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Chrono Trigger is one of those games you can play just for the music.
That was me with SimCity 4. xD
and SimCity 3000 and SimCity 2000 (Macintosh)
Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross and Xenogears are the holy trinity of JRPGs for me. Every fan of the genre should play them at least once in their lives.
Played it again for like the 10th time on like the 5th system I have it on it and it absolutely holds up. This time around it was the OG SNES on a Steam Deck. The original cartridge, box, instructions and everything are in a box in the basement, but that cartridge has been across the country and back with me every since I bought it through a mail order company that had its ads in EGM.
Chrono Trigger is damn near perfect. The closest I’ve gotten to reliving that game in my adult life is Sea of Stars, which I also highly recommend as it is very clearly inspired by CT.
I don’t know if you’ve tried crosscode, and its been a (long) while since iv3 played chrono trigger, but from what i remember of playing it they gave me very much the same vibes, and i was totally blown away by crosscode. Most fun ive had playing a game in a long time, with a surprisingly engaging story.
CrossCode was SO good! It’s a great game and I’m always thrilled when I find others that played it.
Did you know its studio, Radical Fish, has another game coming?
I have never played Chrono Trigger, but I am currently spending some time playing old classic games. However, some games don’t age well and are mostly appreciated due to nostalgia. How easy is Chrono Trigger to get into for someone without the nostalgia, and is the Steam release worth playing?
If you’ve played and enjoyed any 2D JRPG, you’ll be fine here.
There are a lot of JRPGs from this era that I love dearly but would have a hard time recommending to anyone who didn’t grow up on these kinds of games. Games that are slow, grindy, and mostly consist of clicking Attack every turn.
Chrono Trigger is the one exception I can recommend to anyone, and then say that if you liked this entry point then you can try some other JRPG classics.
Just note that the original SNES translation should be avoided, play a modern rerelease or a retranslation patch.
But Ted Woolsey’s original SNES translation is gold for what it is. Remember that he did the whole thing basically by himself and had to get extremely creative to cram the script into the ROM space since English text takes up more characters than Japanese, while also avoiding NoA’s insane censorship rules at the time.
I respect the hell out of him for doing the best he could with very limited resources, difficult technical limitations, and an insane deadline. I just can’t recommend playing that version today over a better alternative.
I love Woolsey but have never played Chrono Trigger. Is there a mashup “best of both worlds” version out there that adds the best Woolsey-isms to the longer script version, like the Woolsey Uncensored for FF VI?
CT doesn’t feel quite as wacky as Woolsey’s earlier scripts–the lighter tone of the game helps with that–and most of the problem with the original stems from Nintendo of America’s censorship and a handful of localization choices that won’t land with everyone (for example, a main character speaks like Cyan).
Unless you hated the FF6 revision in the GBA games or later, I’d say the DS or PC versions of Chrono Trigger do what you’re looking for by revising but not completely rewriting the original.
CT is one of the all time great JRPGs… if you put the effort in.
But it is very much a product of its time between missable party members and even mechanics that penalize you for opening treasure chests too soon.
Conceptually it is cool as hell that there is something like five or six main endings and then a bunch of variants and special/joke endings. But… this is a 20-30 hour JRPG and ain’t nobody got that much time. Although, different re-releases have helped speed those up.
All in all? The big set piece moments are some of the greatest in gaming. The moment to moment are… from the early 90s. I would probably recommend grabbing a totally legit dump of your SNES cartridge, playing until you get bored/annoyed, and then watching a lore video.
Missable party members? 5~ endings?
Is this really in Chrono Trigger?
There is an optional party member that you can either recruit or fight based on which dialogue option you pick. You’ll know it when you see it though, so it’s easy to make the right choice.
There are 12 endings (13 in DS and subsequent rereleases). You can easily see all of them in just two playthroughs. Theoretically you could even do them all on the first playthrough, but it’s much easier to do in NG+.
The only caveat is that you have to see them in order, you can’t backtrack if you miss one, which is why I recommend starting with the final and true ending on your first playthrough, then do all the others on NG+. NG+ makes it pretty easy to speed through things as well, your second playthrough will be much shorter.
There is also one (three?) party members that you can potentially lose due to story related reasons and not recover before endgame.
And yeah. With a guide and some save scumming you can definitely optimize your routes. But that also kind of defeats the purpose of “enjoying” the game, at least to me.
The character that leaves and rejoins the party is not permanently missable. It might be tricky to figure out how to get them back, but there’s no fail state.
You can and should do the first playthrough blind. Save the guide for NG+.
I don’t have nostalgia for the game, tried it a few years ago but bounced off. Not sure why, just wasn’t in the mood for a HRPG at the time I guess.
I recently gave it another go, been playing it on my Steam Deck and it’s been great. I’m a few hours into it in the future currently and I think it’ll stick this time, it’s great.
Only thing is the game feels like it was really made with CRT behavior in mind. Like the game has some amazing shading and almost 3D depth to a lot of the art but without CRT shaders you don’t see it at all. If you play the Steam version, reshade goes a long way. I’m using a combination of CRT-frutbuhn, EasymodeCRT, and vibrance and it looks amazing.
Edit: quick comparison with default look vs. with shaders:
I will say, the longer I look at that, the less confident I am that there is any difference at all, lol.
I made a post about the shader I’m using on the Steam Deck with an album of screenshots hosted outside of Lemmy upload (on Lensdump) and seems to be better, I think Lemmy is doing something to the image with compression.
https://lemmy.world/post/26996470
If you only care about the comparison shots:
Yeah, it looks a bit different on my Steam deck and TV, maybe because they’re OLED displays. It doesn’t come across as dramatic as it is in person on the screenshot. In person there’s more bloom and higher contrast, the characters look more… planted in the world, I guess is the best way to explain it.
Like, if you look at the rounded parts of the big robot there’s a bit more depth and contrast that give it more rounding and image depth in shadows, but again, the screenshot isn’t doing the effect justice.
Also, the still image doesn’t help because the shader also impacts how the game looks in motion.
I took the screenshots on my Steam Deck, but hadn’t actually seen them until I uploaded here.
At this point it’s one of those things that comes down to taste rather than authenticity. Pixel-art games have continued on and had their own development arc between indie gaming and the remastering trend, and they’ve all had different approaches to it. Even people like me that grew up with CRT displays have had their tastes shaped by years of gaming on different tech.
I haven’t gotten my hands on a CRT since I left my last one behind 15-ish years ago, but I do get a bit of a nostalgia buzz from the CRT-Royale package on a 4K display. When that’s not available I tend to use one of the scalers because I really don’t like aliasing, and high resolution displays really bring out the blockiness. That sort of thing is sacrilege to some people. Everyone’s a little different.
I grabbed some more comparisons, this time from my tablet using the CRT-Consumer shader. Notice stuff like the bloom from the window and shading around the curtains, the kitchen appliances and plants, general shading around dithered stuff like the tent, and the trees on the world map.
Also these are best viewed on a larger screen, it’s hard to see the difference on a phone.
Most of those look worse in the bottom pictures tbh. A couple of the top ones look a little too bright and washed out, but the bottom ones just look low contrast and dark.
To each their own. The ones with the shader are closer to what it looked like on a CRT (minus some extra bloom and color bleed if using composite or RF).
Edit - I made a post about the shaders I’m using on the Steam Deck with an album of screenshots hosted outside of Lemmy upload (on Lensdump) and seems to be better, I think Lemmy is doing something to the image with compression.
https://lemmy.world/post/26996470
If you only care about the comparison shots:
IIRC, the steam release is based on a mobile port, and it’s bad. Maybe they fixed it since release, but I dunno.
PSX version added some anime cutscenes, which are nice. Problem is that loading times are horrible and happen as part of every battle.
I seem to remember the DS version being recommended. Otherwise, the SNES version is always good to find on the high seas.
It’s more approachable than most RPGs from the era. It has no random battles, and tends to avoid situations where you advance a character wrong and soft lock yourself. More hardcore RPG fans find it too easy, but it’s a classic for a reason.
The PC port is based on the mobile port, and at release it was trash. However, they have patched out all of the mobile garbage and it’s a lot better.
IIRC, the steam release is based on a mobile port, and it’s bad. Maybe they fixed it since release, but I dunno.
I think I remember seeing an article or post somewhere comparing all the versions of Chrono Trigger.
kagis
This might have been it:
https://geektogeekmedia.com/geekery/video-games/best-version-of-chrono-trigger/
I am about to “finish it” and I haven’t played it in one sitting for sure, I have done some pauses for months here and then and when I go back to it I always find myself lost in their objectives.
One thing I can say I don’t like, and it must be a very personal issue, is that the game work “kinda open” with not clear objectives of where you should head off then, which just increases my sense of loss.
I suppose many games of those days worked like that (like not having pointers in a map of where to go) but I just couldn’t… And if you add the secondary missions to it that involves time traveling it all just gets more confusing for me.
I am aware the game has quite good post game content, so I hope I do my best there…
In a nutshell I think this game does well for people that know it at 100% (as in, their favorite nostalgic game) but for newcomers you’ll get lost and need a guide at hand, especially if you want to enjoy it at “its fullest” doing all the secondary quests available, that is my personal experience though.
It’s tough because I’m sure people that grew up playing games with map markers could certainly get lost in it, but at the same time Chrono Trigger is one of the most straight-forward games of its era/genre. There are JRPGs that came out two generations later that had a real rough time with the “find the NPC to advance the story” problem.
Depending on the version you’re playing, the post game content isn’t quite as sharp as the original stuff (it was added years later by a different team). The New Game+ mode, on the other hand, was in the original and is good stuff.
I am definitely not one of those who grew up playing game with markers though (I am 32 years old and that’s why I specified it must be a me problem 🤣).
I am playing the DS version which seems to be the definitive version, even to this day.
Getting the full experience from Chrono Trigger specifically, unlike most other similar games, is getting all of the endings. The New Game+ mode will help there.
Chrono Trigger has 18 endings, if I recall correctly, including various permutations. Plus one additional one in the rereleases from the DS version forward. Some of them are only very subtly different from each other depending on which combination of character side quests you fully completed, and they all vary depending at which point your manage to defeat the final boss in the main story sequence. Several of them are significantly different interpretations of the future (or the past) post the defeat of the final boss with various for-want-of-a-nail factors causing huge changes to the outcome.
You have quite a few opportunities to fight the final boss up to and including immediately after discovering the first time gate all the way back at the beginning of the game. (Do that in New Game+ with an overpowered Crono, though, unless you want to get steamrolled instantly…)
I played it for the first time about 10 years ago on a SNES emulator (because it kept on popping up in “best game of all time” lists), and I wasn’t disappointed. Well, I don’t think it is the best game ever, but I really enjoyed it, so I don’t think it’s a game that’s propped up only by nostalgia.
I’d kind of like to see someone review retro games on a “equal standing” with current games. That is, sure, they’re using old technology, sure, but see how they stand up to current games in terms of what you pay and the time investment in playing them.
While I remember having fun with Chrono Trigger, I don’t know if, in 2025, I’d recommend it or any older RPG to someone who has never played them. By the standards of its time, it wasn’t very grindy, but speaking broadly, older RPGs have a lot of repetitive combat.
On the other hand, a lot of, say, older shmups are, I think, still competitive. I don’t feel like the genre has changed as much (though I’ll concede that I haven’t spent a lot of time on modern shmups). So I’d probably be more-inclined to recommend an older shmup, even though I’d say that Chrono Trigger was probably, in its time, a better Super Nintendo game than any Super Nintendo shmup.
EDIT: For an extreme example, I think I first played Tetris on a Game Boy around 1990. I think that that’s probably still about on-par with the 2018 Tetris Effect: Connected with a VR headset. The thirty intervening years haven’t really seen that much change in the fundamentals of falling-block games.
Part of what’s nice about the game is that it’s pretty breezy and no grinding required. As long as you don’t reel at the thought of turn-based combat it’s very low barrier to entry.
If you do play it, the best version I believe is the DS version.
I played it back in the day shortly before FF3/6. Man it blew me away with it’s size and scope. I don’t think I ever played anything so large. Not to mention the amazing music. Also I loved the concept of time travel, especially after having watched back to the future around that time. That just made the game appeal to me even more.
I had played games like illusion of Gaia, and a bunch of other Enix RPGs. They couldn’t compare.
I have never played Chrono Trigger
So, are you one of those guys who denies themselves pleasure?
Chrono Trigger Is Timeless
I see what you did there.
It sure is. It’s my favorite game of all time. The story, art, gameplay, music which in my opinion are perfect in their own respect, all come together in such perfect harmony as to be greater than the sum of their parts.
I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. It’s an indisputable masterpiece.
For anyone interested, Chrono Trigger is part of the Steam Spring sale for just $3.74. It’s absolutely worth that price.
I played it during an internet outage in 1999 - no walkthroughs, no strategy guides, no reviews.
I went into the game entirely blind, without having an iota of what it was.
I thought it was a generic JRPG and Final Fantasy knockoff like every other SNES rom I’d tried before getting to it, but boy was I wrong.
