Chrono Trigger Turns 20 :: Nerdy Show Salutes One of the Greatest RPGs of All-Time
On this day 20 years ago, Chrono Trigger debuted in Japan. The Super Nintendo roleplaying game boasted a 32-megabit ROM cartridge, 10 endings, and over 70 hours of gameplay. It could also have claimed that it would change the face of video games forever – it would’ve been no less true.
The time traveling sci-fi fantasy game was developed by Squaresoft (now Square Enix), a studio already known for genre-defining RPGs – but Chrono Trigger broke all the conventions, not just for how a game could be played, but what games could be. This wasn’t by chance. Chrono Trigger was helmed by what Square dubbed the “Dream Team”: Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest, Hironobu Sakaguch, creator of Final Fantasy, and manga artist Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball, artist for Dragon Quest. But the immaculate talent pool didn’t stop there – the game was written by Masato Kato, who would go on to be one of the greats at Square, with now legendary music by Yasunori Mitsuda and Final Fantasy’s Nobuo Uematsu. It was a perfect storm of brilliant minds that sent ripples through the gaming community – still felt to this day.
Chrono Trigger is a milestone as not just brilliant storytelling and gameplay, but an achievement in interactive art. Over the past 20 years the game has shaped the lives of anyone bold enough to pick up a controller and adventure into the timestream. To mark this momentous anniversary, voices from across The Nerdy Show Network have gathered to discuss Chrono Trigger‘s legacy, its innovations, its artistry, and the way it shaped our lives.
John Sebastian La Valle :: Nerdy Show Live Producer
November 1995. The snowy mountains of New Jersey. A woman searches through the labyrinth of an electronics store navigating the flashy advertising and walls of TVs. Her quest? A gift for her grandson. This item could only be procured at this time, in this very area, in this specific store. She couldn’t just walk in anywhere and grab something. No, she needed an expert.
December 25th 1995. My child fingers rip through package after package until I recognize a familiar box size. I don’t tear into this one – it was special. Instead I peel the wrapping paper back slowly… How could she have known? I hadn’t said a word about how much I’d fallen in love with the colorful and intriguing magazine ads. All other gifts were abandoned; I shrieked and embraced my grandmother. Somehow she’d picked the perfect gift – the one I wanted the most, but never dared ask for: CHRONO TRIGGER.
The Super Nintendo was on day and night and I absorbed the game’s story with joy and wonder. Chrono Trigger fueled my wanderlust – scaling mountains and trudging through sewers. It fed my desire for adventure so well that it stuck with me whether at school or on the playground. It was the most influential text of my childhood; not just inspiring me, but shaping my moral code.
This wasn’t just a game my grandmother had given me. It was a codex that would sculpt a man who would not be afraid of befriending the grim Magus or, like Lucca, battle the demons of his past. I understood that sometimes you have to be the one who stands against catastrophy even if it means being lost in space and time. Sometimes monsters aren’t monsters. Sometimes they’re saviors. We can be called upon by others in their darkest hour, even when we ourselves are trapped in an even darker place.
These were all lessons I learned from the living fable of a video game. Not unlike the main characters of the fable, my grandmother unknowingly set a chain of events into action by one simple gesture.
Stevo “Level99: Bortz :: Friday Night Fanfiction / OverClocked Remix
My first, and probably favorite, memory of playing Chrono Trigger is tied to how I stumbled upon video game remixing in the first place. The OC ReMix “Green Amnesia” is one of the first fan-made arrangements of a game score I ever heard. It was during my freshman year of college – it struck me immediately, and stuck with me until this day. The compositions of Yasunori Mitsuda, paired with what Nobuo Uematsu helped wrap up, are so sublime in this game that nearly every single derivative work still carries with it the spirit and element that they imbued in it. For me, “Green Amnesia”, Disco Dan’s arrangement of “Green Memories”, surpasses time itself when played.
Cap Blackard :: Nerdy Show Host
We didn’t know choice in gaming until Chrono Trigger. We didn’t know consequence. We knew what it felt like to go on a hero’s journey, but we didn’t know what it was to shape that hero’s destiny. There were advantageous contenders out there, early innovators, but there was nothing like Chrono Trigger.
The game’s time traveling plot and revolutionary “New Game +” feature yielded not only over ten endings, but the ability to drastically change events, relationships with characters, and indeed the world. What was once a desert in your present could become a forest via optional heroism in the past. Players could make mistakes and have to live with the outcome – at times without even knowing there was another way. In a story where you find yourself defending your planet from an evil that’s been eating it from within since the time of dinosaurs; the capacity to shape your own destiny isn’t just a game feature – it was the dawn of video games as a truly interactive and powerfully effective storytelling medium.
Case in point: when you wake up on that fateful day in 1000 A.D. your world was destined to die. In 1999 the alien spawn Lavos cracks open the world like an egg, raining down destruction. All things WILL end and if you dare to go to that time you witness it first-hand. Crono and crew only learn this when they accidentally travel to the year 2300 and are confronted by what’s left of the human race. The fate of the world is completely in your hands and how you play the game shapes where and how your inevitable confrontation with Lavos plays out.
That confrontation with Lavos is a dynamic lynchpin – repeatedly confronting gamers and reminding them both that they have choice, but also what’s at stake. Throughout the game, missteps in the time stream can lead you straight into monster’s lair and a sudden death. It’s a lesson the game teaches early on, and a cruel trick that befell many keen-eyed gamers on their first play: the Right Telepod. Just as the game begins, not even before the science experiment gone-wrong launches you into time traveling adventure – if you catch the slight glimmer in the right-hand bed of Lucca’s teleportation device, you’ll be immediately flung to Lavos and annihilated. The world doesn’t have to end – you can make the difference… but the doomsday clock is ticking and annihilation is always right around the corner. It’s all up to you.
John “Hex” Carter :: Nerdy Show Host
In 2012, I was literally a starving artist; living off of whatever commission I could find. My subject of choice was pixel art – sprites from games blown up and rendered in acrylic. These days I do it for fun, but back then it was how I ate. My pal, John LaValle, was kind enough to commission the biggest painting I’d ever tackled at the time, and likely the biggest I’ll ever do. He sent me a screenshot from Chrono Trigger: the Mammon Machine from within the Underwater Palace. It wasn’t just to be the sprites – it was the whole scene. It was an ambitious piece, 3 feet tall by 4 feet wide, and it took the better part of a year to complete.
To make pixel art, you have to grid out ahead of time. There is no getting around this and it has to be precise. The grid alone took about two months for me to get through. It took another month just to get through the initial wave of painting all the black pixels. That was the most grueling part. After that, the rest came together amazingly quickly. While it was hell to get through, this piece is one of the things I’m most proud of. While the contribution may be minute on the cosmic level, after working on recreating this one pivotal moment for so long, I can’t help but feel like Chrono Trigger has become a part of me; and vice versa.
Tony Baldini :: Nerdy Show Host
Chrono Trigger was not the first RPG I played. Nor was it the second. Hell, it wasn’t even the third. See, I didn’t have an SNES when the game came out, nor a Playstation in time for its PSX iteration. But I heard about it. Oh, did I hear about it! The sweeping story, the characters, the music – all of it built up into this magnum opus of a game. The trifecta of talent that was artist Akira Toriyama, designer Hironobu Sakaguchi, and composer Yasunori Mitsuda was legendary.
So when I did finally have the chance to play it, having bought the DS re-release, there was a lot Chrono Trigger had to live up to. And did it ever! The game still has one of the most intuitive battle systems I’ve ever encountered – and it lends actual consequence to your party choices. The fact that each character’s tech moves can be combined with other members of your party lends an amount of legitimacy to the characters you choose to roll with. It’s far more than the rote turn-based affair that most RPGs fall victim to. And that’s but one design-centric example of a game that’s brilliant on every conceivable level.
Chrono Trigger is so well crafted from both a story and gameplay standpoint that it achieves an effortless level of perfection – as though it just happened that way. By all reason, the hype surrounding this title and the years of innovation since its release should have at least faded some aspect of it, but no – Chrono Trigger lives up to the two decades of accolades heaped upon it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more endings to unlock.
Do you have favorite memories from Chrono Trigger? Maybe favorite fan art, music, or other cool stuff – let us know in the comments or on the forums!
1 Comment
I never played Chrono Trigger on the SNES. I had actually never heard of it until I fell in love with it’s sequel, Chrono Cross on PS1. Although Cross was a quite different game, many of the great things about Trigger found a new form in it’s sequel. Fantastic story, music, and game play. If any of you that love Trigger have not played Cross, I HIGHLY recommend it. I loved Cross, so I found me a rom to emulate Trigger and fell in love with it as well.
Also if any of you have never heard of the originally Japanese only game released through their rather revolutionary at the time Satellaview system, called Radical Dreamers: The Unstealable Jewel. It’s a sort of inbetween story that bridges some of the gaps of Trigger to Cross, although I believe it is not actually canon. (Though with time and dimensional travel anything is possible) It is a mostly text based adventure and you make choices throughout. There are multiple endings and extra scenarios. It was translated by fans a while back, and is highly enjoyable even without all the references to Trigger and Cross. It’s easy to find a rom of it and emulator online. I highly recommend it if anyone is really interested in Chrono lore.
–Chairfan