The first role-playing game I ever played -- console or otherwise -- was Final Fantasy VII. I know that in some circles, this is damning evidence of my lack of credibility and my unsuitability to speak with any kind of authority on the subject of video games. Well, yes and no.
One of the first RPGs I was ever made aware of (though I never played it) was Chrono Trigger, back on the Super NES. My friend Josh had rented it one weekend, and it sank its claws into him permanently. After a couple more rentals, his parents bought him the game. I think it became clear to them at some point that he would go on renting it, and renting it, and renting it until the total amount he spent on rentals would surpass the cost of the game itself.
Whenever I went over to his house, there was a fair chance that he would be playing it, trying for another ending or maybe just leveling up a few characters who were lagging behind. He offered me the controller once or twice and asked if I wanted to give it a shot. I quickly declined. It was completely unlike anything I'd ever played. The profusion of gauges, numbers and menus was more than I was used to dealing with. Now, of course, I know what all of those things mean without even having to look at a manual. But that's now. This was then, and then, "RPG" wasn't even a part of my gaming vocabulary.
Things have since changed.
I bought Chrono Trigger for the PS1 when it came out in the Final Fantasy Chronicles collection alongside Final Fantasy IV. I tinkered around with it a bit, but it didn't seem right to me. There was a feeling that it just wasn't "live" in a way I can't describe. It's the same feeling I got when I started playing Phantasy Star Online version 2.0 on the Dreamcast in 2002. Even though I wasn't ever playing it online, even though the game's servers were still live, it felt dead to me because I knew the system had been discontinued.
The knowledge of Chrono Trigger's quality has always been in the back of my mind. Listening to people talk about it, listening to OverClocked ReMixes of its music -- hell, listening to the original music -- it's a difficult phenomenon to escape. You can't be an RPG fan with any sense of history without hearing about the game at some point. So when the Nintendo DS version of the game was announced, I got pretty anxious for it.
A lot of the anticipation I felt was a result of my being part of a community of people who really, really like Chrono Trigger. They got excited about it, and the game felt "live" again. Then I got excited about it. I hope that makes some kind of sense.
When I finally started playing the game, I resolved to take my time with it, be thorough, and just enjoy it as much as I could.
The first thing -- one of the first things -- to really interest me about Chrono Trigger was its pacing and brevity.
Let me tell you something about brevity.
As I said before, the first traditional-style console RPG I ever played (in this sense, Crystalis, awesome as it is, doesn't count) was Final Fantasy VII. I had virtually no preconceived ideas of what made a good RPG or a bad one. I had no real ideas about what made an RPG, period. So, after about four or six or eight or however many hours it actually was after I started playing Final Fantasy VII (my memory's fuzzy; I understandably haven't replayed the game much since those early days), I finally stumbled out of Midgar and into the world at large, and my first thought was, "What the hell is this?"
"This" was actually a world map, which my weirdly sheltered gaming background had not familiarized me with. Every RPG has one, in some form. No other RPG on planet Earth (to the best of my knowledge) keeps you off of it for the first six or eight hours of the game. Not even later Final Fantasies; maybe Square learned their lesson.
Chrono Trigger, though... As soon as you step outside your house, there you are, walking around on the world map. And if you want to wander down to the southern continent before you head to the fair where the plot lies waiting, well, you just go right on ahead. But even with a little meandering, six to eight hours into Chrono Trigger is some serious advancement, hurtling toward the halfway point. I know my enemy, where he is, where he comes from, what he's doing, and I'm beginning to get ideas as to how I can beat him. That same amount of time into Final Fantasy VII, I couldn't really answer any of those questions, and I'd barely been anywhere in the world outside of Midgar.
The fact that I can play Chrono Trigger for even just a single hour and actually accomplish something with it is pretty amazing to me. I knew, intellectually, that a lot of RPGs from the 8-bit and 16-bit era tended to be shorter and less bloated than later-era games of the genre. But I didn't really understand how that felt until I picked up Chrono Trigger and started playing it seriously.
I could write about the technical aspects of the game, but there's not much point in that. It was originally a Super NES game, and it was probably one of the absolute best-looking available on that system. It made use of that system's resources in a lot of different ways, and it still holds up very well today. The graphics still look detailed and vibrant, and if the sprite animation seems a little stiff occasionally, well, this is an RPG, after all.
Likewise, the music also deserves mention for aging gracefully. It says something that I listen to the soundtrack from the original game right alongside everything else in my playlist. As much as that says about the Super NES soundchip, it probably says even more about the strength of Yasunori Mitsuda's composition.
The story is also decent, blending epic fantasy with a time-travel theme (usually pretty strictly in the realm of science fiction), and the game’s quick pace keeps the story engaging. You are always doing something, always on the way to something important and momentous. You don’t spend hours resolving characters’ deep-seated and personal neuroses.
It’s so refreshing to have a mentally balanced cast of characters.
Perhaps the one issue people may have with the DS re-release of Chrono Trigger is the new translation. The original version of Chrono Trigger is somewhat infamous for its translation, courtesy of Ted Woolsey, who is much (and unfairly) maligned for his work on the game.
There is a certain group of people out there -- we’ll call them “fanbrats,” although “idiots” is probably equally applicable -- who seem to begrudge the necessity of translating a game out of its native Japanese, as if to do so is a violation of the game’s artistic integrity, a compromise of its vision. If such a crime must be committed, the translation should be absolutely literal, straight from the Japanese, altered only so much as to adhere to some basic standard of coherence. Any attempt to inject flavor or style into the translation is viewed as some kind of unholy sin against the creators of the game, and if the fanbrats could petition hell to set up an entirely new circle just for video game translators, you can bet they’d do it.
To these people, Woolsey would be their anti-Christ, their Great Beast 666. (Satan would be Working Designs’ Victor Ireland, I’m sure).
According to the lore, Woolsey was given only 30 days to write the English script for Chrono Trigger. Obviously, the video game industry took itself and its products a lot less seriously back then. Still, Woolsey did the best he could manage, and the time limit wasn’t his only obstacle. Despite all this, he delivered. And considering all the difficulties, the result is actually sort of brilliant. Oh, it’s full of anachronisms, and a little bit silly in places, but it has flavor. It has style. It’s fun.
The idiots – sorry, where are my manners? – the fanbrats at the Chrono Trigger Re-translation Project (to which I will not link, because seriously, fuck those guys; you can Google it if you want) of course cry foul. Woolsey tampered with the original intent, the deep meaning of Chrono Trigger, which as we all know is sacrosanct.
You want examples? Here’s one: Magus’s three primary henchmen were named after condiments in Japan -- vinegar, mayonnaise and soy sauce -- but Woolsey renamed them, respectively, as Ozzie, Flea and Slash. This is what’s known as “drastic improvement.” It’s objectively better. You can prove it with science.
But as good as it is, no matter how you look at it, Woolsey’s translation is a product less of opportunity than of difficulty. It is good despite limitations. The DS re-release is obviously the perfect opportunity to take the time and care that the game deserved. It’s also an opportunity to change a few item and technique names to fit the continuity that the sequel, Chrono Cross, established. The new translation is in the style of many recent Square-Enix translations, which is to say that it is well-polished, and has good style. So I like it for that reason right there, and that would be just fine on its own.
I also like it because although it is very definitely a non-Woolsey translation, it still incorporates more than a few Woolsey-isms. Magus’s henchmen are still Ozzie, Flea and Slash, just to name one. And that means that the fanbrats are still going to be howling over it, and the thought of fanbrats getting self-righteously up-in-arms about pretty much anything makes me smile. It helps me sleep at night.
And even if you assumed that the fanbrats comprised a substantial group of the game’s fans (they don’t), something tells me that Chrono Trigger is a strong enough product to weather the storm of intense but ultimately impotent nerd rage.
As a DS port, of course, Square felt obligated to add a few improvements to take advantage of the newer hardware. Also to justify the Square-Enix tax.
For one thing, you have the option of using the touchscreen for all your menu diving, including battle menus. This is actually sort of nice. While the battle menus were never a big distraction in the original version of the game, playing on a smaller screen means that every pixel counts. The luxury of not having to deal with menus framing the already-small screen is a welcome use of the DS’s abilities. This new version of Chrono Trigger also features the anime cutscenes that were added to the PS1 port of the game. The bad news is that as soon as the cutscene finishes playing, the game then launches into its in-engine depiction of the same events, which is just a bit redundant. The good news is that the anime scenes are completely optional. You can turn them off at any time. I might wish for the ability to keep the cutscenes turned on and turn off the in-engine portrayals of those events, but that’s probably asking for a bit much.
Is Chrono Trigger perfect? No. No game is. But it doesn’t matter, because despite some minor imperfections, there is nothing that I would consider a deep flaw. There are no deal-breakers, in other words. I’m not a big fan of Akira Toriyama’s drawing style; it’s not horrible, it’s just not to my tastes. Yet even this is sort of nitpicking. The sprites are reduced enough from Toriyama’s original character design work that the hallmarks of his style are largely absent.
Long story short: This game earns my glowing commendation, and you should go out and play it if you haven’t already.
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