Chrono Trigger, A Hollow Masterpiece

  The fourth generation of video game consoles, with the Super NES and the Sega Genesis, bred innovation in many genres of video games, including RPGs. With increased ROM size, developers were much more free to deliver massive worlds with rich stories, and the SNES was host to many of those legendary titles. Chrono Trigger is often lauded as the best of them all. It has a massive reputation, appearing on dozens of publications as one of the greatest video games of all time, even more so than most of its contemporaries. It was with these expectations that I entered the game. Japanese RPGs are known for their epic storytelling, and Square (now Square Enix) has pushed the boundaries of what was possible in these games since its very first hit, 1987’s Final Fantasy. Chrono Trigger was the culmination of their efforts in 2D RPGs. It was made by the “dream team” of Hironobu Sakaguchi, who had created Final Fantasy, Yuji Hori, who had created Dragon Quest, and Akira Toriyama, who designed characters for Dragon Quest. I played the SNES version, though I did watch the cutscenes that were added in the PlayStation version four years later. To say my thoughts were mixed would be an understatement.

The game starts in 1000 A.D. with Crono, the silent protagonist, Marle, a princess pretending not to be one, and Lucca, an engineer and Crono's childhood friend. Lucca creates a time machine that propels most of the game’s event. Time travel is the main gimmick of Chrono Trigger, with the game taking you across a variety of locales that you can explore in different time periods. You meet a colorful cast of characters in these different time periods, including my personal favorites, Frog, a disgraced and cursed knight, and Magus, a mysterious elf mage fighting against you on behalf of the demons. The game evolves into an existentialist story, with the characters resolving to fight against the end of the world. There are even multiple endings depending on what you finish and what order you play the game in, and a New Game Plus mode, which were revolutionary for the time. Chrono Trigger always feels innovative even at its worst, and I was impressed by how much care was put into the various worlds you explore.

The music is easily the strongest point. Yasunori Mitsuda delivers one of the best video game OSTs of all time, with unforgettable tracks like “Corridors of Time” and “Wind Scene”. The music helps place you in the different time periods you explore, and you never feel bored listening to any of the tracks. They tell stories through their masterful composition and help augment weaker parts of the storytelling. The battle themes were all excellent, as well. The combat rarely feels stale. Uniquely, the battles happen in the overworld rather than in a different mode, helping with immersion. The Active Time Battle in Chrono Trigger feels even more action-heavy while still being mostly turn-based, and though I found that it got a bit grindy towards the end, it’s definitely a treat for fans of turn-based RPGs. 

Unfortunately, where the game fell apart for me was the story. Crono is not consistently characterized. He is whatever the player wants him to be, and a good friend to the rest of the cast, but nothing more. I found that especially since you were supposed to feel saddened by his death and deeply want to bring him back to life, the choice to make Crono a silent protagonist was a flawed one. It’s hard to be invested in a character you know nothing about. In contrast, Final Fantasy VI, which came out a year before Chrono Trigger and was also made by Square, featured dynamic and well-written protagonists in the form of Terra Branford and Celes Chere. The writing decisions in Chrono Trigger generally perplexed me. While you have side quests you are encouraged to do at the end to learn more about each character, they felt shallow to me, only with a few exceptions. While it’s believable that some of these characters are friends, not many have developed connections with each other (Lucca and Robo being the very notable exception here), and worse, none other than Magus are connected to the overarching plot. 

To elaborate on this, Magus and his sister Schala are integral parts of the central conflict of the game. Magus’s backstory reveals that he was once the prince of an kingdom called Zeal, and his real name was Janus. He was about ten years old when his mother, Queen Zeal, had nearly succeeded in achieving immortality absorbing the power of Lavos, a powerful being within the earth. Schala, a young woman, is opposed to this, but is powerless in the face of her mother. The Queen descended into madness as she absorbed more energy from Lavos, and she eventually became its pawn. Crono sacrifices himself to save the rest of the party from Lavos, and Schala stays in a crumbling Zeal, using her magic to transport the rest of the party to safety. Many from Zeal, including the young Janus, were transported to other time periods by the time rift that Lavos’s power opened. Janus was groomed by a group of fiends to become the leader of their army, and he trained to one day defeat Lavos and save his sister.

Janus, as the adult Magus, eventually found a way to travel to the downfall of Zeal once more, but he couldn’t change anything, and still didn’t know Schala’s fate. Chrono Trigger is often a narrative about war, and how greed for power ruins people’s lives. We saw that with Queen Zeal and her children, and we see Magus continue the cycle as an adult as a person who only knew violence for most of his life. We see the consequences of his actions in the form of Frog, who was a man cursed by Magus to enter that form after Magus killed the knight he was a squire for. The Queen’s machinations eventually caused an apocalypse (the one the party is trying to prevent) that eventually caused robots to revolt against humans. We see this during the party member Robo’s sidequest, where we learn that he was deactivated as he rebelled against his programming by being kind. In theory, Chrono Trigger is a story about a mostly young, scrappy group who manage to end an apocalypse due to their compassion for the world around them.

On paper, this is fascinating, but there aren’t nearly enough moments that help develop these ideas. Magus hardly gets any dialogue about the implications of him not having a true childhood due to his mother’s abuse and his displacement at ten years old. Frog does not get to have interactions with Magus despite their tenuous relationship, and his role as a mere teenager fighting and nearly losing his life in a war is not delved into beyond his grief over losing the knight he squired for. There are times where the belief that humans are inherently more morally good than the fiends comes into question, but the game is largely lazy with this theming, making the inhuman fiends evil caricatures. Worst of all, the characters themselves have almost nothing to say about these conflicts. They often feel like set pieces rather than genuine members of this story, with Marle’s dialogue often being related to her romantic feelings for Crono, Ayla being not much more than comic relief, and Lucca, while interesting and charming, not having any connection with the overarching plot or Lavos. Crono himself is the worst offender, as it’s hard to know what he wants or why he does anything through his expressions and the ways the other characters talk about him. 

To summarize, RPGs with multiple playable characters greatly benefit from a good party dynamic, which Chrono Trigger doesn’t have. Other than a vague desire to do good, most of the characters don’t feel like they belong in the story, which itself is extremely meandering. Having different time periods and locations is all well and good, but when they don’t connect into a thematically coherent story, they don’t feel nearly as interesting. The game tries to explore many different things, such as AI, industrialization, cultism, and the cycle of war. Sadly, it ends up not meaningfully exploring any of them. The character writing is sparse at best, even for the more developed characters, and the most interesting storylines (like Schala’s) are not explored nearly enough. The story is a far cry from the other juggernaut SNES RPGs Square produced, like FFIV and FFVI, which tell more intricate stories with deeper characters.

Overall, Chrono Trigger was a disappointment. The core of an RPG, for me, is the story. It is the base of the game that everything else builds on. The story being as shallow as it was despite its fascinating premises was a real let down. If you want to experience a 16-bit RPG with interesting gameplay and great music, Chrono Trigger might be up your alley, but be warned that you will be better served by other games if a well-written story is a priority for you.