Chrono Trigger: The Dream Team slam dunks a JRPG gem.
The JRPG dream team. Who cares about basketballs when you have 3 video game MVPs?
Akira Toriyama (left, RIP), Yuji Horii (top right), Hironobu Sakaguchi (lower right).
I will start by turning the clock back to the summer of ‘95. When I learned that a new title was on the horizon from my favorite game company, I was immediately excited. The previews from Nintendo Power promised amazing graphics, time travel and cool character designs. I was already a fan of anime and was familiar with the Dragon Ball series, so I immediately recognized Akira Toriyama’s unique artstyle. When my dad took me to Toys R Us to buy me a birthday gift, I already knew what I wanted. Only issue was the exorbitant price: 89.99 US Dollars back in 1995. The most expensive SNES cart I’d ever seen, by far! Honestly, I didn’t know it was going to be that expensive. My dad wasn’t happy about that, but ultimately I convinced him by arguing the game was worth it because it was longer and I wouldn’t need to get another game for the whole year. Fortunately, Chrono Trigger turned out to be great, cause I was stuck with it whether I liked it or not.The Nintendo Power preview for Chrono Trigger was very lengthy and had plenty of Toriyama's excellent concept art.
MINOR SPOILER ALERT FOR CHRONO TRIGGER
I always thought it was crazy that no other game has played with the concept of time travel to the level of Chrono Trigger. It seems to me that a time travel theme is ripe for memorable gameplay experiences but I can’t think of too many games that have approached it. The idea of being able to go back to the past and drastically change the future is used effectively as a trope in many occasions in this game. The dialogue of townsfolk, contents of treasure chests or even the land masses themselves might be altered by actions performed in the past. Towns can be raised from nowhere or have their inhabitants altered by the actions of our heroes. The quest that plays into this theme the best, in my opinion, is one where Lucca gets a chance to alter a traumatic event in her past. Fate allows her the opportunity to go back and undo a mistake in her childhood that ended up leaving her mom crippled. If you succeed in stopping the malfunctioning machine in time, the present is changed and her mother behaves very differently if you visit her again. I thought the scene was particularly effective in using the main concept of the game to further connect the players with the emotions of the characters.
This scene really connected with me as twelve year old, can't really explain why.
The set piece for the trial was also incredibly beautiful.
The Ancient Kingdom of Zeal is my favorite section of the game. All my homies love Schala.
Development History
The history of the creation of Chrono Trigger is deeply connected to the history of manga and one man in particular: Kazuhiko Torishima. Torishima was the lead editor of the weekly manga publication “Shonen Jump” and was responsible for discovering Akira Toriyama. He was also involved in the founding of Enix, the company that discovered Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura, the developers of Dragon Quest (Also he brought Toriyama to serve as the concept artist for Dragon Quest). He regularly promoted Dragon Quest by offering regular sneak peaks into the development process on "V-Jump", their video game magazine off shoot. He is basically responsible for the popularity of the RPG genre in Japan by leveraging his manga audience and succesfully convincing them to play those games.
Kazuhiko Torishima. This man is the godfather of the JRPG genre.
Torishima became aware of Final Fantasy and Hironobu Sakaguchi after the release of FFIII. Sakaguchi wanted FFIV to get the front page magazine treatment on V-Jump but Torishima refused. Torishima was not a fan of their product. He told Sakaguchi that he found FFIII to be too dull compared to Dragon Quest, and found the final dungeon “strangely difficult” (I’m sure the fact that it was a direct competitor to his Dragon Quest franchise played some part in the decision, but I digress). Sakaguchi was pissed, but took it on as a challenge and decided to invest more into the story of FFIV so he could get the approval of Torishima. Final Fantasy IV was a success and when Final Fantasy V came around, it was promoted on V-Jump. But the relationship didn’t end there.
Torishima had an idea to bring Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest together in some sort of epic JRPG dream team collaboration. His reasoning behind it was to get Horii out of the creative rut he felt he was falling into with the Dragon Quest series. So he brought Sakaguchi, Horii and Toriyama together to work on the project. The only hurdle was finding a producer that was up to the task, and Kazuhiko Aoki, designer/producer of Squaresoft’s Hanjaku Hero series, volunteered. A lot of promotion was done through the V-jump magazine, including developer interviews and previews. I was able to find one of the promotional videos on youtube.
The development process was a bit more free flowing than what is common with Final Fantasy games. Horii and Sakaguchi had devised the big concept of time travel for the game but a lot of the individual moments were improvised based on the concept art from Toriyama. That gave the game more of a loose, free flowing feel where the creators felt encouraged to be a bit more comedic and outside the box than what was typical for Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. Horii focused on writing the overall story and the NPC dialogue, while Sakaguchi focused on tuning the combat, monster stats and adding scripted events. Horii also designed some of the characters, and he would hand his designs to Toriyama to enhance. In the early builds of the game Sakaguchi had made the combat very strategic and challenging and the play testers complained. Eventually, the difficulty was significantly tuned down.
Besides the dream team trio, the Chrono Trigger development team includes many of the talents who worked on Final Fantasy VI. There are far too many to mention one by one, (The staff included 60 employees at peak, the largest for any Square SNES project at the time) but it is clear that Squaresoft put their best talent to work on this project. The project took one year of planning and another for development. The project was notorious for the excessive crunch time needed to complete it. In one of the endings, there’s a developer room easter egg where the player can talk to the developers and many of them complain about the excessive hours on the project, going as far to mention 24 hour work days. I don’t know if it was an exaggeration but considering they finished the game in a year, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched.
Additional Note: Chrono Trigger initially was intended as a CD-Rom disk game for the canceled Sony/Phillips SNES CD-Rom attachment, which is why it ended up necessitating the expensive 32 bit cartridge to fit all of the content.
Story
The story involves a cast of seven characters who get pulled into a time traveling adventure to stop the world from being destroyed. The main three characters are Crono, the silent protagonist, Marle, the secret princess of Guardia and Lucca the apprentice inventor, all from the 1000 AD time period. The other four are Frog, the cursed knight from 600 AD, Robo, the automaton from the future, Ayla, the cavewoman, and Magus, the mysterious antagonist turned ally. The story starts when the main three meet up at the Millenium Fair and are testing Lucca’s new invention, the teleporting machine. After it reacts to Marle’s pendant, they inadvertedly get teleported back to 600 AD.
I hate it when unexpected time travel happens.
Lavos, the evil hedgehog from outer space is planning to rain destruction on humanity in 1999 AD.
A small preview of two of the 13 endings of Chrono Trigger. The "bad" ending was a particularly creative twist at the time.
It was unusual to get a story scene for losing in the climatic battle. I recommend everyone experience it at least once.
Gameplay
It is interesting to note that despite being a collaboration between the creative minds behind Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger plays like neither of those franchises. It does have active time battles like the Final Fantasy series, but almost everything else is different. They did away with random battles on the overworld map like most JRPGs at the time. The enemies appear on the map as if it was an action rpg and the enemies chase after the party to initiate combat. They use this set up in clever ways, as enemies can hide and ambush the party, and they also have some scripted battles that are triggered by interacting with the environment. This way of presenting encounters with enemies is far more interesting than the random battle system in Final Fantasy and I’m surprised the series didn’t adopt it going forward. If I had to guess a reason for that, it is probably a lot more labor intensive to have to script the encounters than just rely on RNG.
Enemies have their own scripted behaviors. They sometimes ignore the player and goof around (left) or set up ambushes like the birds waking the ogres (right).
Isn't it the coolest thing ever?
This is the first JRPG to include the New Game + feature that allows the player to carry over their levels, spells and equipment to another playthrough. There were extra endings that were only accessible by fighting Lavos and beating him at different points throughout the game where previously it would lead to death. The New Game + concept proved to be a popular design idea, adopted by many other games going forward.
Also, I’m almost certain this is the first Squaresoft JRPG to heavily feature a lot of mini games. Final Fantasy VI certainly didn’t have many (maybe the Colosseum, if you want to count that) but Chrono Trigger had a multitude of them. There’s the race with Johnny in 2300 AD, the many carnival games available at the Millenium Fair and another mini-game in 65,000,000 BC. The next few mainline Final Fantasies would follow the lead from Chrono Trigger and go heavy with the mini-games and side activities.
Before Final Fantasy VII's motorcycle race, there was Crono racing Johnny on a jetbike.
Graphics and Concept Art
The look of Chrono Trigger was developed from various character designs and set pieces Toriyama created. The animators and programmers were working hard to create pixel art animations that fit whatever wacky ideas Toriyama was cooking up. The pixel artists had to create more frames of animation for the characters than for previous Squaresoft games. The difference is noticeable as the walk animations, emotes, and attacks for the characters are far more fluid that those in Final Fantasy VI. Squaresoft employed an art team of up to 30 pixel artists, by far the largest at the time. Tetsuya Takahashi, Xeno series creator, served as one of the graphics directors on the Chrono Trigger team. Other Final Fantasy stalwarts such as Tetsuya Nomura also contributed to the monster designs.
Akira Toriyama's Chrono Trigger art work in all its glory. They captured the feel of his artwork pretty well, I think.
Squaresoft was starting to research into the emerging silicon graphics 3D rendering technology and some of the early work made it into Chrono Trigger. The special 3D and postprocessing blending effects are noticeable in some of the spells and even some of the set pieces like the trial scene. It is also prominently used in the pendulum swing animation in the intro of the game.
Music and Sound
Chrono Trigger was the debut of an incredible video game score compser: Yasunori Mitsuda. He started at Square as a sound engineer working on grunt work such as tweaking sound effects, but he joined Square with the goal of becoming a game composer. When he saw that his career was stagnating, he made an ultimatum to the management at Square to allow him to pursue his passion or he’d quit. Sakaguchi decided to assign him as the composer of the new Chrono Trigger project. Nobuo Uematsu also had to contribute a few tracks near the end of the project as Mitsuda had drove himself ill with stomach ulcers due to overwork and stress. As unfortunate as that sounds, at least Mitsuda had the comfort of knowing that he had created one of the best JRPG scores of all time.
There are far too many excellent Mitsuda tunes, but my favorites are “Memories of Green” and “Corridors of Time”. And for something more upbeat and heroic, “Ayla’s theme”.
Rereleases
Chrono Trigger was rereleased as part of the PS1 Final Fantasy Anthology series combined with Final Fantasy IV. There were some new cutscenes animated by Toriyama’s studio for this version and they are spectacular. However, the gameplay experience of this version is atrocious because of the way the SNES code was designed to take advantage of the near instant data streaming capabilities of the cartridge. The loading times really ruin the flow of combat, so it is not recommended.
There is also a Nintendo DS version of Chrono Trigger with the additions of the PS1 version with a new localization. There are also new dungeons, bosses and even a new ending in this version. I haven’t tried this version so I can’t really comment, but the general sentiment online seems to indicate that the new content is mostly forgettable. The smaller screen of the DS version really makes it hard to appreciate the pixel mastery in all its glory. As usual with Square Enix remakes, the original often remains as the preferable version.
Legacy
Chrono Trigger was reviewed well but it wasn’t as critically acclaimed as Final Fantasy VI in Japan. The reviews generally praised the game for its graphics and music, but found the game to be on the easy side and the story to be a step down from previous Squaresoft efforts. The game still sold 2 million copies in Japan in two months. In the US it was well received and it was the top rated console RPG of 1995. It sold around 300,000 copies overseas between the SNES and PS1 versions. Squaresoft games were not able to find the same level of success overseas that they did in Japan, but they did have a small group of dedicated fans (such as myself). I can only speculate that the higher price point was a sticking point for many parents and the Dream Team scenario didn’t resonate as much overseas where manga/anime was more of a niche hobby.
EGM and GamePro went bonkers over Chrono Trigger.
Final Thoughts
I hope you all enjoyed my Chrono Trigger retrospective. I took a trip on the Epoch buried in my mind back to 1995 with this one. Next up I will try to cover a few loose end Squaresoft SNES games, some of which never made it to the west but I have experienced over the years through emulation. It won’t be as in depth as this article, but it will cover multiple games, such as Seiken Densetsu 3, Secret of Evermore, Front Mission, Rudra no Hihou, Bahamut Lagoon, Live a Live, Romancing Saga 2 and 3 and Radical Dreamers. And before we know it, we will reach the PS1 era!
Thanks for reading. Feel free to share your experiences with Chrono Trigger in the comments. If you want to read the previous article in the series, click here.
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