Chrono Trigger Retrospective

The editors over at Game Podunk bring us a thorough retrospective of Chrono Trigger, Square’s finest Super Nintendo title and arguably one of the best JRPGs ever created.

You play the game as mute protagonist Chrono, but you don’t always have to use him. As you gain more and more party members you can swap and change which ones you use whenever you want, including Chrono until you find the right mix for you. There’s only around six different characters, so the choice is limited but I’m sure you’ll all have unique tastes. Each character has a different fighting style and learns different ‘Techniques’, which are essentially different kinds of spells and fancy weapon attacks. As you progress, your characters will also learn ‘Double’ and ‘Triple’ techniques which allow them to combine their attacks in pretty nice fashion (the graphics are actually really good for the SNES era – just ignore the style of modern games and appreciate how good they were for the time). These combined attacks as well as looking very nice will inflict more damage (usually) on your opponents.

Speaking of opponents, the battle system in Chrono Trigger is pretty damn good. Enemies appear on screen, a la Final Fantasy XII, and there is no delay between the battle initiating from the field. When an enemy spots you the battle music simply kicks in, the HP bars and MP levels appear and you are in the midst of battle before you know it. The system using the traditional turn-based systems we’ve seen time and time again, letting you act when your ATB bar fills up enough. You will then choose to attacks, use your techniques or use weapons on your enemies. The thing is with this game is that each enemy generally has different weaknesses and resistances, meaning often you will have to tactically think about how to kill them rather than simply attacking relentlessly. For example, one boss is surrounded by five magical flames that you have to attack at random. Only one flame is the ‘real’ flame and damages the boss when you attack it, while the others prompt the boss to burn you up with a pretty damn nasty fire attack that will sap most of your health in an instant. Saving regularly to avoid imminent death is definitely recommended in this game. The challenging battles mean you won’t get sick of slogging through constant types on the same enemies and because the enemies are generally on the map (apart from a few ambushes) you often have the option to avoid enemies should you so desire it. Of course then you’re missing out on getting experience and money which you will need a lot in the game’s final stages unless you want to die a miserable death indeed, so I wouldn’t recommend avoiding too many of the enemies. Get stuck in there and fight them.