Chrono Trigger Review

What can you say about one of the greatest SNES games and RPGs of all time? Well. That’s really all you need to say I suppose.

But when have I ever let something like that stop me? Never. That’s when.

Crono woke up one day all excited to go to the fair. He got some allowance money from his mom. Talked to his cat. Was nearly killed by this blonde chick running around and not looking where she was going. Ate a guys lunch, fought a robot, and then watched same said blonde chick get pulled through a portal to who knows where. Well, people saw him and Blondie hanging out and he thought “Well, that’s gonna look bad if she’s just gone. I’d better go find her.”

And now we’re here on Chrono’s Island.

But seriously folks. Crono goes through the portal and finds himself 400 years in the past. He has to rescue Marle (the blonde), and gets help from a humanoid Frog. His pal Lucca eventually meets up with them in the past and, eventually they find themselves in the distant future after some sort of global extinction event.

The three (now four cause they met a robot. not the one I mentioned before) find out what happened and decide they need to stop this from happening. A little internet search tells them that all of this seems to have started in the year 600 ad when a wizard named Magus summoned Lavos.

After some more time skipping and meeting some new friends, the group get ready to fight with Lavos and take him out before it can destroy the world.

That is a VERY quick summary of the game and I left out a TON of stuff. But I’m not here to talk you through the whole story. Play the game.

This is a JRPG by Squaresoft. So that’ll tell you a bit of what you need to know. It’s got all the usual stuff like equipment and party management, magic, levels, consumables, hidden treasure and side quests… all that fun stuff.

This game gave us the very popular and powerful Double and Triple Tech system which let any two, or three in some instances, party members combine their powers into one more powerful attack. Other than that, the gameplay is pretty standard RPG stuff. Time travel is obviously a mechanic in the game and it plays into some of the different puzzles you’ll need to solve to get all the best stuff.

Graphically this is one of the best looking games on the console. I don’t even mind the Toriyama character design all that much in this one. The sprites are good, the animations are great, the enemy design is good. I feel like I say that a lot. I must have pretty decent taste in games when it comes to graphics.

The soundtrack… now… we gotta talk… This is one of the finest game soundtracks ever but especially on the SNES. Square really had the best people working for them in this little era of the 90’s. They had so many great games with so many talented people working on the games. The music can be tense, energetic, funky, emotional, sad… I could write a paper about it. But I won’t. I’ll save you from that.

Look. There is nothing I can tell you about this game that you haven’t already heard or know first hand. This game is a masterpiece. The only think I can say about it as a negative is really just that SquareEnix has just let the whole universe rot on a shelf in a dark room. They should give it someone that would treat it right.