Timeless: Chrono Trigger Arrives on DS

It has been over 13 years since Chrono Trigger was released, and three console generations later, this game still sits proudly as one of the best RPGs, nay, video games, ever made. Yet after its initial release on the SNES, the game has only been available as a part of Square’s Final Fantasy Chronicles collection that was released in 2001. Despite featuring new animated sequences by character designer and anime god Akira Toriyama, this version was dismissed by fans due to lengthy load times, terrible resolution and sound effects engulfed in static. But Square Enix has finally given Chrono Trigger the treatment it deserves by porting it to the Nintendo DS, allowing the game to perform better than its SNES ancestor. Also, it fits in your pocket. Neat!

All tanks should look like dragons.

For both of you who haven’t heard of this game before now, Chrono Trigger chronicles the adventures of six time-traveling friends on a quest to save the world from ultimate destruction. As you jump to different time periods, your actions in the past directly affect what happens in the future, potentially changing every aspect of the world around you. In one of my favorite side quests, you meet a greedy town mayor who is despised even by his own children. But if you hop back a few hundred years and offer his ancestors your help for free, you return to find that the importance of being thoughtful and caring have been more thoroughly embedded in the mayor’s family, thus changing him into a nice guy. The fighting system is also one of the game’s trademark elements, allowing every character to combine their individual skills with another character’s for a massive, combined attack. Most importantly, all of these aspects—the story, the gameplay, even the graphics—still hold up remarkably well today.

So let’s get into what’s different about this version. Probably the first thing Chrono fans will notice is the new translation, which has received a complete overhaul from the SNES version. For the most part, this is a good thing: some of the more obtuse or vague statements (my personal favorite being “One of you is close to someone who needs help. Find this person, FAST.”) have been smoothed over for better comprehension, and everyone speaks much more legibly. Unfortunately, this greater clarity seems to have sapped some of the humor out of the game. For example, when you first enter Guardia Castle in 600 A.D. in the SNES version, Crono is harassed by the soldiers about his age and perceived wimpiness, saying “Show us your stamp collection, son.” Yet in the new edition, they instead threaten to “lock you up in the towers.” Furthermore, get ready to re-memorize most of your equipment, items, tech attacks, and even some of the characters, as many of them have been renamed: Magus is now known more widely as the “Fiendlord,” Crono’s “Confuse” attack is now called “Frenzy,” and strangest of all, “Revive” items are now called “Athenian Water.” Lastly, everyone in 600 A.D. speaks with a heavy “How art thou?” type of accent, which—depending on your tastes—can get a little old. All in all, the new translation adds more to Chrono Trigger than it detracts, but fans will surely miss the little things that hit the cutting room floor.

Did we really need this line to be retranslated?

Also included as a side-game of sorts is the new Arena mode, where you can train your own little monster to fight other monsters for prizes. Sound like another game popular on Nintendo systems? The Arena mode plays like a watered-down version of Pokémon: you don’t actually control your monster while it battles, and you increase its abilities by sending it to another time period—and while it’s raining, you can’t really do anything else besides play the main storyline. In other words, you don’t really do much besides giving it items in battle, which it may not even use if it doesn’t trust you enough (another element you have to build up). On the bright side, you get various items and equipment if you win, but whether or not getting a few extra mid-potions is worth all the trouble depends on how much patience you have.

The last real piece of new material is the much-touted additional dungeons: the Lost Sanctum and the Dimensional Vortex. Spanning two time periods, the Lost Sanctum is a secret underground civilization of Reptites that escaped the ice age. Apparently, being underground so long has made these creatures relatively useless, as most of this area consists of fetch quests. The Dimensional Vortex, on the other hand, is a randomly-generated dungeon that plays with a mixture of themes from Chrono Trigger and its sequel Chrono Cross, which ends with a new final boss battle and ending that further links the two games (click here if you want to spoil it for yourself). This is definitely my favorite of the two areas, but even though they were both moderately enjoyable, neither of them really live up to the design of the main quest.

But that’s the great thing about this version of Chrono Trigger: all of the new stuff (aside from the dialogue, anyway) is entirely optional. There’s even an option to turn off the animated cut scenes inherited from the PS1 release on Final Fantasy Chronicles. So for all of those who simply wanted the pure Chrono Trigger experience, this is likely the closest you’ll get unless you shell out for a SNES cartridge. Or you could wait for Square Enix to release the game on Virtual Console, but I think we all know how likely that is to happen.

So should you get it? It all depends on how much you’ve played the game in the past, really. If you’re a Chrono-nut and haven’t already bought it, the novelty of having one of the greatest games of all time in portable form is reason enough to purchase it. For those who have never played it (shame on you, by the way), this ought to be considered a course in Gaming 101. And for those caught somewhere in the middle—those who played it but weren’t drawn in like the rest of us were—I doubt this version will change your mind, so you might want to save your $40 for something else. I will never understand that point of view, but I know there are some of you out there.

Whatever camp of Chrono-appreciation you fall into, we should all celebrate the fact that many of our favorite games from yesteryear refuse to be forgotten—it’s almost as if they’re able to defy the boundaries of time.