Whose Faulty Vision

Great Games: Chrono Trigger

You save the world in a lot of video games, to the point where it’s really a cliche. But Chrono Trigger makes you take it seriously by showing you what’s at stake. The whole game is about time travel, and very early on in the game, you’re projected into the future, after a terrible disaster has happened. The world is a hollow, dying place, with a handful of people left who have largely lost hope. You can help them out a little, but ultimately their world is simply too far gone for even a video game hero to be able to do much good. Preventing that world from coming about is what motivates the rest of the game.

And that’s what’s so powerful about Chrono Trigger in general. Like all of the other Japanese-style RPG video games of its era, it tells a convoluted story full of characters and events. Unlike many of them, it really makes you care.

Here’s another example: About 2/3 of the way through the game, the main character (Crono) is killed by a powerful enemy. But since it’s a time travel game, dead isn’t necessarily final. (As a side note, one of the things that’s cool about the game is that you don’t have to rescue Crono–it’s possible to leave him dead and win the game without him.) Through a series of convolutions, Crono’s friends manage to get a dummy of Crono, freeze time at the moment of the enemy’s attack, and replace him with the dummy. The whole group is then transported to a hillside. Marle (who’s kind of a love interest) runs to Crono and hugs him, and the rest of the world fades to black, until it’s just the two of them hugging. It’s a beautiful, touching scene. Who knew grainy little 16-bit sprites could be so moving?

Chrono Trigger suffers from a lot of the same flaws of other JRPGs (and playing Oblivion makes me more acutely aware of those flaws). It has the massive dungeons that have no reason to exist other than to be dungeons, the heaps of random encounters that don’t do much but stretch the game out, and a lot of the cliches from the RPG cliche list. But the compelling story and excellent world-building more than make up for it.

It also uses the time travel concept to great effect. Thanks to traveling through time, you not only discover the massive disaster you have to prevent, but you also discover its roots in the distant past, and how it influenced history in the meantime. And there are some great little ways you can alter things in one time period and see the influences in another. (Another game on my list, Day of the Tentacle, uses that idea to even greater effect.) The time travel use and the great story elevate it above the rest of the pack and earn it a place on my Great Games list.

(My full “great games” list)