Chrono Trigger - Retro blast

               I have a road trip coming up soon, which means for the next few day my gaming choices will be limited to portable games only. I thought what systems I can take with me. There is the Switch with a whole host of games I have not even touched yet. I also have a 3DS chockful of games I have been meaning to play. I do not have a Vita, but I still have an old PSP with long forgotten games. Some of them I have still plans for playing one of these days. More importantly PSP gives me access to GBA, NES and SNES games in the form of emulation. In all those choices I did not even consider phone as an option. Not having landed on anything in particular, I was listening to a podcast where one of the hosts was also trying to make a similar decision. She ended up deciding to play Chrono Trigger because she had never finished it. I immediately knew that was what I had to play too.  

Touch options seems to be working fine

               Unlike the podcast host who gave me the inspiration, I have finished Chrono Trigger before at least once and I have played it multiple times without finishing it all the way. But I never got a chance to play it on the original SNES. I only started playing video games in 2000, which is also when I got an SNES for the first time. Chrono Trigger was already rare by then. Not that it mattered since I knew next to nothing about RPGs at the time. Once SNES emulation became stable, I found myself with a half decent PC and a folder full of SNES roms. By this time, I had played Final Fantasy VII and had decided I was in love with the JRPGs. For me, the SNES roms were a treasure beyond imagination! There were so many turn based games; I did not know where to even start. In the end, I went with Mario RPG. It was a familiar IP with a simpler mechanics and beautiful graphics. This further cemented Square (or Square Soft, today’s Square Enix) as a seal of quality. I was willing to play anything coming out of that studio.

              Further down the road I played Chrono Trigger, almost a decade after initial release in fact. Even by that time I knew nothing about it, not having looked up any information on it. I vaguely remember it being featured in EGM’s best 100 games list. Which is probably why it caught my eye. I immediately fell in love with it. The sprites were beautiful, the music was catchy, and the battle mechanics were deeper than anything else I had played until then. There was a sense of epic adventure that came with it. Chrono and his team moved through time to save the world. It was more sci-fi than fantasy, which is an all too rare setting in JRPGs even now. But I did not finish it at the time. I would start a new game in my free time. Inevitably I would stop when school demanded more attention. Only to forget where I was in the game or lose the emulation game save.

                I finally finished it few years ago and jumped right back into the New Game Plus Mode. Chrono Trigger might be one of the pioneers in popularizing the NG+ modes. I do not find many games prior to it with the option to carry your progress into a new game after finishing a run. I think I saw a few more endings before school got in the way again.

                Ever since I played Chrono Trigger, I have wanted to buy a legit version of it. I don’t have an SNES anymore and I don’t think my Playstation works so it isn’t worth getting it on those two systems. DS copy is also a little expensive . Which leaves the mobile version. So today I decided to bite the bullet and get it on Android. Only to find out that I have already bought it on there. I guess I will be playing it on the phone on my trip. Catching the rat in the future is going to be tough but other than that I can not think of anything that will be problematic on a touch screen. I will be playing with the Active Time Battle turned off, but I mostly do that anyway. The mobile version is notoriously buggy though, but I’m hoping the upgraded version has fixed most of those problems.

                Chrono Trigger is a relatively short for an RPG. According to HowLongToBeat it is about 25 hours long. That is perfect length for me to finish on my trip and back. Maybe I will even see all (or most) of the endings too. My bare minimum aim (as always) is to roll credits on it.

                Since the first-time playing Chrono, I have learned a little more about it. This was the first time Square and Enix came together with the intention of making a perfect RPG. This was almost a decade before the two companies would merge for good. Enix had the wildly popular Dragon Quest series under their belt. To this day no other RPG has found the kind of success Dragon Quest commands in Japan. Square had Final Fantasy series to their name. Even though it was not as popular in Japan as Dragon Quest, it had found more success internationally. In short, both the companies had the track record of being able to build well balanced RPG systems.

                Legendary manga artist Akira Toriyama was brough on to consult on character design. I am not sure how much work he did consulting on the game, but you can find some of his influence on the games enemy character design. Those familiar with Toriyama’s work will be able to see the similarities between enemy design in Chrono Trigger and some of the character design in the Dragon Ball series.

                I remember being blown away with the battle systems. Once I am deeper into the game and have had enough time to refamiliarize myself with the systems I will talk more about it. I am really looking forward to playing Chrono Trigger one more time!

11-21-20