The Stack

Having now been through scenarios past and future, I reach what seems to be a sort of time-travel hub. Described as “the end of time”, it’s your basic stone platform in an inky void, with a mysterious elderly guardian-of-the-balance type on hand to explain things. There are a few permanent time portals there, including one back to the present. (That is, the time period in which the game starts. To some of the player characters, it’s the past or the future.) But it doesn’t go to the same geographical location that you started in. It goes to Monstertown.

That’s not its real name. It’s just a more descriptive name than the real one, which I’ve already forgotten. Regardless, it’s the place where an evil wizard tried to take over the world 400 years ago, and it’s still inhabited by the descendants of his minions, who still bear a grudge against all humans for defeating him. Not an attack-on-sight sort of grudge like most monsters, just a seething prejudice and an active project to eventually summon a Godzilla-like lava monster to lay waste to all human civilization. And when I say “Godzilla-like”, I mean it’s an obvious metaphor for nuclear weapons. The future you visit is a post-apocalyptic wasteland with starving survivors huddling in shelters and mutants in the ruins outside, and it was Lavos who made it that way. The present seems to be in a state of cold war.

It seems to me that East and West have different trends when it comes to post-apocalyptic scenarios. Japan is the only nation on Earth to be the target of a nuclear attack, and understandably has never forgotten it. America is the only nation to have launched a nuclear attack, and has done its level best to forget. Thus, in American games with post-apocalyptic scenarios, such as Wasteland and the Fallout series, the details and origins of the conflict tend to be either lost to history or just not particularly relevant to the story — the world has moved on and developed new bad guys from the chaos following the war, and thus has more important things to worry about than who nuked who. Japanese games, on the other hand, are generally very clear that whoever activated the doomsday device is the story’s villain. We see this most clearly in the Final Fantasy games, where, as I’ve noted before, the world tends to get destroyed at the end of the first half. In FF5 and FF6, even after the world is shattered, the villains continue to target individual cities for destruction with city-destroying weapons.

Chrono Trigger‘s combat system is essentially the ATB system from Final Fantasy: each character has a gauge that fills up (at a rate determined by their Speed stat), and when it’s full, they can take an action, such as attacking an enemy or drinking a healing potion. When you use special “technique” attacks, however, things get a little different.

I talked recently about special attacks in Final Fantasy VI, including Cyan’s “sword techniques”. I mention this to avoid confusion: “Techniques” in CT have nothing to do with that. Instead, they take the place of spells. All Techniques require “Magic Points” to use, even the ones that clearly involve nothing more than swinging a sword around in a fancy way. Every character has their own unique set of Techniques. Some simply do more damage than a standard attack, while some have more spell-like effects, such as healing damage or putting enemies to sleep. But the special thing about them, the thing that makes Chrono Trigger combat different from standard ATB, is that many of them are affected by the geometry of the battlefield. There are basically two variants of this: those with ray effects, and those with burst effects. In either case, you target a specific enemy. Rays will effect anything in a straight line between your character and the target, while bursts affect everything within a certain distance of the target.

It’s not really a very advanced concept. Plenty of games before and since have had similar area-of-effect rules. But it combines oddly with the ATB system, particularly when you take into account two things: (1) You can’t move during combat, and (2) the enemy can. (Please understand that the player has absolutely no control over where the player characters put themselves when battle starts: even if you approach the monster from a different direction, the team will dutifully run to their assigned spots for that encounter when combat mode begins). The ultimate effect on gameplay is that you can wind up spending a little time waiting for the randomly-wandering foes to line up or cluster together in order to get the most out of your mana. Now, I complained about how Cyan’s sword techniques in FF6 forced the player to sit there and wait to use them, and considered that particular UI experiment to be a failure. But the CT system doesn’t force you to wait: it simply gives you an incentive to wait voluntarily. And I don’t often do so, but occasionally it’s worth it.

Voluntary waiting is also the effect of the other new feature of the Techniques: combinations. Specific pairs of characters — or even trios, supposedly, although I have yet to see this in action — can perform their Techniques together for synergetic effects. For example, Crono, the main character, has a “cyclone” Technique that lets him do burst damage by leaping into the middle of the enemies and swirling his sword around. Lucca, the tech girl, has a Technique that does a ray of fire damage. Do them together and Crono uses his swirling sword to deflect Lucca’s fire ray in all directions, doing a large amount of fire damage to all foes. (Weirdly, there’s another Technique where Crono does the same thing to Marle’s healing-aura Technique, in which case the deflected magic misses the monsters and hits all the PCs.) But in order to do a combo attack, all of the characters involved must be ready to act. Since everyone’s action gauge fills up at a different rate, this means sitting and waiting sometimes.

OK, I realize I’m already in the middle of a JRPG. But The Brainy Gamer’s Vintage Game Club has just chosen Chrono Trigger as their latest game to collectively play though and discuss, and since it’s on the Stack, I may as well play along. And anyway, it looks like I’ll have plenty of time to play FF6 between Chrono Trigger sessions. The Club has a week-by-week schedule for synchronizing play, and I’ve just completed the first week’s allotment in a single session.

Apparently Chrono Trigger is considered by many to be the best JRPG ever. Having grown up as a PC gamer rather than a console gamer, I had no idea. The only reason I own a copy already is that it came with the anthologized Final Fantasy for Playstation, taking the place of FF3 (which still has only been released for Nintendo consoles). It was a collaboration between the creators of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragon Ball franchises. Of these, Final Fantasy is the only one I’m greatly familiar with, so that’s the main thing I’m comparing it to in my mind as I play.

The mechanics are basically Final Fantasy-like, with the ATB combat system and all, but the presentation is greatly different. Combat mode isn’t cleanly separated from exploration mode, but happens on the same screen. To support this, your entire party is always visible as distinct sprites, rather than lumped into a single unit like in most Final Fantasy games. (In these respects, we see Square catching up to what Ultima 6 did a few years earlier.) Random encounters don’t just happen to you suddenly, like pits you fall into, but instead, monsters are seen going about their monster business before you fight them — even when you walk into an ambush, there’s animation of the ambush being sprung, like a mini-cartoon, usually with some slapstick in it.

The characters themselves get to be more detailed than in a Final Fantasy, because they’re not squashed to the size of a map tile. For that matter, map tiles are a less noticable feature all round. Presumably the maps are still tile-based, but the tiles are never a constraint to movement, and the overland map looks extremely freeform.

Speaking of freedom on the overland map, I was surprised at just how much the game lets you wander around before getting down to the plot. You basically get the run of the continent, and probably another continent besides (there seems to be a ferry, although I didn’t take it). The game guides you pretty clearly, though. Wherever you go, everyone is talking about the Millennial Fair. The Fair is one of the closest things to your starting location, and it’s chock-a-block with interactive doodads to keep your attention focused there. At the fair, an accident with an experimental teleporter (invented by the protagonist’s meganekko friend) causes someone to disappear, leaving only a pendant behind. I went to pick up the pendant, figuring that it would be important in the investigation of what happened, only do discover that the game interpreted my action as a signal that I wanted the teleporter turned back on immediately so I could follow the missing person wherever she went. (A singularly irresponsible moment — who’s to say she wasn’t simply vaporized? We know from the title that it’s a time-travel game, but have the characters read the box?)

I was tempted at this point to go back to my last save, as I wasn’t finished exploring yet. But I kept on playing anyway, knowing that I’d be back: they wouldn’t have made all that world if they weren’t going to use it. And indeed, by now I’ve been back and again away. I’ll say this for the game: it moves at a pretty good clip. The story’s been pretty simple, and (perhaps a little ironic for a game about time travel) entirely focused on the present moment. That is, it hasn’t been going in for lingering mysteries or obvious set-ups for later events. It’s just a series of misadventures that your gang of anime stereotypes tumble into one after the other.