Pulling the Trigger

Hi, my name is Jeff, and I have been gaming for as long as I can remember. Ever since I first played Adventure on the Atari 2600 in the early 80's, I have enjoyed games with fantastical elements, such as dragons in need of slaying, keys to unlock chests containing fabulous treasures, and some sort of hero to tie it all together. By the time that Adventure popped up on the Atari, computer game developers had been designing games featuring fantastical elements like those I mentioned before, but often coupled with the pencil and paper mechanics of  Dungeons & Dragons, giving birth to the genre that would come to be known as the RPG, or role-playing game. RPGs differed from other games on the market by offering a captivating narrative and a world that lets your character grow to be a powerful and integral part of the plot.

Pictured: The valiant protagonist has emerged victorious after slaying a deadly dragon in Atari's 1979 hit, Skyrim. Wait, I mean Adventure. I get those two mixed up.

Dragon Quest (called Dragon Warrior in the States until 2005, for trademark reasons) is one of the earliest examples of what would come to be known as JRPGs, or Japanese (developed) role-playing games, the J given to distinguish the games against their western counterparts. Taking elements from earlier computer RPG series like Ultima and Wizardry, developer Enix married an arresting art style (created by manga artist Akira Toriyama of Dragonball fame) to engaging gameplay birthing a franchise that would take Japan and later the rest of the world (albeit to a lesser extent) by storm.

Not Chrono Trigger

Although Dragon Warrior/Quest was a bona fide hit, it was a competitor to Enix named Squaresoft that took their RPG formula and copied it with their own flare, giving the world Final Fantasy. Despite never having released a RPG before, Final Fantasy was a runaway success and is to date considered one of the largest franchises in gaming. The name itself came from the creator and  producer of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi. Software sales were low, and the studio was facing bankruptcy. Faced with the task of making one more game, Sakaguchi (or, the Gooch, as some fans like to refer to him) decided to make a RPG based on the success of Enix's Dragon Quest. Expecting the game to be his last, he never expected the success that would follow the franchise. The rest, as they say, is history. Meanwhile, the name Squaresoft came to be synonymous with the growing genre of RPGs.

Flash forward to 1995. Squaresoft releases Chrono Trigger on the SNES (Super Nintendo), which is still often hailed by fans as the pinnacle of the JRPG genre. Created by what is considered to be a dream-team of development talent, including the creator of Dragon Quest, Yuji Horii, the artist previously involved with Dragon Quest (and Dragon Ball), and the creator of Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi.  Granted, I played it myself back in the day, but how does it hold up when we try and wrench the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia off of our faces? Let's find out in my two-part retrospective on Chrono Trigger.

From left to right: Frog, Ayla, Lucca, Robo, Marle, and Crono. I feel like some of those should be evident.

Chrono Trigger is essentially a story about a boy that meets a girl. Crono (spelled without the "h" most likely due to system limitations at the time) is awoken by his mother, telling him he will be late for the Millennial fair if he sleeps much longer. It is the year 1000 AD in Guardia, the kingdom where Crono resides. At the fair, he runs into (or she runs into you) a young girl that goes by the name of Marle. When her and Crono collided, her pendant flew off her neck. Being the good guy that I am, I picked it up off the nearby ground and returned it to her, although protagonists with a more sinister temperament can try and sell it to Melchior, a NPC (non-player character) that becomes quite important later in the story, but I digress.

Crono agrees to show Marle around the fair, and one of Crono's friends, Lucca, has an invention in the center of the fair which she is about to demonstrate along with her father, Taban. The invention is a teleportation device, one that Crono volunteers to try out. Crono is transmitted from one pod to the other without fail, but when Marle decides to try it out as well, the machine reacts to her pendant which causes a malfunction that ends up pulling her back in time. Being the good guy that Crono is, he decides to follow into the past, in the year 600 AD. Lucca tells you she will follow once she knows what went wrong, so off into the void you go, all by yourself. 

Once you make it through the woods, you find a castle where you are greeted by Queen Leene, who turns out to be Marle! Turns out, they mistook her for the missing queen, so they stopped looking for the real Queen, which then causes Marle to vanish, but not before Lucca shows up to explain everything. Basically, Marle is princess Nadia, a princess from their own time who snuck out of her castle in order to check out the Millennial fair. So, you know, boy meets girl, boy accidentally gets girl sucked into a dimensional vortex as a result of a malfunctioning teleportation machine, girl gets mistaken for her royal ancestor causing the search for the real queen to be called off, thus negating her own existence. Like I said, boy meets girl. If I had a dime for every time I heard this story, I would have one dime.

WHY IT'S RELEVANT:
Sony recently updated the firmware of their PlayStation Vita hardware, which allows users to download PS1 games from their online store, PSN. But, Jeff, you're saying. I thought Chrono Trigger was on the Super Nintendo. Well, it was, until 1999 when Squaresoft ported it to PlayStation, the first of its name, with a little bit of bonus content (a couple of cutscenes come to mind). Although some people complained it had slowdown compared to the Super Nintendo version, it's still a very highly functioning port.  If you have a Wii, you can get the Super Nintendo version from their digital store for 800 Wii points (the equivalent of $8), or barring that, there is a DS port from 2008 that is more than playable (Doesn't feature the slowdown of the PS version, plus additional content).

Bottom Line:
The graphics, while dated, are still charming. The story, while convoluted, is still sophisticated. And the characters, while lovable, are still as every damn bit as lovable as they ever were. While this probably won't convert any fans to the genre, if you're a RPG fan that hasn't played it yet, please do. It really is one of the classics, and it holds up remarkably well.