Did you ever wonder how cool it would be after finishing the game to tear through it with super-powered characters equipped with almost all the ultimate weapons just for the sake of killing Yakkra with one fucking hit? Here you can. I doubt it was even considered that the whole purpose of this feature was to kill Lavos at different points of the story to gain the endings. I just used New Game + to kill everything in sight and be a god in the game. The story at the time was THAT good. I didn’t mind having the challenge thrown out the window, not that CT is that challenging anyways.

Aside from basically starting a game where your stats and weapons left off at the end of your last one, New Game + added a feature like I said above: Kill Lavos when you felt like it. There was a gate at the Millennial Fair that could now be accessed that took you straight to Lavos. When you did take it was what gave you your ending.

Chrono Trigger had essentially one main ending with four variations. The variations were as follows:

Kill/don’t kill Magus

Use the Epoch to battle Lavos or do it another way

With every possibility a few things happen. If you killed Magus you’re treated to a scene where you see Frog in his human form as Glenn. If you went to Lavos in Epoch, the scene ends with Chrono and Marle flying away on balloons (aww). If you didn’t use the Epoch. Chrono’s Mom hops in a gate following the hungry cats and Lucca takes the group to find her.

I don’t know what was canonical in all this for Cross, but I know that Magus survived AND Frog got his human form back. Aside from those variations, the rest of the endings have no bearing on the story whatsoever and are humorous attempts to make you laugh, or failed lunacies that are downright silly and ruin the mood of the game. Heh heh, collect them all. Chrono’s one line in the whole game is spoken in one particular ending, and like I said in his character overview, everyone is absolutely shocked-which is actually pretty funny. This offered the game an insane amount of replay value. You could meet the development team if you took Lavos on right at the beginning of the game, you could see Guardia be descended from frogs if you went in after the first initial boss fight.

For most gamers though, we took this New Game + as a way to legally cheat. Since we didn’t enter codes and it was staring us right in the face, we didn’t mind starting the game up and tearing through it in 10 hours because beating up underleveled bosses was just that much fun The funny thing is as much as I played this game to death, it STILL hasn’t got old. I’ve probably played through this more times than anything else because the New Game+ and it’s pick up and play style just were easier than me sitting in my room for 8 hours power leveling characters to take on a boss.

Why every game didn’t have this feature? We may never know.

Criticism:

Chrono Trigger has gotten a large amount of criticism from gamers who started with the Playstation 1-onwards for being overrated. This is not unlike Final Fantasy VII getting bashed for being overrated by younger gamers as well. Most of the criticism stems from the way the game is unfairly compared to newer games

While it is my favorite game of all time, I can see where the arguments come from. When people started gaming after the FFVII boom, just about every gamer who heard about people liking RPG’s said stuff like, "Man you gotta play Trigger." So people did.

The problem was while older gamers were used to having stories full of fetch quests and branch off points, younger gamers were used to being coddled and having to go from point A to point A.

Case in point: Just about every gamer I know who tried Trigger after FFVII stopped playing during the Masamune quest. Understandably it’s one of CT’s weakest plot setups. It’s revealed that you need to stop Lavos. So you go to a cave where it’s revealed that Magus may have "created" Lavos (this turns out untrue much later). Magus is in 600 AD. So you go to 600 AD to kill Magus so you can stop Lavos. You meet up with Frog and learn that the only weapon capable of killing this Magus guy is the Masamune.

So you go to the mountains to get the Masamune so you can give it to Frog and kill Magus to stop Lavos. After getting the sword you find it’s broken but is engraved with Melchior-a blacksmith from 1000 AD’s name. So you go to Melchior in 1000 AD to fix the Masamune, to give it to Frog in 600 AD, and kill Magus to stop Lavos. Except, now you need a red rock that the sword is made from. Melchior says that it wasn’t available except for a long time ago. Since there’s a gate at The End of Time that leads to 65,000,000 BC, and it hasn’t been used yet, that must be where the red rock is. And so it goes on and on and on.

By now the story has branched off into like, five tiers and you have so much crap you have to get done just to get to the main plot it seems like a massive subquest. It’s almost as bad as clearing Bow’s name in Breath of Fire II...almost.

The difference between this fetch quest and many others in other RPG’s is that Chrono Trigger made you care. Not one objective was a waste. There was no repairing bridges or anything that really didn’t have purpose. The problem is, newer gamers didn’t like how this game, despite all it’s polish, was still old school. The Masamune quest is a good example of how following some things can be a pain if you’re not careful. It’s the same reason people bitched and moaned about Xenogear’s several sub-archs that made you forget the main story while you resolved the extra crap. By the time you got back to the main story, you forgot what the hell it was you were doing or why you were doing it in the first place. In many ways, it mirrors Horie's approach towards the Dragon Quest series - the overarching plot is pretty simple, but it's the individual stories, towns, characters and events that really make the game.

The last gripe is the challenge or lack thereof. No mistaking it, Chrono Trigger is a walk in the park. It seems that the developers just said "to hell with it" after killing Giga Gaia, because the game is incredibly easy. You can easily nearly hit max Hp/Mp without even having to go level up the ENTIRE game. The fact is with the games tech skills and combat, it was so deep for the time, that it didn’t need challenge. Actually, when I played the game years later at level 1 and not on a new game + I was wondering how hard it was, and it quite possibly is the easiest RPG I’ve ever played.

It didn’t help matters that your characters are overpowered. For instance, when Marle gets her advanced cure spell towards the end of the game, her magic power is so high that her medium cure spell can heal anyone that isn’t near death and bring them back to max hp. It made her best cure spell completely useless as I could just use the lower end one for less mp. But this doesn’t matter, CT is simply put, FUN TO PLAY!

You know, the reason we played video games to begin with.

Translation Differences:

Ted Woolsey got a lot of negative press for his translation of FFVI and Chrono Trigger, while I am not going to exactly praise his work for some inconsistencies, he actually didn’t really do a bad job.

Back in the 16-bit era, EVERYTHING was censored that Nintendo could get its hands on. The original Mortal Kombat fell victim to this, and RPGs with some adult situations were just shit on in that regard.

I played through CT on a fan translation to see if there was much of a difference, and oddly enough, I don’t see what everyone bitched about. Obviously any references to alchohol are gone (I think if they left it as sake like they do in the original no one would have noticed), some names are changed, and weapons are changed, but overall, Woolsey didn’t do a BAD job.

The only thing really different was the scene when you meet Ayla. In the American version, Ayla makes Crono drink "Jurassic Pork Soup" in order to get the red rock needed to fix the Masamune. Lucca is giving you crap for not drinking it in one gulp, everyone is dancing around...Alright, let’s just call it what it is: everyone’s getting piss-ass drunk. You aren’t drinking soup there, that’s sake. To get the red rock requires Crono to do a short mini game where you drink Ayla under the table. The next day you wake Ayla up in the middle of a hangover (and you are no exception) to get the gate key back. This was all tucked under the rug.

Other than that, death was now "Perish", kill was "Defeat", and so on. Overall it wasn’t BAD. It was the same experience I had playing through FFVI re-translated. I didn’t see what everyone was bitching about. The one thing I have to give Woolsey credit for is getting the Japanese out of the game.

Let’s put it this way, in Japan their humor is heavily based on puns. This is just about the equivalent of toilet humor here. Now would that go as funny here? No, probably not. So they changed some of that to suit our tastes. Ozzie and crew were known simply as rock stars rather than food because it’s the American equivalent of what they were going for with the Japanese names.

So play this game firmly assured, nothing really got left out, well besides that alcohol scene, but that is so minor, it isn’t worth getting an emulator and downloading the game to play. I’m not praising Woolsey, because there were some inconsistencies that annoyed me. But overall, he didn’t do a BAD job.

Aftermath

When Chrono Trigger’s time passed it became a relic. Once the advent of the internet consumed the world, it fetched 100+ prices on ebay, and many gamers considered it the password of video games. If anyone claimed to be a gamer, and said they loved Chrono Trigger-it meant they WEREN’T a poser.

It was the first device that brought people closer to artist Akira Toriyama. At the time Dragon Ball Z was still unknown in the US. I can’t speak for all gamers, but I initially watched DBZ because I remember how fricking cool Chrono was. In fact there are many stories about the height of DBZ’s popularity coming from people who played Chrono Trigger and thought it was a Chrono anime until figuring it out.

Of course with DBZ becoming a fad, and all these newer gamers post-FFVII wanting to see what the hub-bub was about, Square released a PS1 version as part of the Final Fantasy Chronicles package. The port however was pure crap. Visually, the games are identical. However, aside from identical screenshots, the games sound chip truly suffered. Of course that’s nothing compared to the worst thing of all: load times. These aren’t one second either, it can take up to 10 seconds to just load the status screen. Fights take a few seconds to load up as well, making a play through of Chrono Trigger a grudging experience. Oh yeah, much like a cold sore, the slow down just stays forever annoying you.

However, the port is worth picking up simply because Akira Toriyama did a number of animated scenes from the game, some of which set up its follow-up: Chrono Cross. It’s worth picking up of course if you have no desire to just quickly view them on Youtube. Like the Final Fantasy ports, there's also a monster database and other bonus stuff, along with a few new songs composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, in addition to improved versions of certain themes from the cutscenes. Still, it's not enough to make up for the technical faults.

The remake actually worth buying is a DS port released in late 2008. It contains the Anime cutscenes the PS1 version had, but also has two new dungeons: The Lost Sanctum and The Dimensional Vortex. While these may be nothing more than a gimmick to buy the DS version, for once after over a decade we have NEW Chrono Trigger Areas. It isn’t really that much of an addition, as if it takes you longer than a weekend to finish the additional areas - you’re doing something wrong.

You’ll probably go ga-ga with additions. "WOW" You’ll say. "Extra crap? I gotta go out and buy this right now". Then you put your 30 hours finishing the game, that’s when you realize how tedious it is, much like the Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI remakes on the GBA. Why should I be complaing though? It’s another Chrono area damnit! Chrono Trigger was one of those few games that after a decade you wanted to do "just one more task" before finishing the game.

The first area "The Lost Sanctum" is accessible in your first game as a side quest after you get Chrono back and after Lavos essentially shits on 12,000 BC. Next up is "The Dimensional Vortex". The job here is a set of areas resembling backgrounds you’ve seen before and sending you to kick some ass. There’s a few of these warps that when completed lead to a different boss fight with something called "The Dream Devourer", which further tie the story with Chrono Cross.

Finally, they added something called the "Arena of the Ages". Think of it as Pokemon Light. You take a monster, train it, and then make it go beat the snot out everybody else who did the same things. I have a feeling no one will think of you less for not participating in the fad JRPGs have now of monster training. It would've been nice if they'd stuck in the Singing Mountain, an area cut from the original game, whose remnants are still lying around the game code (and the excellent song still appears on the soundtrack), but nope.

Not to say no to peer pressure, the game also has use of the dual screen layout offering a map on one of the screens. Personally, I find a map next to useless as Chrono’s areas were so varied and easy to navigate, not to mention extremely short. In the original, you’d have to try pretty hard to get lost in this game. The map is still a welcome addition.

Aside from the dungeons and the arena (which all sound like afterthoughts), the port is spot on with no slowdown or sound problems. They even updated the translation quite a bit. While the Woolsley translation is pretty much kept, a good portion of the script just seems to have gone through a revision of sorts. Gone is that ridiculous Jurassic Pork Soup mini-game. In is what it should have been-hard A. For purists, there are still a few things different, but I think this is as close as we are going to get to the original Japanese spirit of the game.

After you factor in The Dream Project, and everything else, Chrono Trigger was just that - a fun game. It was the reason we played games to begin with. It was one of the last games I played where I wanted to play it, not because I felt like I had to play it or had to keep up with anything. Its sequel, Chrono Cross however, would be the reason why you don’t hand sequels over to the wrong people. Cross is the only example I can think of that’s a great game but a terrible sequel.