I can't understand why the hell it took me so long to replay Chrono Trigger. I love JRPGs, and I like to reminisce about my favorites once a few years have passed, when memories grow cold and it doesn't matter so much to fight a gazillion fights again, level up to overcome the next boss, and keep moving through a story whose ending you know.
My first time with Chrono Trigger dates back to a little over a decade ago, when emulation opened the doors of games that had never been released in Spain, but the second game did not arrive until this month, thanks to the Nintendo version. DS that was launched in our country. And boy do I think I just have to say that as I write this I am about to finish the third.
What makes Chrono Trigger special? A good question that perhaps a few years ago I could not answer, but today I am clear. All games, even bad ones, have something that makes them special in some way. Something that stands out, the first thing that you think of when they tell you its name and that makes an image of that game form in your mind, different from any other game you have played throughout your life. My first thought when talking about Chrono Trigger a few years ago would surely have been time travel. Because yes, Chrono Trigger has time travel, it is one of its main differentiating elements with respect to the vast majority of JRPGs. But what I now think makes him really special is something so simple, and at the same time so difficult to achieve, like that absolutely everything about him is special.
Every time I take a game and dissect it into different aspects such as control, level design, history or the audiovisual section, it is practically impossible to find a true homogeneity, a perfect balance. Something always stands out, for better or for worse. There is always one aspect that stands out from the rest, to which we go before anyone else to praise or criticize a game. Like the characters in Final Fantasy VI, the plot of Xenogears or the combat system of Baten Kaitos. But that's not the case with Chrono Trigger if I try to dissect it. There are no highs or lows, no rough edges to file. Nothing weighs on anything, and nothing has to make up the lack of anything. What on paper seems like a utopia, is what in my opinion that "dream team" of Japanese designers achieved back in 1995.
So let's go back to time travel. When the young Crono goes to the fair in his town and witnesses the appearance of the first portal to the past, an adventure begins that spans no less than five different eras of the same world. All of them have their own design, their characters and their little stories, five realities separated by hundreds or thousands of years. Together with Crono, the mute avatar that represents the player on the journey, we travel back and forth through these five ages, finding new teammates in all of them and unraveling the mysteries of a plot that little by little connects them brilliantly.
The starting point is quite simple: not long after starting the game, our protagonists discover that in the future a creature has led / will lead the world to its destruction, so they decide to use time travel to avoid it. But the task is not as simple as it seems and the plot begins to twist with constant comings and goings through different ages, unexpected obstacles and a few script twists as tradition dictates in this genre.
The premise that the past is known can be understood and even changed the future is used to the maximum, and not only when advancing through the main development, but also to successfully solve some of the secondary missions. Travel to prehistory to get a nonexistent mineral in the era in which we want to re-forge a broken sword, avoid the disappearance of a character by saving the life of a distant ancestor in the past or leave an artifact charging with the energy of the sun during thousands of years to pick it up just two minutes later are just a few samples of those little glimpses of genius that abound in Chrono Trigger.
Genius that is multiplied when we realize that as players we have practically the same ability to modify the course of the story as the characters with their travel in time. While there is a base development leading to the end, say, standard, Chrono Trigger allows us to make some pretty big decisions and even get out of the preset script. More than one of the protagonists may not reach the end of the adventure with us if we wish, and the moment in which we face the creature that is going to destroy the world is completely up to our choice, which can completely alter both the duration of the game and the outcome of the plot, which has many and very different variants (some even border on the surreal).
This greatly favors the replayability of the title, which also has a prodigious pace in its development. Although it is not especially long for what JRPGs are used to and can be finished in about 15 hours, it makes up for it with a high density of events. The filling is conspicuous by its absence and at every step we discover a new area, a new detail of the plot or we get to know our characters a little more. All of them manage to leave their mark without resorting to endless blocks of text. A solid script and the many situations into which they are drawn in so few hours quickly outline characters as diverse as a warrior transformed into a frog seeking revenge, a rather abrupt troglodyte who barely breaks the language of his companions or a sorcerer who left drag to the dark side with the idea of fighting a greater evil.
And as a perfectly calculated piece of engineering that is Chrono Trigger, the fighting also fits like a glove to this philosophy of not wasting the player's time. For starters, they stop being random and take us to a separate terrain to fight after a loading screen. Enemies roam freely through the forests, ruins or caves that double as dungeons, waiting to engage us at the slightest physical or visual contact. Part of these encounters are scripted and occur every time we pass a specific point, but many others can be easily avoided if we do not go after the enemies. In either case, when a fight begins, the characters and the enemies are positioned on the same terrain on which we previously moved freely and the menus are displayed on the screen without any other kind of transition.
The combat system is based on the Active Time Battle released in Final Fantasy IV, in which the bars of each character are filled according to their speed and when completed they allow us to choose attacks, magic, objects or any other available command without stopping never the time (although the option to change it is available in case anyone wants to take it easier). On this basis, Chrono Trigger builds a less rigid system, in which the positioning of the enemies changes in real time during combat and especially affects the effectiveness of some techniques. In this way, if there are several enemies crowded together, they can be attacked at the same time with a spell that damages all those located within a specific radius; whereas if they are in line, a technique that advances in a straight line will be more recommendable.
These techniques consume magic points based on their effectiveness, and among them we find the best physical attacks, magic spells, heals, status alterations and, most importantly, combos. A maximum of three characters participate in the combats, each one with their own techniques that, after gaining experience fighting together and / or obtaining certain items, can be combined to perform double, and even triple techniques. Thus we obtain abilities as convenient as the use of a character's sword to disperse the healing spell of another throughout the combat area, or combos of various types of magic that tear enemies to pieces. This great diversity of techniques, together with a roster of well differentiated characters, allows a multitude of possible strategies when facing the toughest fights in the game.
Speaking of which, the game is not particularly difficult, seeking to always offer a reasonable and not frustrating challenge. Choosing haphazard attacks may be of little use against bosses, but stopping to climb higher levels is rarely the best solution. It is much more productive to observe what elemental weaknesses they may have, in what order it is preferable to attack if there are several objectives or make a team change if we need to resort more to physical attacks, magic or healings. The design of the dungeons is also a good sign that Chrono Trigger does not seek to hinder the player's progress, but rather wants to keep them interested at all times. Its size and complexity grows as we progress through the adventure, but the game never dons the disguise of a dungeon crawler and after going through a few levels, activating strategically located switches and taking down the shift boss, we are ready to change the scene. .
What is always a pleasure in a work that puts so much care in artistic design. Taking as reference the art of Akira Toriyama (creator of the Dragon Ball series), who designed both the characters and the most distinctive features of each of the five eras, Chrono Trigger can boast of one of the most beautiful graphic sections of the entire 16 bit generation. The game squeezes the SNES color palette to put on screen from the brightest green forests to the most oppressive browns and grays dungeons. Everything is taken care of to the extreme, each age has its own setting, each interior is full of small details, the taverns and castles give a real sense of life with a lot of people wandering from here to there. And in front of it all, the protagonists, who through excellent animation work manage to create the illusion that you are not alone in front of a handful of sprites, and laugh, cry or are surprised when the occasion requires it.
Because in Chrono Trigger there is room for joy, sadness and epic, and in case the script or the 2D graphics of more technologically limited times were not able to move you, Yasunori Mitsuda enters the scene with his masterful compositions. It is, unfortunately, the aspect of the game that less justice can be done in a text like this, but it never hurts to mention the fantastic soundtrack that the game has. Sometimes it works as an accompaniment to set the scene, other times it reinforces the most emotional scenes and other times it speeds up our rhythm in the middle of a fight. In any case, the level is always through the roof, and at the end of the trip it is almost impossible not to throw back a nostalgic look and remember everything lived when listening again to songs such as that of the millennial fair, that of Frog or that of the ancient kingdom of Zeal.
What makes Chrono Trigger special then? I hope that now I have made it clear. If you like JRPGs and have never played it, do it right now. Literally. Don't wait to settle all outstanding accounts with overdue games on your shelf. If it cannot be through the original version of SNES, you have the reissues of PSX and DS, or else, you can also download it for PS3 or Wii. I think it is even available for some cell phones, so there are no longer any excuses. Unless you don't understand English, of course, but even then there are unofficial translations circulating on the net. Be that as it may, do yourself a favor and don't miss out on this wonder. It may not end up becoming your favorite JRPG, but you can hardly deny that it is one of the roundest games ever created. A true masterpiece that does not need to resort to time machines, but to an extraordinary design so as not to age.
If you want to play this classic in this link I leave you to download the game and the emulator
And here you have a video tutorial on how to make the emulator work
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You´re right, everygame has a side that stands out, even bad videogames. I´m a fan of the JRPG genre in videogames too. You see, I like Chrono Trigger but it´s not in a special place in my heart or something, I preffer Xenogears although I think they are games that can´t be compared. Welcome to the community.
Thank you very much for your words, in answering your comment, I am a fan of retro games, there are some that I like a lot and another I just like, I hope that everything I put you like
!hw ban
Robo de contenido y fraude.
Banned @hulks.