Ah, Chrono Trigger, one of the great classics of the Super Nintendo era. I can’t help but look back and realize that literally months of my high school life disappeared into this game. Its characters are likable, memorable and distinct. Its premise was highly original. Its execution, looking back without the pink-colored glasses, was not as perfect as I recall. Don’t get me wrong, I still absolutely love this game and its adaptation to the DS, but that can’t stop me from examining it tonight with a critic’s eye.
I’ll start with the added content. The new monster raising game initially struck me as a fairly cool idea, meant to showcase the DS’s networking capabilities, so I began to explore it on the first run through the game. The main issue is that this really feels like just what it was, added on. The only relevance to the main game is that your prizes from the monster matches are often in-game items. Unlike the coliseum in FF6, which felt tied into the world, stepping through a gateway at the End of Time seemed like an easy out. Even the pillar of light that sends you off to it feels out of place.
The Lost Sanctum and Dimensional Vortex locations felt a little more well-integrated; at least they got locations on the world map and in the Lost Sanctum’s case dialog that drew you to the location. The Dimensional Vortex as a Plus-Game bonus felt a little less tied in. That said, the two provide an easy contrast of one failing where the other succeeded. Where the Lost Sanctum felt mildly integrated into the storyline, once inside you’re subjected to a number of fetch quests that the original SNES game would rarely stooped to. The amount of these fetch quests is boggling and tedious, but since it’s new content, veterans of the original will undoubtedly play it, since it might have some extra story stowed away in the corner. The Lost Sanctum offers little of that.
On the other side, the Dimensional Vortex arrives with little fanfare after you defeat Lavos for the first time. It seems a little more tied-in, brings additional power to Crono, Lucca and Marle along with finishing up in an alternate ending that ties off Magus/Janus’s story arc a little better than where they left it (though the end movie of that scene opens several new plotlines that will probably not see attention outside of Chrono Cross, a now contested sequel in a similar since to Highlander 2). In one part of it, your main party must be rescued by your second string, something that thrilled me since one of my favorite features in FF6 was its multi-party dungeons. But though surprising, it too felt added on, even to the point of a trivia game at the entrance of one Dimensional Vortex that reached right through the 4th wall, having the player answer questions that the characters themselves would have little difficulty answering in order to gain access to a secret area.
But I shouldn’t be so critical of the new additions. They’re great fanservice and I certainly don’t grudge Square-Enix polishing an old piece of intellectual property. If anything, I feel miffed that it didn’t get a fuller treatment like Final Fantasy 4. But playing through this classic again did give me a chance to re-examine the shortcomings of the original game, something which Square-Enix left nearly completely untouched.
I’ll start with the combat system. The idea of combo attacks between characters is a great idea, executed poorly. I wish that more games had adopted this system and worked out the bugs. In discussing this system with my friends, I was alerted to the fact that many people do not find Chrono Trigger’s combo system flawed, so I’ll elaborate. The attacks themselves are cool, the graphics are fun, the damage… either so subpar that you’ll never use the tech or vastly powerful to the point of overkill in rare cases. In most cases the tradeoff between using two people’s turns instead of one makes little to no sense. The other issue is that there are too few combo attacks at the high end. Why would I cast Ice Sword II, taking two turns, when I can utterly destroy a full screen of all but the hardiest enemies with a Luminaire? Triple techs as a rule are Awesome but Impractical.
While I’m at it, techs themselves, even without combos factored in, are grossly unbalanced. Some people get techs like Luminaire, Flare or Dark Matter for their final tech, others get situationally useful (Life 2/Frog Squash), or plain laughable (Triple Kick) techs. I mean seriously, Ayla destroys all before her, so why would you pay 20MP (or 5 equipped right) to do 3x your normal attack damage when she crits for 2x about half the time on a normal attack without the mana cost?
Which leads me to the general imbalance between the characters. They are pronounced. The first notable ailment in the game’s combat system is that Marle and Lucca use Accuracy instead of Power as their driver for weapon damage. This isn’t a problem unless you consider two other built-in factors, the capsules (or tabs in the old SNES version). You can get Power Capsules, Speed Capsules and Magic Capsules. You cannot get Accuracy Capsules. So while even the weakest melee fighter, Magus, can up his weapon damage with Power Capsules, the two girls are stuck in the Accuracy ghetto, unable to be useful with their normal attacks (Lucca makes up for this with having one of the three super-offense spells, but Marle’s Life II/Arise spell is situationally useful as mentioned above). By the same token, for the player that just wants to press attack all day instead of getting fancy with all this tech mumbo jumbo,
the optimized party would be Crono/Ayla/Frog.
In regards to this, I’m not saying that every character has to be the exact same, but in a three-person party game you run the risk of having clearly obvious stronger and weaker party choices, a difficulty dodged in FF6 by the nearly utter customizability of the characters (other than their special ability) and in FF4 by the fact that you do not choose your characters. Chrono Trigger lacks the customizability of FF6 and its attempts to differentiate between the characters causes balance issues.
So on to the story. I love this story. A kid wakes up one day, goes to a fair, meets a cute girl, takes her to see his best friend’s invention, all hell breaks loose. There’s your hook. There are a few things that stick out though, and I’m not going to talk about cliches or narrowly avoided cliches; the characters live up to a standard of personal depth.
The first objection that I have is Lucca’s supposed scientific incompetence hinted at in the comments of minor characters around the Fair and town. This person, whose machines apparently blow up all the time, in short order shows her list of inventions includes a working robot (Gato) and a physical matter teleporter. She also creates a Gate Key allowing time travel within less than a day of being exposed to the idea of time travel and repairs an advanced humanoid robot upon travel to the future. How exactly does this sort of genius “make inventions that suck”?
Don’t be fooled, all her awesome inventions really suck.
Another point that is both charming but complex is the early party’s reaction to discovering their planet will be destroyed a millennium after their time period. They choose to fight it and save the future they’ll never live to see. While provided enough characterization for Marle to leap to the conclusion she does and then drag the other two along for the ride, the reasoning lacks the personal hook to the epic storyline that FF4 and FF6 presented, in which the characters each had a very personal reason for doing the epic things they did. Chrono Trigger’s heroism is one of which steps out of its way to help people it will never meet, in a showy, epic manner that seems almost too much. Put in the same situation, I would probably be hard-pressed in deciding to put my life on the line like the party does and that’s what makes the characters heroic, perhaps foolhardy, and a little hard to identify with in comparison to FF4′s Cecil, whose psychological journey and resultant emergence to heroism is more mapped out than the spurious decision of a rebel princess.
Still, psychological realism is not the only goal of good literature, let alone a good game. Chrono Trigger’s interesting characters, engaging and epic storyline, solid gameplay and excellent, I mean freaking excellent, musical score more than make up for its brief moments of weakness in getting the characters on task to fight the Big Bad.
Overall, I still rank Chrono Trigger as a must-play game for anyone serious about RPGs.
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