RetroGrade Episode 1: A Question of Time - Part 4

Chrono Trigger (SNES, Playstation, Nintendo DS - 1995)

When gamers talk about the best years of their lives, they’re usually talking about the mid-90s. It was an exciting time to be alive. It was the junction of everything good and right in the world of gaming. The arcades had lost prevalence, but they were still there, and while platformers definitely reigned at the seat of the 16-bit empire, their dominance was not so complete that RPGs, fighters, adventure games and other genres were not given their shares of celebration and fandom. Each of us has our own personal set of milestone games that chronicled our adolescence during this era, and few games resonate quite as universally as Chrono Trigger.

While many games (particularly RPGs) are stories of already extraordinary figures like knights, mages and young heroes or heroines chosen by destiny to fulfill a prophecy, Chrono Trigger begins with a very average boy who has no dialogue or development of his own. He is a blank canvas upon which the player can impose his or her own thoughts, allowing them to interact with the world as though they were the main character. And while it’s easy to dismiss that as a standard affair in the age of Bethesda and BioWare, for console games in the mid-90s, it was quite a novel concept. Anyway, that ordinary boy finds himself in a quite extraordinary situation. He’s not up against dragons, great evil or a corrupt empire. He is up against all of those things, but ultimately, he is up against time itself, a charge that makes many “epic” adventure stories feel inconsequential by comparison.

Time is an enemy against which not many great heroes have been tested, and while Chrono Trigger has its fair share of villains (quite charming ones, I might add) for Crono and his cohorts to defeat, the greatest enemy they face is a much more intangible menace. Crono is fighting against a possible future where man hinges on extinction, and the seeds of this future have been planted millions of years before the game begins. Crono isn’t trying to right wrongs or seek vengeance, he is trying to make the inevitable evitable, to demonstrate that destiny is something proven only by history, and that with enough heart, with enough tenacity, and with a handful of devoted friends at your side, history can be changed.

What makes Chrono Trigger such a powerful experience, an experience that grips us in the deepest, most basic places of our humanity, is the separation it creates between what we expect to happen and what will happen. In most other RPGs of its day, the latter and the former might as well be the same thing, and often were. Chrono Trigger actively seeks to defy player expectations with almost calculating deviation.

Certainly, in other games, villains are set up and knocked down so that bigger ones can take their place. Not content with this, Chrono Trigger twists what we know about these villains and puts us in a position of almost uncomfortable empathy. In other games, the hero dies and it’s game over. In Chrono Trigger, the hero dies and his companions are thrown to the wind, forced to take up arms against the game’s main antagonist without a leader, or find a way to bring their companion back. Other games are content with a linear narrative with a defined beginning and end, where variables in between put up a smoke screen hiding the overarching simplicity. Chrono Trigger offers over a dozen possible conclusions and a second playthrough that can be as short or long as the player desires, with one possible end- taking place literally minutes after the player has gained control.

These elements alone are not what make Chrono Trigger great. Chrono Trigger is primarily a game of “how” rather than “what”. No, these elements are what make Chrono Trigger revolutionary, and in spite of what ideas may first pop into your head when you encounter the word “revolutionary”, history has proven that “revolutionary” and “great” are concepts that rarely coexist within the same event. Often, a revolution is an awkward first foray into unfamiliar territory. For Chrono Trigger to explore that unfamiliar territory as if it had lived there for years is a feat of such magnitude that no game may ever encroach upon its level of greatness again.