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It’s Tier One. I mean, it’s widely accepted that it’s the best RPG for the SNES and one of the best RPGs ever, so what did you expect? This review is going to be on the short side (Edit: actually, having finished writing this, maybe it won’t), since almost anything I could say has probably been said before.
Chrono Trigger is a time-traveling adventure that seems to start as a cliched “save the princess”, but quickly becomes “save the world” with the help of that self-same princess. I actually started this game twice. The first time I got stuck on a fairly tough boss fight (The Golem Twins) and never finished. About a year later I picked it up again, but had to start from the beginning because I’d forgotten almost everything. (If you care, my party both times was Crono, Marle, and Ayla until I got to the Black Omen – where I replaced Ayla with another, spoilerific character) Here are just a few of the many amazing things about Chrono Trigger:
- The characters are lovable and distinct. They start to feel like “your” party as you level them up, and they feel like good friends (for me, like the characters in Wheel of Time do).
- The plot is interesting and sprawling (in a good way).
- The world slowly opens up as you progress, giving you both a feeling of wonder and excitement and a sense of growth.
- There are twelve different endings (depending on how you count). This is the grandfather of what it meant to have a reactive world. And it did it successfully – unlike many games today that have a “good” and “bad” (and if you’re lucky, a “neutral”) ending.
- Meaningful choices are represented through action rather than description. It’s one thing to be sentenced to death because the game asked you if you wanted to steal a guy’s lunch. It’s quite another to steal that guy’s lunch because it’s an RPG and that’s just what you do – and then have a character in the game call you on it. (though during my second run I was found 100% Not Guilty)
- The music is fantastic – this is the only game I have ever not gotten tired of the battle music. I could listen to every track on this soundtrack for a very long time. And I didn’t even know you could get the SNES to sound like an electric guitar.
In fact, I have only three real complaints – though two are significant. From least to most bothersome: some of the quests are obtuse (which happens in practically every RPG). As an example: there was a quest item I needed to place somewhere for 65 million years. It get stolen, and you need to find it – but there’s no hint of where to look. In Chrono Trigger’s favor, talking to NPCs in other circumstances is almost always helpful and the game does a great job of using your past knowledge to help you in future areas.
Inventory management is a real problem, though. It is both difficult to figure out what something does and difficult to manage a quickly-growing list of items that spirals out of control by the end. There are advantages to having the right equipment in the right places, but you quickly get tired of keeping such an extensive inventory. Some screens show you item comparisons for each of your characters, but there is no way to equip an item in those screens or to see what special properties an item has. It’s a small annoyance, but one that comes up frequently enough to merit mention.
The real problem is the combat. For the first two-thirds of the game, fights are mostly well-balanced. But as enemies get more and more special abilities, fights become increasingly based on luck rather than skill. Late in the game, fights are either a chore that poses no real threat or a fight that may very well kill you multiple times with little warning. The perfect example of this is the final boss, which incorporates all these problems with the combat. The final boss has 12 stages. The first nine are trivial and make you wonder why you had to fight them at all (partly due to stat re-use, rather than stat scaling). The next two are fairly easy, but are a good challenge. The final boss stage took me an incredibly long time to beat – through very little fault of my own. On my first run, I spent half an hour doing absolutely no damage – without realizing it. Worse, the last save point was before the previous two bosses. Since I was low on items at that point, I needed to fight them again to even have a chance at beating the final boss stage.
I would trace these problems to two sources: first, percentage-based attacks. There are several enemies (including the last boss stage) that have magical attacks that deal 50% of a characters current HP. Some are even worse and deal damage equal to your current HP minus one. Combine one of these enemies with another high damage one, and it’s entirely possible to get wiped out in a single turn before you have a chance to react. These attacks make you wonder why the late-game bosses don’t just have a minion do that last HP of damage to kill your entire party.
The second source, related to the first, is gimmicky fights. Some fights that require unusual tactics are fine – Chrono Trigger does a great job of drawing on past experiences to clue you in on how to fight a new enemy, and can give you a few turns to figure out how to fight it….mostly. There are just a few too many fights where this breaks down – with the last boss stage, there is no indication that attacking two of the three onscreen enemies is entirely counterproductive most of the time.
By far the worst culprit of this is a side-quest boss called the Son of Sun, which will counter any direct hit with a powerful fire attack. Instead, you are supposed to attack one of the five flames rotating around the boss, and all but the “right” one will cause a similar fire counterattack. There is no indication or hint for this. To top it off, you have about fifteen seconds before the boss shuffles the flames and you again have to guess which flame is the “right” one. It’s entirely a matter of chance, and is incredibly frustrating to fight. I willingly admit I only beat this boss through save-scumming.
All in all, though, Chrono Trigger is a fantastic game that I’ll likely come back to for New Game+ (and the other eleven endings). It does many, many things right – things that even modern games have a hard time replicating. This game is one of those rare confluences of talent, hard work, and a bit of luck that makes for a fantastically good time.
Steam link. Oh how I wish.
You can get it on Android or iOS, or rip your cartridge to play in RetroArch on anything, including Android.