Among gamers, there’s constant debate about what is the best game of all time. There are plenty of great contenders and though the answer is ultimately subjective, for me there’s only one answer. Chrono Trigger is the best video game ever made.
Don’t believe it? Fear not. I traveled all the way from 65,000 BC to the End of time to bring the receipts. Now, go grab some jerky (or just a quick trip to the Enertron), and let me tell you why Chrono Trigger is the best title in video game history!
Chrono Trigger
A classic JRPG by the makers of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragon Ball.
The End Is Only the Beginning
Why do fans keep replaying Chrono Trigger decades after its 1995 release? One reason is that the game features multiple endings. There are 12 different endings in the original game that are affected by exactly when you defeat Lavos, the game’s Big Bad.
Normally, it would be impossible to take out a game’s final boss before you get to the end of the game. However, Chrono Trigger features an awesome New Game+ feature that lets you start a new playthrough while retaining your level, magic, and the vast majority of your items. For completists who want to experience every ending, this killer feature encourages multiple playthroughs. For others who just want to experience the game’s groundbreaking story again, New Game+ allows them to play through as a sightseeing tourist without worrying about facing any real challenge.
Some endings are, of course, better than others. But for a game of its era, it’s impossibly cool that Chrono Trigger had so many ways to win and so many endings that revealed more about these characters and this world. And for those who love Chrono Cross (it’s not just me, right?), you can always snag the Nintendo DS version, which adds a 13th ending to Chrono Trigger to canonically set up the original game’s controversial sequel.
Small Choices, Huge Payoffs
Sometimes, it’s hard for new audiences to appreciate the little things that make Chrono Trigger so great. For example, this SNES classic was filled with tiny choices that unexpectedly led to major payoffs later in the game. Whether or not you lead someone’s cat back to its owner, for example, may decide your fate in a tense courtroom scene. Whether you can find a hidden code will determine whether your best friend’s mother stays crippled, and whether you gain a powerful new ally will be determined by whether you decide to kill him for his many crimes.
These days, those kinds of cause-and-effect situations are quite common in RPGs. In fact, you could argue that Bioware really led the way in normalizing this feature with titles like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, and the popularity of those games is why countless modern RPGs make players face the major consequences of the most minor actions.
Back when the SNES reigned supreme, RPGs were far more limited. Even flagship franchises like Final Fantasy didn’t have this level of immersion! But courtesy of Squaresoft’s “Dream Team,” Chrono Trigger delivered gameplay that was quite literally years ahead of its time.
But what else would you expect from a title that’s all about time travel?
The Dream Team’s Greatest Creation
A video game is ultimately only as good as the team making it. That seems obvious enough, but it can be difficult to keep track of the many artists and designers behind our favorite titles. Accordingly, gamers typically pay attention to the big names behind a game, like Hideo Kojima. With Chrono Trigger, there were several big names involved that made gamers stand up and notice. Even Squaresoft knew how important these creators were, which is why they were internally dubbed “The Dream Team.”
One of the biggest names in the Dream Team included Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man who created Final Fantasy. The team also included Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest. The Dream Team’s artistic ace in the hole was Akira Toriyama, who did character designs for Dragon Quest. Of course, he’s much more famous among nerds for creating Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, the latter of which led the charge in making anime mainstream back in the late ‘90s.
Frankly, the mind boggles at how much collective talent went into Chrono Trigger. The modern equivalent would be an RPG created by an equally eclectic team like Gabe Newell, Toby Fox, and Shigeru Miyamoto. These days, such a collaboration seems completely impossible. Back in the ‘90s, though, Squaresoft brought very distinct talents together to create the greatest game any of them would ever make.
If you want to thank them personally (sort of), be sure to go for the Dream Team ending next time you play New Game+!
A New Way To Fight
When Chrono Trigger came out, series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest had already set our expectations for combat. Generally speaking, players wandered around overworld maps trying to get from Point A to Point B. This would trigger random battles, ones that often became an annoying slog unless you were just trying to grind levels. However, Chrono Trigger did things a little differently, which is one reason it’s a great RPG for people who don’t like RPGs.
In this game, wandering the overworld doesn’t trigger any random battles. Instead, you can see enemies onscreen whenever you navigate dungeons and other combat zones. Typically, these monsters won’t attack you unless you get close, which gives players the chance to change up gear ahead of a nasty fight or possibly avoid it altogether. Making combat even more exciting was that this game featured an Active Battle Time system that made fights feel much more kinetic and dynamic than the standard turn-based battles.
Now, Chrono Trigger didn’t invent either of these things. The Legend of Zelda featured onscreen enemies and no random battles, for example, while the Final Fantasy franchise originally introduced Active Time Battle. But Chrono Trigger refined each feature, making every combat feel like a frantic fight for survival. And that’s simply much more exciting than watching two groups politely waiting for their turn to hit each other!
A Soundtrack for the Ages
Let’s get one thing straight: Chrono Trigger doesn’t just have “good” soundtrack. It has one of the greatest soundtracks in all of video game history. The music perfectly complements the game’s story and action, but it also sounds great on its own. These are the kinds of tunes that you can put on when you need to study, write, or just vibe out, and even the remixes are complete bangers. The best remix was The Brink of Time, and it comes to us courtesy of Chrono Trigger composer Yasunori Mitsuda.
It’s obviously a major cliche to say that a creator put their heart and soul into a game. In Mitsuda’s case, though, we do know one thing for sure: he put his career and his health on the line to create this killer soundtrack. At the time, he was a low-paid sound engineer for SquareSoft and decided to do something about it, telling then-VP Hironobu Sakaguchi that if he didn’t get to compose a game, he would quit. Sakaguchi assigned Mitsuda Chrono Trigger, telling the younger man that he might be able to improve his salary by working on this game.
In turn, Mitsuda took his job seriously. A little too seriously, really: he’d work on tracks until he passed out and then spend his dream time composing new tracks. Eventually, he was hospitalized because the stress of composing gave him stomach ulcers. That’s why Nobuo Uematsu had to help finish some tracks, but Mitsuda deserves credit for creating 54 unforgettable songs for Chrono Trigger.
Just like that, he went from being an unknown sound engineer to one of the most beloved video game composers in the entire world!
Iconic Art Design
A big part of what makes Chrono Trigger so memorable is the iconic art design. The game’s characters were designed by Akira Toriyama, best known for creating Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Admittedly, it can be pretty distracting once you notice that the main character Crono looks exactly like Goku with red hair. For the most part, though, having the man who made DBZ create its art designs helped Chrono Trigger appeal to a Western audience that was starting to discover how cool anime could be.
Toriyama’s designs are so good, in fact, that they effectively redeemed one of Chrono Trigger’s more controversial re-releases. While the original game came out on the SNES, it was eventually ported to the PlayStation. Unfortunately, the disc-based port featured nasty load times and persistent slowdown during battles. These annoyances added up, tempting frustrated players to walk away from this port altogether.
But that port’s secret weapon was the anime cutscenes that were added to it. These were animated by Toriyami’s own studio and added some awesome production value to an otherwise perfect game. Later, those cutscenes were included in the Nintendo DS and Steam ports, allowing gamers to enjoy all the flashy animation without any of the annoying slowdown.
Related
Impossibly High Stakes
Part of why I love Chrono Trigger so much is that the game presents incredibly high stakes. Your characters are fighting a creature that has presumably fed off countless worlds and may eventually feed off countless more. Therefore, defeating this creature will do more than save the entire planet. It might just save trillions of lives that the evil Lavos would otherwise destroy.
These high stakes appealed to me as a kid, especially when most RPGs were simply about stopping would-be dictators or weird monsters. Plus, I loved the charming way that our characters experience their call to adventure. At first, they treat traveling through time as a kind of game, but they eventually land in a post-apocalyptic future. Thanks to an archival video recording, they watch Lavos emerge and begin laying waste to the entire planet.
Suddenly, the math is clear: they know when the world ends, and they know who causes it. This revelation is one of many reasons why this is one of the games I wish I could play for the first time again. And, of course, they are time travelers who have a chance to prevent the apocalypse, meaning they have a moral responsibility to save the past, present, and future. In this way, Chrono Trigger borrows from titanic sci-fi franchises like Doctor Who and Star Trek to create the kinds of high-stakes story that will stick with every player until, well, the End of Time!
If you want to revisit Chrono Trigger or maybe play it for the first time, you don’t have to dust off your old SNES or track down a copy for your Nintendo DS. The game is now available on Steam, complete with (rather inexplicably) ultra-wide support. No matter the aspect ratio, though, trust me when I say this title remains the best game ever made.
Chrono Trigger
- Released
- March 11, 1995
- ESRB
- T for Teen: Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood
- Developer(s)
- Square Enix
- Publisher(s)
- Square Enix
