Chrono Trigger – Zero Punctuation

Is it so hard to believe we want the chonky pixel resolution to be consistent like the original? “Oh don’t be silly Yahtz, obviously you want all the interface text in teeny weeny vision in case the ants on your office floor want to get involved.” Yeah, I should probably pick up that toffee apple. The Steam version also has a few full on anime cutscenes for a couple of very arbitrarily chosen action sequences, a holdover I assume from some port or other, maybe for the PS1 or some long forgotten failed early 32-bit system that used discs the size of 18 wheeler hubcaps, and it’s always an awkward lurch when the Dragonball Z episode ends and we hard cut back to the characters doing the exact same thing again but in artfully fudged Mode 7 SNES pixels where everyone’s only got two expressions: neutral and surprised. And slapping their bum. Actually that’s not true, I can’t rip on Chrono Trigger for its pixel art because it’s actually one of the better looking 16 bit games, and as much as that sounds like saying “it’s very architecturally sound for a Duplo project,” I genuinely mean that.

Compare it to Final Fantasy VI where every single character’s based on the same basic look that resembles a chronically overdressed Lemming, every character in Chrono Trigger has a distinct stance and subtly different emotes and animations that convey a lot of personality, so that one character gets a surprising amount of mileage out of the slapping her bum animation. But we get ahead of ourselves. If you’re used to having your eyeballs physically abused by modern Japanese RPGs with their twenty-hour tutorials and interfaces like the modern art on the walls of the euthanasia clinic, it’s refreshing how stripped down Chrono Trigger feels in retrospect. Here’s your dude, here’s a sword, here’s four different kinds of magic. Fire, water, light, dark, and that’s your lot. Anyone who says they need more than that is just padding their expense claim. Yeah, I know you heard me, Persona 5, get outta here with that “nuclear” shit, that’s just fire with a PHD. And it’s a nice understandable plot that doesn’t feel the need to throw you into the middle of a tense political situation that you need ten minutes with the in-game glossary to understand, although the plot it does have initially comes across like that of a knockoff Goosebumps book being described over the phone by an editor who just got off the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios.

I was just an ordinary kid ’til I went to the fair where my friend who’s good with a wrench and therefore has the ability to build a fully functional teleporter accidentally sent me back to medieval times and now I need to rescue a princess or my girlfriend will be erased from history! And also there’s a frog. That’s good stuff, Robert, but we might need to work on cutting the title down. As plots go it’s got a decent hook, but then it’s all resolved at the end of the first act and there’s still another fifteen hours of game to fill, and I wouldn’t say the subsequent story holds up to its promising opening. We return the princess and get mistaken for a kidnapper and there’s a rather beautifully done sequence where the player is morally judged for a few seemingly innocuous choices at the start of the game, but after the prison break the characters basically just go “Ah bollocks to this, we’re out,” and randomly gad about time for a bit before the game goes “Oh shit we need a plot. Er… giant evil god wants to destroy the world. There we go.” So here we are again, teenagers using the power of friendship to kill God, the point all JRPG plots end up at if you let them go on long enough.

It doesn’t help that the main characters frequently feel like outsiders to the plot after having such a strong presence in the first bit. The princess love interest who set the entire story in motion I eventually drop from the regular party in favour of the robot for their strong range of attacks and the cavewoman for the way her buttocks bounce up and down as she runs. There’ll be a major story cutscene where an evil queen sacrifices her daughter to summon the big baddie and Crono and his mates are just sort of there, like Sora Donald and Goofy awkwardly standing to one side while Elsa from Frozen’s doing a big musical number. All in all, I have a feeling Chrono Trigger is one of those fondly remembered games that people will often go back to and replay the first few hours of, but don’t often get around to replaying the rest of so much. You know, System Shock 2 syndrome. The gameplay goes downhill after a while, too, the simplicity that is to its credit early on becomes the proverbial friendly dog in the sterile operating room when the game has few options for escalation beyond just giving enemies more health. So the later boss fights are just about repeating the same sequence of attacks and heals for forty five minutes and getting buggered over an ironing board if your concentration ever slips.

I was having real trouble with this giant robot boss around the mid point. I don’t know who this giant robot dude thought he was in the context of the plot or what I’d done to upset him but he showed up without a word and got off three free magic attacks in a row that sucked all my health off like your mum with an ice lolly. Which seemed very unreasonable until I remembered the Steam version had a speed setting for combat, and stupidly I’d set it to fast, thinking it would hurry up all those elaborate special attack animations that you have to sit through nine billion times, but turns out it just shortens the amount of reaction time you’re given to rummage through the menus as part of the Active Time Battle thing that was Squaresoft’s opening salvo in their afore-discussed decades-long effort to very slowly transition to Final Fantasy 16’s real time combat. But I think I hear the rhythmic scraping of the retro snobs getting their stabbing knives ready so let me clarify that Chrono Trigger was always one of the few 16 bit JRPGs that could instantly grab me purely from music, visuals, presentation, and pure sense of adventure, and it’s hardly fair to piss on it for points that were let’s face it par for the course for the genre at the time. Still, it would be nice if newer JRPGs could mix things up a bit. Maybe end with twentysomethings using the power of middle management to maim the pope.