick to any particular tradition (even if elements of that tradition were incorporated in anyways; the idea wasn't, as with Final Fantasy XII, to chuck out years of honed design acumen simply for the sake of "shaking things up"). Looking at the list of gaming giants behind the game (Hironobu Sakaguchi – Final Fantasy; Yuji Horii – Dragon Quest; Akira Toriyama – artist behind Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest; Nobuo Uematsu – composer for Final Fantasy), it's clear what the modus operandi for Chrono Trigger was: take everything that has worked, throw out everything that hasn't, don't include anything simply because of "series requirements," and polish the game up as if it was a multi-million dollar epic in an established series. That sounds relatively simple on paper, but it must have been a herculean task.

The reasons for this are, unsurprisingly, a little bit technical. Chrono Trigger is the most technically accomplished game on the Super Nintendo, not simply for "dick-waving" bragging rights, but because innovations needed to happen to accommodate the story that the team had dreamt up. The game has some of the most outlandishly beautiful 2D sprites ever seen in video games, with crisp, colourful backdrops to play around in. Chrono Trigger is perhaps one of the best arguments for 2D game development ever, as every interaction and every bit of this world feels entirely natural. It maintains a gorgeous aesthetic that is completely and utterly beholden to video game tradition, which was obviously a requirement in 1995 but seems more and more like good design now. And decisions such as to have the sprites moving during battle, or to not simply reuse the same settings for different epochs, highlights the attention to detail that makes Chrono Trigger feel as alive today as it did 16 years ago.

That same attention to detail applies to every aspect of the game (as I've already mentioned). The temptation for me here is to run down every element of the game and exalt it to the high heavens, but instead, let me just say: the soundtrack, by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu, is one of the greatest bits of music, let alone video game music, ever committed to instruments, digital or otherwise; the battle system is fluid and fun in every way – even if battles hardly make sense from a narrative perspective, they add so much to this game in terms of creating an interactive bildungsroman, as you feel yourself and your character grow in a logical way after each encounter; the difficulty is absolutely pitch-perfect; exploring the world is a joy in and of itself, creating a childlike wonder within the player as you try to find every nook and cranny, simply because it's so rewarding to do so; and overall, the game creates a sense of nostalgia for a time when a game like this could even come out.

Let's be entirely clear here: Chrono Trigger isn't writing a new rulebook here. The general structure of the JRPG is very much intact here, blending the breezy, charming atmosphere of the Dragon Quest games with the epic template of the Final Fantasy games. The innovations are quite a bit more subtle than a complete sea change in design philosophy would have been. That innovation shows up in two areas: time travel and characterization, of both the landscape and the characters themselves.

Time travel is often the most praised aspect of Chrono Trigger, the thing that makes it stand out – its "gimmick" if you will. But it's emphatically not a gimmick. It's a gameplay device woven into every aspect of the game. Indeed, the idea of traveling to the same patch of land, but in different eras, is brilliant in the way it allows the designers to make every facet of the game so intricately detailed. As well, it puts the onus on the player to juggle several time paradoxes, and for the lover of this kind of delightfully absurd, sci-fi "what if" scenario, it's handled about as well as it can be in Chrono Trigger. It also gives the player a sense that the game actually cares what you do; that your decisions matter. An early example, and one often called upon when discussing this game's brilliance, is the opening scene at the Millenial Fair. As Crono, you bump into the princess of Guardia, Nadia (though you only know her as the normal, tomboy-ish Marle at this point). The two of you then proceed to explore the fair. All the while, the game is keeping tabs on what you do here: do you eat the old man's sandwich? Help the girl find her lost kitty? Compete in a drinking contest? All of these decisions come back to haunt you later in the game. It's hardly Mass Effect, but in some ways it's better, as it doesn't feel like an arbitrary morality decision – the game simply asks you to act as you really would.

By throwing you throughout history, Chrono Trigger is the most successful game ever made at creating a sense of virtual place and virtual history, save perhaps the Legend of Zelda games (which are more of a multi-game experiment, whereas Chrono Trigger manages it all within one game). You feel like Guardia is a real place, with real history; despite the fantasy elements, it manages to feel as alive as the world we live in, all within the strictures of a 16-bit console. That alone is reason enough to play this game, but the way in which the game is also so incredibly personal, and concerned with the human (or, you know, frog) aspects of the game are what makes almost anyone who comes in contact with this game fall in love with it.

The game manages a trick that the best Final Fantasy games have managed, but manages to do it all without getting bogged down in any melodrama or too many stereotypes. The best characters are the female ones, another refreshing change from the norm. Crono is a bit of a wash – he's your standard silent protagonist, but it works here. Lucca is an intelligent, inventor friend (who also happens to be female, refreshingly); Marle is hardly a spoiled, princess character, but manages her own in battle and in conversation; Frog is a valiant, tortured character with real pathos; and even the villains manage to avoid the trap of being snarling caricatures – indeed, one of them can even join your team eventually. You're made to care about all of them to an unbelievable degree, though, and that's because of expert characterization. The swirling, time-shifting background wouldn't work nearly as well if we didn't genuinely care about the characters going through it all. We do.

Sure, the game might have a standard "save the world" plot, but that setup is a sturdy foundation to build upon in video games, and nowhere is that more apparent than here. It's emphatically not about the end-game, but about the journey, and that's something that too few video games, past or present, understand. You're basically free to go wherever you want. There's a set path that you eventually have to get onto, and that's what allows the game to have such tight characterization and plotting, but there's nothing forcing you to go anywhere. This is your world, your game to discover.

And it's just as wonderful to discover it now as it was when I was a kid. I've acknowledged the role that nostalgia can play in colouring our opinions towards video games, but Chrono Trigger seems like such an objectively great video game experience. This is what video games, especially those with narratives should be doing. Everything coalesces into a beautiful whole that anybody who loves this medium needs to play. The only problem is that afterwards, if you're like me, you'll feel a distinct sadness for how thoroughly this game embarrasses almost every other game ever made.

Click here to listen to Vigigames editors Matthew and John enthuse about this game at length.

Got a retro game you'd like me to play? Head here to request one!