Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger is the G.O.A.T. for me (Greatest Of All-Time). Well, it's actually the G.O.A.T. along with it's sequel, Chrono Cross. They are tied, I just can't pick one over the other. Prepare for some major gushing, this is kind of a review of the game and a retrospective of the game's impact on my life. Chrono Cross will get it's own post because there is just too much to say for one post. Away we go!

The year was 1995, I had just turned ten that summer, my friend is coming over for a sleepover and he has brought something with him: Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo (abbreviated as SNES from this point forward). I was initially kind of not interested to play it, The Legend of Zelda series was as close as I got to RPG and Adventure game fun back in those days, I was more a fan of Fighting games. The music got to me first, Yasunori Mitsuda is the best composer in video games, you're argument is invalid and not accepted, sorry. That guy could score me washing dishes and it would be epic and emotional!

I liked the fact that while it played like a traditional RPG, you could dodge the enemies on screen if you didn't want to fight them, none of this random encounter nonsense! The story and characters. That's why it's stayed my favorite since 1995. There are six playable characters, with one optional playable character, and they are all fleshed out and interesting. The story while using time travel as it's core device to tell said story, is never confusing, it never loses sight of the goal. The goal is defeat the big bad guy and save the world. Everything you do in the game, builds up to that. Congrats Chrono (actually thanks Masato Kato) for making time travel NOT a migraine.

I borrowed my friend's copy for like a month, needless to say he kind of wanted it back. Hey, I was happy to oblige, I'm no game stealer, I just think it's telling that I played it for like a month, I never borrowed anything as a kid. So I got my own copy of the game and played it so freaking much that it was clearly becoming something of an obsession. Hey, at least it was a good obsession, could of been hard drugs or killing people.

It took five long years to get a sequel, but like I said, we'll talk about the equally as beloved (for me anyway) Chrono Cross another time. Chrono Trigger had some very good effects on me, I became genuinely interested in history and how things worked all throughout the history of mankind. I became very interested in time travel, though I've never experienced time travel done as well as it was in Chrono Trigger.

There is a very genuine sadness when it come to this game. That sadness is that there will likely never be another game in the franchise. There was a sequel that was exclusive to Japan called Radical Dreamers, it was a text based game, and of course there was Chrono Cross for the original PlayStation, which received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and most fans and it sold very well. After many years, Chrono Trigger was ported to the Nintendo DS, with a new translation and added content. Again, great reviews and it sold well, but apparently not well enough. In 2009 Square Enix Senior Vice President Shinji Hashimoto said "If people want a sequel, they should buy more!"

Buy more? I've bought every incarnation of the series that was ever officially released, and so have many many others. The Chrono series has made Square Enix a ton of money, is it too much to ask for a freaking sequel? Apparently it is too much.

Let's not end on a sour note. There may be little to no chance of a sequel, but Chrono Trigger and it's proper sequel, Chrono Cross live on! Through fan fiction, fan games, and even fan sites, heck I'd even consider www.chronocompendium.com to be THE Chrono website to go to if you want to explore this franchise in glorious detail. Chrono Cross is available on the original PlayStation and as a digital download for PlayStation 3. Chrono Trigger is available on just about every Sony or Nintendo device available, SNES, PlayStation (as part of the Final Fantasy Chronicles collection), PlayStation 3 (as a digital download), Wii Virtual Console, Nintendo DS, Android and iPhone, iPad and I'm sure I'm forgetting a device or two.

So if you haven't experienced this game, I feel legitimately bad for you. As with anything, it's not guaranteed to be a hit with everyone, but it's as close to video game perfection as it gets.

Final Score: 100 out of 100 talking frogs with swords.