Chrono Trigger Review

This review originally appeared in E26, November 1995.

The rift that exists between the Japanese and Western gaming fraternities generally boils down to one genre – the RPG. Where our Eastern cousins love nothing more than to immerse themselves in the epic lives of a band of tiny sprites with disproportionately sized heads, players elsewhere complain of basic graphics and random battles with stop-start gameplay. Or they used to.

In the past year one game has lifted the reputation of the Japanese RPG tenfold. So popular has the American version of Square’s Final Fantasy III been that the translation of the company’s next project, Chrono Trigger, has been as eagerly awaited as any action extravaganza.

The whole premise of Chrono Trigger revolves around time travel. Leaping in and out of the characters’ pasts and futures in search of wizards and magic rocks seems initially confusing, but the packed storyline (courtesy of the most respected RPG author in Japan, Yuji Horii) sticks firmly to the RPG tradition of linearity. Even if you can go everywhere, nothing happens unless it advances the story.

Although the game’s battle engine is still turn-based, Square has made an effort to rework it. Not only can characters combine their powers to create a super attack, but their opponent’s position on the screen is now also important, for example.

In comparison, though, Chrono Trigger is more lightweight than Final Fantasy in almost every department. And the graphics (with characters by another Japanese superstar, Akira (Dragon Ball) Toriyama) ultimately lack the grandeur of Final Fantasy.

But for SNES owners bitten by the RPG bug, Chrono Trigger is a welcome oasis in the barren wasteland of translated Japanese RPGs. With Square producing games on Nintendo’s 16bit machine thick and fast, owners can still feel justifiably smug in the face of next generation competition. [7]