Originally released for the Super NES in 1995, Chrono Trigger is a time travel story, a quest that starts out (as so many JRPGs on the Super Nintendo did) in a quaint village, but ends up spanning the entire history of the human race as the player’s party jumps between eras.
In theory, video games should provide a uniquely suitable platform for telling stories about time travel: If we’re exploring the idea of altering the future by changing the past, why not do that in a medium where the player can take control of the flow of the narrative, jumping back and forth to see the results? But very few games prior to Chrono Trigger had actually used time travel as a play mechanic—likely because such a system would be as difficult to design as it is easy to daydream about.
Perhaps it was the difficulty of creating a time-travel game that attracted these seasoned creators to the idea? Chrono Trigger was the result of a collaboration between Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Questcreator Yuji Horii, and the well-known illustrator Akira Toriyama, who designed the characters for Dragon Quest but was best known for the Dragon Ball manga and anime. From interviews conducted at the time, we know that even though it took quite a while for this game to come to fruition after Horii and Sakaguchi first began discussing the collaboration, the idea of traveling back and forth between different eras was part of those discussions very early on.
Chrono Trigger doesn’t take long to get to the good stuff. A boy named Crono wakes up and heads to the town square for the once-every-thousand-years Millennial Fair. He meets a girl named Marle. A demonstration of some new technology goes wrong and the two of them end up sent back in time from 1000 A.D. to the year 600, where Marle is mistaken for her distant ancestor, the kingdom’s queen.
When Marle is rescued, the kingdom calls off their search for the missing queen, which alters time. Since the queen doesn’t get rescued, she never has kids, and thus Marle never exists, and indeed, she then vanishes in front of Crono. It’s Crono’s job to find the queen and set the timeline right. The game breaks all this logic down into a little tutorial-style vignette, leading you to believe that creating, then fixing, these time paradoxes will be a major part of Chrono Trigger’s gameplay. But it’s not. This is actually the only time the game does something like this.
In fact, for a time-travel game, Chrono Trigger starts off awfully linear in its structure. There’s little bouncing back and forth and tweaking things to see what happens, and more just progressing from era to era, figuring out more about the world’s history and the nature of the cataclysmic event that destroyed most of humanity. But that’s really what the JRPG audience wanted out of its games, after all—to use the role-playing genre to tell an intricate, if linear, story, rather than an open-ended game in which you chart your own path.
When I recently decided to pick Chrono Trigger up again, using the best version of the game (that’s the 2008 Nintendo DS edition), I wanted to take my time. No rushing to see the next plot point; I wanted to see if there were meaningful things I could do to extend my gameplay experience. So after I met Marle at the fair, I didn’t head straight into the malfunctioning machine but instead took her over to the nearby forest to fight mobs of enemies.
Battles in Chrono Trigger are similar to the turn-based combat of the contemporaneous Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games. They’re fairly simple in their scope: You can use physical attacks, a few magic spells, and a small selection of healing items. Some battles require you to be somewhat tactical with what attacks you use and on whom you use them, but they’re mostly simple in that old-school way. There are some interesting design twists: Instead of random encounters where the map screen fades out and a battle fades in, the enemies are all present on the screen as you navigate through the forest. When you get close enough to the enemies, the fight takes place then and there, in the same exact map you’re exploring—there’s no new screen meant to be a facsimile of the battlefield, as there is in Chrono Trigger’s peers. This doesn’t greatly affect how the battles play out, but it has a tremendous effect on the feel of the game overall—it makes everything more cohesive, makes the dungeons feel like living places full of activity and charm, versus sterile, empty places that warp you out to a disconnected battle scene every few paces.
Playing around in the forest while raising Crono and Marle’s levels, I re-acquainted myself with the battle system. How you can carefully skirt around enemies and not trigger battles, or how battles might have different groups of enemies depending how you approach them. Enemies might pop out of suspiciously vibrating bushes, sound alarms to call backup, or set traps to lure you into combat.
You might think that designing an entire game’s worth of situations like this, hand-animating every frame with pixel art, would be a laborious task, and you’d be right. The game’s developers later commented that creating each battle scene took nearly as much effort as creating the storyline cut scenes, not only in terms of having to animate each enemy entrance individually but having to conceive of hundreds of different surprising ways that a battle could begin.
This may be something to keep in mind when you wonder why there aren’t any other games like Chrono Trigger.
Back to the forest. Having raised Crono and Marle’s levels some, and unlocked some new battle abilities, I set out to see how much of the continent I could explore before being forced to move on. Far south of my starting point, there was a whole other town, where I could scoop up a few extra items and even upgrade my gear, trading in Marle’s starting crossbow for a better model. Chrono Trigger’s designers clearly understood the importance, in an otherwise linear RPG, of giving the player some wiggle room to move around on that line. Less of a rope, and more of a string of pearls in which you can play around a little bit at each junction before progressing to the next. When you play a linear RPG that does not let you stray at all from the path and poke around at the edges, you know it. It constricts in a way that Chrono Trigger, despite its obvious linearity, does not.
As I’d hoped, the extra time I spent battling monsters and searching for treasure paid off in the end. Once I found myself in the time period of the ruined, post-cataclysmic future, the NPCs told me to stay out of the abandoned sewers, saying I’d get destroyed by the monsters in there. But they didn’t know I’d been secretly powering up! It turns out I was able to tackle the sewers early, nabbing some excellent treasure that would make things even more fun later on.
It does make sense that Chrono Trigger needs to be linear, given the complexity of the story the designers are attempting to tell. Everything’s actually just fine in Crono’s home era, and the apocalypse—caused by a demon named Lavos that burrows up from the earth and sets everything on fire—doesn’t happen until the year 1999, a good 900 years after Crono and Marle would have presumably died of old age. We don’t find this out until we land in the ruined future, and even then it’s not even initially clear where—excuse me, when—we are.
As we jump through more time periods, the game carefully doles out bits of story (out of chronological order!) until we can fully piece together what happened with Lavos. By far the most intriguing era we travel to (and the final one that we unlock) is the kingdom of Zeal, a magical civilization that built itself above the clouds after the earth below was destroyed. It’s much more unique than the standard time-travel tropes of prehistory and the ruined future, and as one might therefore expect, it’s also critical to the main storyline.
As befits a game about time travel, you can actually go fight Lavos whenever you like, starting from very early in the game. Doing so is exactly like entering in 007-373-5963 to go straight to Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out: Sure, you can do it, but unless you’ve been grinding like hell beforehand, you’re just going to get wrecked. In both cases, it’s like a preview of a battle to come.
So the adventure continues. Along the way, we add new friends—exactly one from each era, of course—to the party. Coming off of Square’s previous game Final Fantasy VI with its 14 playable characters, Chrono Trigger cuts the cast down to a more manageable 7. You’ve got Frog, the devoted knight who just happens to be an amphibian. Or Ayla, the take-zero-shit cavewoman who leads a tribe of warriors. They’re all distinct enough, written well enough, and get enough screen time to endear themselves to players. Everybody has their share of great lines—except Crono, who atypically for Final Fantasy but quite typically for Dragon Quest is a “silent protagonist” who utters not a word. Not even when he dies.
source:
Kotaku.com
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