Ripples In Time

Chrono Trigger is not a game I really knew anything about until the last few years. It was a Super Nintendo era game, which was a generation of consoles I skipped (going from NES system to N64). And it's a JRPG, which is a genre I didn't get into until maybe the mid-2000s (the first actual JRPG I played, as opposed to an Americanized mimic like Sudeki, was DragonQuest 8). So it fell into a gap.

But I'd come across posts about it online occasionally, and I bought the DS version for my friend a couple years ago (as the Super NES version was prohibitively expensive), so I figured I'd try it myself.

And it's good. Maybe it's a game that rewards repeat plays, since there's more than one ending. It certainly would have helped if I didn't sometimes go three weeks without playing. A few times I'd forget where I was supposed to be going, and more often, why I was going there. Definitely didn't always keep track of places I needed to double-back to once I'd gained some skill or item. That's not on the game, just on my being distracted with other things this spring.

The story starts small, with the main character agreeing to rescue the friend he just made was somehow sent back in time by his other friend's teleporter. Then it spiral into needing to stop an invading army led by a villainous Magus, to confronting some threat from beyond the stars that will ultimately destroy most of civilization, to dealing with the idiots who think they can harness its power for themselves. Friends are made along the way, and since you're bouncing through time, you can alter the outcome of certain events to produce new results in the future. I like getting the time travel ship, if only for the freedom to pick whichever era I wanted whenever I chose, and being able to nose around islands I couldn't figure out how to reach otherwise.

(Although I'm not sure the game always recognizes when I screw up. I'm pretty sure I botched Lucca's chance to save her mother from dying in that one invention, but at the end of the game, she was there at the big celebration.)

Lavos as a threat is fairly impressive, even if it's damn tedious to fight that battle where he mimics a dozen of the bosses you fought earlier in the game. Then, of course, you have to have another boss fight with him immediately after. At least there's a save point before the next two fights against him afterward. Of course, those first two fights came after three consecutive boss fights against other opponents. I really hate that kind of nonsense.

As a villain, Lavos isn't really one. I don't have any sense of what his goal was, other than basic survival. He drew energy from the planet to make himself stronger. I don't know if I'm supposed to read the fact his emergence destroys civilization as his having fed off humanity's own selfish and destructive impulses or not. Queen Zeal's delusional, so used to be looking down on everyone from above she can't conceive of losing or not getting what she wants. Magus is the guy with allegedly good intentions that figures he can justify anything by them. The game gives you the choice to let him join you or fight and kill him. I opted to give him the pointy end of a sword, rather than friendship.

The graphics on the DS are better than the SNES, if only marginally. It doesn't make a huge difference. You can tell what's going on, can usually see where the trail you need to take is (there was one narrow alley in a sewer that I kept missing because it was invisible due to the wall between the it and our viewpoint). The different areas are distinguishable, so are the characters and enemies, that's really all I need. I really didn't notice the music when I was playing, so I can't comment, other than it obviously wasn't distracting or irritating.

Going back to the whole turn-based combat style wasn't my favorite thing after Tales of Vesperia's more fluid approach (aided by being 20+ years newer, no doubt), but it's not off-putting. I like the ability to learn two and three-character combo moves, which is not something I can remember having available in any of the other RPGs I've played over the years.

Although I didn't actually use combos much. I didn't want to commit two or three of my characters all at once, then be left waiting for all of them to get their next turn. Sometimes I'd select a combo move, and before it could go off, then enemy would hit me with some major attack and I'd want to change gears, do some healing. Except now the healer is tied up in the combo attack. So I preferred to keep my options open, rely on a more gradual whittling down of the enemies. Which worked sometimes, and didn't work other times. There were quite a few boss fights I wouldn't have won without looking strategies online, judging by how many times I died even when I did look up strategies.