I have to admit — when my daughter brought up Chrono Trigger back in 2011, I didn’t really see it as anything more than another old-school game that I’d probably never get around to playing. I was still getting used to the idea that 16-bit graphics weren’t terrible, thanks to my obsession with Super Metroid, which I got hooked on a year prior to Chrono Trigger. She kept mentioning it, kept telling me that it was different (she’d say “Dad, this one’s got time travel that actually works”), and that “the music will make you cry.” I was skeptical – a video game was going to make a 42-year-old construction foreman cry?
But I guess she was right about the crying part.
Finally, I bought a copy at a retro game shop in Denver — paid way too much for it, probably $50 for a loose cartridge, but the guy behind the counter looked at me knowingly when I told him that it was my first time playing it. “Man,” he said, “I wish I could play this again for the first time.” I get that a lot when I tell people that I’m experiencing classic games for the first time. However, there was something about the way he said it that made me think that this one might be special.
A few weeks later, I booted it up on the SNES I had bought a few months prior. Those opening notes started – this hauntingly beautiful melody that was both nostalgic and mysterious – and I immediately knew that this wouldn’t be like the other RPGs I had been playing. I had struggled through parts of Final Fantasy VI – it was okay, but I found it too slow, and the random battles kept breaking up the flow of the game. But Chrono Trigger had a hold of me from the very beginning and wouldn’t let go for the next 40 hours when I saw the credits roll.
First of all, the time travel aspect of the game was what really caught my attention. I’m a hands-on guy – I build things for a living, I understand cause and effect, I know that if you don’t build a solid foundation that the rest of the project will fall apart. So when a game shows me that planting a seed in 12,000 BC will create a forest in 1000 AD that I can use to find treasure, that’s the kind of logic that my mind understands. It isn’t just “magic portal to a different level” – it’s real time travel with actual rules that apply.
However, what really blew me away was that the game never patronized me or treated me like a baby. I had assumed that these older RPGs would seem dated and primitive in comparison to the newer RPGs, but Chrono Trigger seemed incredibly advanced in some ways. The battle system was an incredible balance of strategy and action – characters moved around the battle field, combinations of attacks required timing, enemies had actual positions and weaknesses. I had never played a turn-based RPG before, so I figured I would hate the combat. But I found myself looking forward to battles simply to figure out what new combination attacks I could come up with.
And the characters… wow. I wasn’t expecting to become emotionally attached to these pixelated humans, but I did. Frog quickly became my favorite – the cursed knight with his dignified speech, searching for redemption for his previous failures. Since I’ve also made plenty of mistakes throughout the years, I was able to relate to Glenn’s journey and the emotional impact of the scene where he ultimately decides whether to seek vengeance for the death of his brother, Cyrus, or to do what is morally correct. The scene where he does this has a lot of depth and emotion – for a 16-bit game, this is a serious and powerful moment.
Then there is Robo – a robot that spends 400 years alone in a desolate future, slowly wasting away, yet still finds the courage to remain optimistic. When Robo speaks about learning human emotions, I expected it to be cheesy science fiction. But instead, it becomes a poignant exploration of what it means to find a purpose, what it means to care for others regardless of your differences from them. Hell, the scene where you find Robo after he has spent centuries reforested the earth with nothing but his own two hands, almost broke me.
I also need to talk about the music because…. Oh boy. I spend all day on a job site building things. I am surrounded by noise – machinery, yelling, the usual chaos of a job site. At the end of the day, I usually want to be quiet. However, I found myself leaving the game running just to listen to the soundtrack. There is a track called “Wind Scene” that plays when you’re in the middle ages, and it’s just….. peaceful. It made me understand why people buy their video game soundtracks on vinyl, something I never thought I would understand.
Each time period in the game was also done extremely well. Each area felt completely different, had its own unique personality, issues, and art style. You have the prehistoric era with tribal conflicts and dinosaurs. You have the dark ages with knights, castles, and magic. And then you have the post-apocalyptic future where machines have destroyed everything and everyone is dead. While most games, when they do time travel, use the same level design with different textures, Chrono Trigger made each time period feel like a separate world with its own set of rules and culture.
That post-apocalyptic future in 2300 AD was especially well-done. Seeing what humanity was left with after being destroyed by an alien invasion was a sobering sight. Understanding that this is what you’re fighting against…. it gave everything you were doing some real weight. This wasn’t just “rescue the princess” or “get the magical item” – this was “stop the destruction of humanity.”
Lavos, the main villain of the game, freaked me out in a way I hadn’t expected for a Super Nintendo game. He’s a parasitic alien that crashes onto planets, burrows beneath them, consumes everything he learns about the planet and its technological advancements, and then comes out of the ground to destroy everything before sending his offspring to continue the process in different locations. That’s straight-up creepy cosmic horror – the idea that Earth is just one stop on this creature’s breeding cycle. Once I learned about Lavos, I viewed the entire game differently – every time period you visit, Lavos is already there, under everything else, manipulating the course of events from beneath.
Most impressive, however, was how the game respected my time and intellect. No random battles interrupted my exploration. No grinding was necessary to advance the game. The multiple endings that actually changed depending on my actions and when I decided to fight the final boss. The New Game Plus mode allowed me to take my characters’ progress into subsequent playthroughs to see the effects of different story paths. These were innovations that solved problems I didn’t realise existed in RPGs until I played ones that didn’t.
I ended up playing through Chrono Trigger four times that first year, seeing different endings, making different decisions, finding new lines of dialogue and interactions between the characters. Each playthrough revealed additional detail I hadn’t discovered previously. The game was full of content but never felt bloated or unnecessary.
When I finished it for the first time, I called my daughter. “So?” she asked with excitement in her voice. “Yeah,” I said, “you were right. It’s special.” We spent an hour on the phone discussing our favorite characters, favorite moments, comparing notes on which ending we thought was the canonical ending. It became one of our common references, something we could bond over despite the difference in our generations.
Since then, I’ve played other time-travel RPGs, other classic Japanese RPGs that people say are must-plays. Some of them are excellent. But none of them have achieved that rare “Chrono Trigger” type of collaboration – the combination of Akira Toriyama’s artwork, Yasunori Mitsuda’s music, and the writing that seems to work together perfectly.
I’ve purchased Chrono Trigger on several platforms since then — DS, mobile, Steam. Each platform has its own quirks, but the core experience remains strong. I play it now on my phone during my lunch break at the job site, watch Crono and friends go on adventures through time while I sit in my truck eating a sandwich – it’s always surreal. But that music still gets me, those moments involving the characters still hit me hard, and the time travel still seems clever and logical.
Sometimes people ask me if Chrono Trigger still holds up for someone that doesn’t have nostalgia for the game, if it is indeed as good as its reputation implies or if it is just a product of childlike memories. I can confidently say that it is the former. This is a true masterpiece that transcends the time period in which it was created. It proves that with enough talent and imagination, you can create something that will stand the test of time — fitting for a game about time.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
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