Work: Chrono Trigger (FULL REVIEW, AT LAST!)

This review appeared in issue #185 of Hyper magazine.

At some point in time, a group of gamers somewhere on the interwebs decided that it would be socially acceptable to roll their collective eyes at JRPGs. The eye-rolling business caught on fast and, before long, everyone was making fun of the genre. Perhaps it was because they were excruciatingly pretty in a very anime-stylised kind of way way, or because they constantly featured a male protagonist with spiky hair, or maybe even because they all were incredibly linear, with the player’s actions seldom causing any real effect. It was like the developers had removed the player – the real person – from the equation and, rather than involve us and make us feel that we were the ones behind the characters, we were merely asked to shuffle the characters along until the next cut-scene.

As a lover of JRPGS (and I swear it has nothing to do with my gender or race) and their never ending sameness, Chrono Trigger was a breath of fresh air. No, it was more than that – it was a foot to the face, and perhaps the most delightful foot to the face I have ever received.

While its gameplay mechanics are typical of JRPGs of the era (turn-based battles, moving from place to place exploring buildings, forests and dungeons, talking to people and opening up treasure chests filled with ether and potion), it’s the way the game involves the player that is its truly stand-out quality.

The focus of the game is on time travel and restoring balance to a world where balance has been lost at various points in time. Playing as Crono (that’s right, sans ‘h’), you travel through time with your nerdy friend Lucca and a princess named Marle to escape the wrath of Marle’s father. By travelling back and forth through time, you are exposed to the same kingdom at different stages in history, venturing thousands of years into the past and future. Perhaps it is this theme of time travel that gives the game a whole new dimension, not so much because time travel is anything new and unusual, but because actions and decisions made in the past will inevitably affect the future and, in Chrono Trigger’s brilliance, the player is held accountable for these actions.

Accountability; it’s funny that this came as a surprise to me, seeing that games are an interactive medium that involve the player making decisions all the time, and our actions always have consequences. I should have known that. What I was not prepared for was how the dilemmas that Chrono Trigger presented to me fell in such grey areas. I had expected the game to be a bit more binary, like in Fable 2 where you can either behave like a saint or become the embodiment of pure evil through your actions. Chrono surprised me by never really offering me clear-cut right or wrong decisions to make. Nothing was obvious, and everything required me to pause for a moment and think about how my actions – no matter how small they were – would play out later on.

In one particular scene early on, my character was placed on trial for crimes that I had committed, but I did not know I had committed them; at least, not really. I had jumped into the game and behaved in typical RPG fashion; I picked up everything I came across, ate everything I could eat, and pressed the A button impulsively when my character stood in front of shiny objects.

In a memorable flashback while I was on trial, my character was exploring a fair and there was a bag of food on the table, so I picked it up and ate it because, well, that’s what you do in RPGs – you click on everything and take everything. What I failed to do was make the connection between the bag of food on the table and a comment an old man made to me just moments earlier about his darling old wife always packing his lunch for him. So, at this trial, the prosecution tried to prove my guilt by illustrating my character to the jury. I was asked if I had ever stolen anything; I said no. The prosecution called up a witness – the old man whose wife packed him lunch – who testified against me and said that I was the one who stole his lunch from the fair. For that, I was punished. No, actually, I was being punished for not thinking before I acted.

I had not expected the world to react to my actions, but it did. Suddenly, my approach to the entire game changed; it had to. I couldn’t play Chrono Trigger in the same way that I played other games because I felt the weight of responsibility – that this world’s fate depended on my actions.

With such a small map, most of the games’ focus lies in travelling through time, thus rendering the world different each time you travel to a different time period. Travelling into the future where the kingdom had become a dilapidated wasteland a la Blade Runner, I couldn’t help but feel that I was somehow responsible for the downfall of this civilisation, even though I had no clue how I could have possibly caused so much damage. I found myself scrutinising every single thing I did and thinking back to everyone I had spoken to, everyone I had offered to help, and everyone who I denied help to, and I wondered to what extent those moments I spent with other characters in the game played a part in altering the face of the world I was playing in.

Chrono Trigger made me feel a sense of ownership of my character and I found myself completely immersed. It created a world I grew to care about – a kind of living, breathing society that responded to the decisions I made. My little sprites felt more human to me than even the most realistic of CGIs because behind the character with spiky hair, an iron blade, and a silly name without a ‘h’ was a real person – me.

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