Chrono Trigger

A few years ago, I and a good friend of mine were bonding over old games consoles and all the games we had played when we were younger.  We spoke of the SNES one of my favourite consoles and his, and we shared our views on games we had both played.  He introduced me to two games that had passed me by when I was younger, one was Chrono Trigger.  I remember seeing this in a catalogue when I was younger but had no idea what it was about and misjudges the title to assume it was some sort of shooter game and as such wouldn't be in my interest.

Since the original SNES release, Chrono Trigger has also been released to Nintendo DS and is available on Amazon, to find out more click here.

Warning: This post contains spoilers, if you have not played the game and wish to do so, do not read on.

When I first played Chrono Trigger I immediately fell in love with it for the style of graphics, the in depth story and the progression of the plot.  Above all else one of the great appeals of the game was its length.  Not by any stretch of the imagination could you call it a short game.  It took me a few weeks to finish it when I first played through it and even then I did not play through every adventure and side-quest the game offered.

The reason this game has been posted in this Tragedy Challenge is because of one of the pivotal plot points in the game.  As long and in-depth as the game is, you form an attachment to the characters.  The title character is called Chrono and throughout the game you follow him.  His party expands to include other characters which you can switch at times.  Chrono is the only member that is always present in the party however.  So for the greatest part of the game you do form an attachment to him and a fondness for him, I would imagine even more so if you were a kid playing this game.  Some time into the game, passed the midway point there is a key battle in the game.  A battle which you cannot win, you have to lose no matter how hard you try you have to lose because it is part of the storyline that you do.  When you lose the battle there is a cut-scene in which Chrono, our beloved hero of the game, dies.

The game continues for some time, you can finish the game having lost Chrono, for some time this appears to be what must happen.  If you were to do so this would surely leave you rather grievous and melancholy.  However there is a way in the game to 'resurrect' Chrono, although not technically a resurrection.  Time travel focuses heavily in the game and through completion of a side-quest you can obtain a lifelike replica of Chrono, a cut-scene then shows the scene of the battle you lost temporarily frozen in which the real Chrono is swapped for the life-like doll thus saving the Hero's life so that he can rejoin the party and complete the main story with them.

Chrono Trigger was developed by Square, now Square Enix who also developed the Final Fantasy series of games, and if you are a fan of those games you will no doubt see a parallel drawn between this storyline and that of one of the FF games.  All I would say is that Chrono Trigger in a way forms a precursor to that event, showing that Square had a predisposition towards creating games that would pull heavily on the heart strings of their players.