February’s game: Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
Welcome to the fourth year running of my JRPG Journey. I’ve been playing one JRPG a month since the start of 2020 and sharing my thoughts, and I’ve had a blast going through all the classics I missed. To start off what’s bound to be a great year, I could think of no better game than Chrono Trigger. In fact, due to the gargantuan levels of hype around this one, I’d been saving it for a special moment: this is my 100th JRPG. So how does Chrono Trigger stack up against the zeitgeist, or against my personal favorites? Well, for much of the playthrough, it didn’t feel very special. It seemed like a standard, modern JRPG.
But that’s the thing: Chrono Trigger set a new standard that an entire generation of JRPGs, mostly for the DS, followed in part or wholesale. Amusingly, playing Chrono Trigger feels like playing a JRPG from that hit-filled era, so it’s fitting it got a remake for that very system, and since many consider that the best version, it’s the one I played. Before Chrono Trigger, at least from my admittedly shallow, mainstream experience with the genre, side quests weren’t a major part of JRPGs. Often, they were nonexistent or thrown in as an afterthought, such as in Phantasy Star, or hardly mattered and gave little reward, like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. And it was unheard of to spell out quests explicitly, the way Chrono Trigger does late-game, at least as far as I know. Well, I’m pretty sure Final Fantasy VI has a bunch of sidequests, though I haven’t played it yet, but the way Chrono Trigger handles them feels modern to me.
The way I see it, by the SNES era most JRPGs opted for the tried-and-true approach of giving the player plenty of freedom and room to explore and discover, but a new breed, brought to prominence by Final Fantasy IV, adopted a cinematic approach, rushing through a white-knuckle story with sidequests tacked on. Chrono Trigger tackled an expansion on that fresh direction while wisely deciding to tap the breaks once in a while. At many points during your quest, there’s a range of locations available to explore, and even if there’s no treasure or quest to find, there’s usually an interesting NPC or mysterious artifact that piques your curiosity for later. Best of all, while Chrono Trigger also dumps most of its sidequests at the end, this happens at an earlier point due to the game’s overall length. It’s a short even when doing as much content as possible, maybe 25 hours on a blind first playthrough and far fewer on a replay, and the endgame sidequests take up a solid 5 to 8 hour chunk of that.
These often unusual or bizarrely creative quests make your effort worthwhile, with rewards such as a weapon that resoundingly outclasses the garbage you’ve got, gear boasting powerful effects like status immunity, or even a new party member. That’s right, there’s at least one optional character, and like much of the hidden content, it’s not exactly easy to find, but even if you miss any of the multitude of super cool stuff like that, it’s easy to shrug and keep playing. That’s because the adventure is designed around replays under New Game Plus mode, a term allegedly coined by Chrono Trigger itself. Plus, not only is it shorter than even contemporary JRPG fans were used to, it’s packed with sizable chunks of this kind of missable and often obscure or poorly hinted-at content.
For the most part, I cared about these sidequests—this is the oldest JRPG I know of where I can say that. Yeah, there’s stuff like Romancing SaGa 2, but all the smallish quests in that game, while optional, frame and support the main story. You can’t skip all of them—they’re how you progress. In Chrono Trigger, it’s up to you if you want to help your party members work through their personal problems, or clear out a monster-infested dungeon for nearby townsfolk. In fact, much of the story itself is optional, since you can go fight the final boss at any time. Is that another JRPG first? It just might be. But good luck beating him unless you’re playing on New Game+.
In the opening few hours, I wasn’t feeling the characters or story. Unlike most JRPGs of the past 20 years that I’ve played, the party members who join up early on, while central to the main plot, play out fairly dull, basic fiction tropes. Oh, there’s protagonist Chrono, the shonen hero with a heart of gold but no personality beyond that. Oh, there’s Lucca, the smart, science girl who builds robots. Oh, there’s Marle, the brash tomboy type who sometimes gets feisty and wouldn’t ya know it, she’s secretly a princess. This all wasn’t doing it for me so far: there’s nothing original here, the characters are bland, and it’s a time travel plot. Then I met Frog and Robo, whose backstories and character development make their childish names seem like a joke. Frog is a take on the classic princess and the frog tale, but it’s a good one, focusing on the frog rather than the princess. Here, he’s a knight sworn to protect his queen, who must make the best of his, er … amphibious predicament. I’d say he succeeds, considering he’s one of the best units, and his story stands out as the most poignant and well-written of the lot. I say “the lot”, because each character gets their own mini-arc, whether as part of the main story or in the sidequests section.
Robo, on the other hand, is, well, a robot, with a standard “robot learns emotions” arc. That’s disappointing, but when you think about it, what else can you do with a robot character in a story like this? If he’s gonna be a party member, making him better understand humans or “feel more human” is the only natural route I can think of that fits the structure of a JRPG. That may be why I don’t get excited over this archetype in games, and Chrono Trigger does nothing to change that opinion. It’s good, then, that Robo is amazing in combat. Like Frog, he’s a versatile support unit with great healing and good damage, but I prefer his massive HP, spells, and ability to tank and heal while my other characters rack up huge hits.
Both spells and weapon techs draw from the same resource pool, an effective simplification that helps streamline gameplay and reduce menuing, and while there are combo techs that require two or sometimes all three party members to use, I found basic techs the best way to deal damage. Late in the game, Chrono and Robo both get devastating multi-hit attacks that make all your combos look pitiful. Still, combo techs are fun to use early on. Surprisingly, that’s thanks to the ATB system: I had a blast with it this time around. Maybe it’s the DS’s unique setup, or maybe it’s this version’s UI design, but waiting for another character’s gauge to fill up then firing off a combo tech as soon as it does? So satisfying. I do still find it annoying how you have to wait a little for your first character’s bar to fill up at the start of every battle, although it becomes near-instantaneous once your characters grow speedier from level-ups.
For my third and last main party member, I chose Ayla, a brawler cavewoman who gets no dialogue besides essentially, “Hulk, smash”. She gets almost no characterization beyond that, either, yet she’s endearing nonetheless and has perhaps the best damage output. You can tweak characters with stat boosting items—up to a point. (This isn’t like FFV where you can make anyone do anything. Ayla doesn’t even learn any magic.) At the same time, there’s enough freedom to use any of several different strats or party setups. Common JRPG wisdom at the time suggested the protagonist should always stay in your party, yet Chrono Trigger is, once again, the first of the genre I know of to make that optional. You can play without Chrono no problem, but he proved useful enough to keep around across both my playthroughs.
Little tweaks or additions to the JRPG formula abound in Chrono Trigger, many of which have stuck around for decades after … and counting. You can change equipment right on the shop screen. There’s few ways to grind for cash and no real need, resulting in flawless economy balance—I didn’t have money to waste on extra potions or items until deep into my playthrough. At the same time, there’s a few loopholes enterprising players can take advantage of if they desire. Nice. Instead of random battles, monster stacks roam the overworld, and while that’d been done before by Earthbound and others, here the amount of skill required to dodge through rooms without being touched feels just right. Not that you’d want to—Chrono Trigger is balanced for the player to fight every battle yet still struggle a bit with bosses, and monsters often don’t respawn, giving few chances to grind until the late-game. In another first, to my knowledge, combat plays out directly on the overworld, even bosses; there’s no transition to a battle screen. That’s pretty cool: Breath of Fire got halfway there with its combat backgrounds; Trigger takes things to a new level. That’s not to say it’s better, but it is different—or was at the time, anyway. It’s since become a popular design style, so it’s doing something right. Most importantly, this choice fits the game’s fast pace, and I did skip several fights and did fine.
While Chrono Trigger is not difficult per se—hell, most random encounters end after one or two attacks—it’s loaded with bosses, more than in any other JRPG I’ve played. You face a new one damn near every other story beat, which come at a fast clip as most areas consist of only a few screens. Presumably to keep up the pace, bosses tend to fall quickly to the classic high-damage-plus-healing strat, though some have special weaknesses or oddities about the surrounding environment that come into play. Your party members often get placed haphazardly in battle, but unlike in, say, the first Lunar game, field position in Chrono Trigger doesn’t matter much. Much of your arsenal can hit any enemy, and you’ll always have an answer for any situation. (That’s handy since characters can’t be moved around.) Enemy positioning matters the most. Because Chrono and Ayla’s best screen-clearing attack affected a horizontal line, I usually had to make sure to target the right enemy unit, even against trash mobs. That’s more than I can say for combat in competing JRPGs. All this adds up to a strange injection of strategy to the formula, enough to shake things up and make you pay attention to every battle, but also nothing groundbreaking.
Chrono Trigger’s presentation, however, has left perhaps the largest mark on the genre. I know the DS version updated the UI, so I won’t discuss that, but the insane level of detail readily apparent in the sprite work and art direction in general blows me away. Even the SNES release looks like a DS game compared to its peers, with so much color and detail packed into every scene. The music sure helps too, shockingly done by newcomer Yasunori Mitsuda, who insisted he get to compose for a game or else he’d quit Square. They obliged, and he knocked it out of the park on his first swing. Primarily consisting of short pieces, the soundtrack transitions perfectly as you move from scene to scene, often with on-screen actions timed to match the flow. (This sort of thing is still somewhat uncommon in RPGs.) Final Fantasy dabbled in this previously, but in Chrono Trigger it’s the whole game. Since you’re never on a single screen or in a single dungeon or on a single continent for long, the music becomes entrancing, pulling you into Chrono’s unnamed world.
I’ve barely touched on the story because I don’t have a ton to say. I’m not much of a “story analysis” guy, nor am I super impressed with what Chrono Trigger’s has to offer. It’s.. fine: enjoyable enough, yet forgettable. It’s how the story affects the game’s structure that appeals to me. Like I said, it’s a time travel tale, and this plays out by taking Chrono and co. from time period to time period as they travel across their world, then to new parts of the world in each time period, eventually tying it all together by letting you go anywhere you want, whenever you want. While it’s not my favorite structure for a JRPG, it’s fun to play because it feels like its own thing, for 1995 anyhow. Titles like Radiant Historia and Final Fantasy XIII-2 tried very similar frameworks, and it was a joy seeing a nearly 30 year-old game execute multi-location time travel arguably better — and I love both of those games! Chrono Trigger not only shows how to break the mold, it provides plenty of replayability, secrets, and paths through the story. Someone could replay it 10 times and not even discover a certain character if they don’t search hard enough. I love that. There’s even numerous possible endings, an innovation for the genre as they’re radically different and occur at multiple points throughout the game. It’s all so … neat that I have to appreciate the effort even though the story didn’t hook me.
And again, the presentation goes a long way. Take the Magus fight, for example, the culmination of Frog’s revenge quest. Now, I liked the writing in Frog’s storyline well enough, but I didn’t feel any emotion connection to what was going on until my party approached the boss in that dank room. If you played the game, you know what I’m talking about. Those purple flames. That theme … did I mention Mitsuda crushed this soundtrack? And that’s but one of a bundle of scenes that make Chrono Trigger seem more alive than just sprites and text on a screen. It’s got some of that intangible magic or je ne sais quoi, and I would normally never use French but we are talking about a frog here. Other small touches add up, such how the dialogue’s fast, snappy, and—crucially—translated well. Holy cow, that’s a welcome relief after some of the SNES games I’ve been playing. It’s never too confusing how to advance the main plot, details that seem minor in early scenes come into play later, and there’s a good amount of variance in gameplay without resorting to mini-games. At one point, you’re left without your equipment and have to “stealth” your way around for a short while, but thankfully it’s never true stealth, just a bit of flavor added to spice up the adventure.
Chrono Triggers covers a lot of time, events, and decisions, bringing every aspect together beautifully and cramming them all into one tiny cartridge. There’s dinosaur hunting, visages of the far future, a trial scene where your past actions matter, prison breaks, and a romp through a robot factory, not to mention all kinds of whimsical situations that immediately give away Chrono Trigger as a Japanese RPG. It’s all the better for it. It doesn’t quite live up to its absurd, overblown reputation, particularly when it comes to the story and characters, but it easily stands up as a classic, a titan of the genre that’s a must-play for JRPG fans. I’m ecstatic I finally played it, but it was awful freaking dumb to save it for my 100th JRPG. That one’s on me.
Thanks for reading. See yall next month, when I’ll finally complete the FFXIII trilogy with Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.
