CHRONO TRIGGER: THROUGH THE ROSE-TINTED SPECS

That.. was a great read, and so true. For this guy it's Chrono Trigger, for me its Final Fantasy VII.

Chrono Trigger is one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. That's pretty much objective. It's also one of my favorite games of all time, and often the statement of 'You people only like it because of nostalgia', and well, it just doesn't hold up for me. I first played Chrono Trigger long after the SNES era and fell in love with it. CT remains 'one of those games' that in my observation, defies expectations, as I've witnessed everyone from girl game haters to gangster rappers playing it with no prior expectations or even knowledge of its existence and ultimately loving it to fucking death.

I gave up trying to analyze it. I just accept it for what it is. And I love it.

This game is to video games what the original Star Wars trilogy is to movies.

The graphics, while amazing at the time, are utterly outdated. And everything in the game has been done to death. It's all ridiculously cliche. There's nothing that makes it stand out, at a brief glance. Some unlikely heroes go on an adventure and end up saving the world.

It doesn't do anything really special. It just does it all perfect.

It's true that it all seems so cliche now. But I wonder how many of the things that are cliches in JRPGs, in video games in general, are cliches specifically because everyone is trying to recreate this game.

I don't remember Seinfeld having outdated special effects for today, having great special effects when it first came out, defining all works of the same genre from then on, or being an epitomally cliche story about unlikely heroes getting dragged into an adventure and eventually saving the world/galaxy. I could have missed that episode.

I would accept, uh, I Love Lucy or something, I guess. Not that Lucy and Ricky were battling Lavos or anything, but... at least the other stuff.

I'm not saying Seinfeld isn't good beneath an unassuming shell. But my point wasn't just that Chrono Trigger is good beneath an unassuming shell; it was also all that other stuff.

Pretty much agreed with most of the stated above. I personally prefer the older generation games over the newer generation. Let's see what the new gen games have got going for them: better graphics, terrible gameplay, terrible story. I swear, if I ever owned a game company, I wouldn't hire any of these game makers today.

I do like the article though, it's an interesting read. I've been replaying the game myself on the ds...and the new content has been...unimpressive, to say the least. I still havn't seen the new ending...so that's the one thing I can't comment on yet.

Edit: I just lol'd at the post two slots down. Thanks for that physhal.

author=Sailerius
I played Chrono Trigger for the first time about four years ago and to be honest, I really didn't care for it. The characters were bland and unremarkable, the gameplay has nothing to offer that I haven't seen done a thousand times but better, and the battles are slow and boring. The music is great, though.

This really puts your reviews into perspective.

Chrono Trigger's battles could benefit from about a 25%-50% speedup. Maybe more like 100% at the beginning of the game, when you have fewer than three characters. Fortunately, we have emulators.

Since Sai mentioned it, I kind of want to rant about the gameplay in Chrono Trigger, and the battles in particular. I actually really, really like the way it handles combo techs and geometric-areas-of-attack. They're not complex, but they're handled with extreme finesse. Every battle is set up with the geometric attacks in mind, and every battle has the enemies in a different formation than you've ever seen before. Every combo skill has lots of times when you want to use it and lots of times when you don't. It would almost feel like a semi-tactical RPG level of gameplay in battles, if it weren't so damn easy, which is admittedly a pretty big fault when viewing it as an experienced gamer.

Every enemy has unique but easily understood gimmicks, and they appear exactly the right amount of times before you never see them again. Party members are perfectly balanced. Battles are not random, and the ability to avoid most but not all encounters is done in a way that most people find appealing - each encounter is individually designed with its own movement patterns and triggers so that even just the act of starting or avoiding a battle feels like a meaningful event every single time.

I do think the equipment is overly simple, and the way skills are learned has not aged well. These are areas where modern games do a much better job of building complex, living, breathing gameplay systems, while these systems in CT are basically nonexistant. Traditional XP grind systems have also fallen out of style, with what I feel is good reason. However, CT does a fair job of discouraging the average player from grinding by simply making dead enemies stay dead until you exit the area to the world map, and also by giving enough room for error in battles that grinding is utterly unnecessary even for the most pathetic novice.

Really, examining the game objectively as a designer, it is the way encounters are done as much as anything that makes the areas feel so alive. They are seamlessly integrated into the areas, and each one is unique. This helps the areas come alive, and by extension makes the story much easier to become immersed in.

Because, like the author in the OP, I admit the story is ridiculous and childish and stupid. I think if you kept all the dialogue and cut scenes but replaced the areas with FF4 style areas with FF4 style battles, the story would feel about as epic as FF4's story (read: you would need a seriously strong prescription on those glasses to honestly claim it's anything other than dumb).

Unfortunately for CT, the graphics haven't aged well, and good graphics can do just as much or more to make the areas and characters come alive. So while the story benefits from the timeless gameplay, it suffers as a result of the crappy SNES graphics. Neither of these are things people typically think about as directly affecting the enjoyability of the story in a major way, but the truth is that they do. Frickin' Square C&Ding the frickin' Chrono Resurrection project, I want to hang their frickin' lawyers from barbeques.