Chrono Trigger (DS)
Chrono Trigger is a trip.
12/9/2008 6:29 PM | 6 Comments | Page 2 of 2
What's Hot: Time travel; Cool sidekicks; No random battles
What's Not: The same old save-the-world plot; "Dragon Ball Z" hairdos; Turn-based grind
Gus Mastrapa
Status: Chickens that shoot lasers out of their eyes.
Chrono Trigger is adored among fans of the steampunk Loch Ness monster.
Focus on all these fiddly details and you miss the point of a game like
Chrono Trigger. Sure, the game is old-fashioned. Even the newest role-playing offerings from Japan feel like they're trapped in the past. There's a reason why people like Hironobu Sakaguchi continue to make games with this look and feel. Nostalgia surely plays a part -- Akira Toriyama's character designs have hardly changed in the decade since
Chrono Trigger dropped. The leads in
Blue Dragon feel slightly less angular than Crono, Marle and Lucca, but they're close cousins nonetheless. But there's something else. I'd argue that the deliberate pacing of turn-based fights, the steady but predictable character growth and the familiar hero-saves-the-world plots have a certain value. These traits make a game like
Chrono Trigger predictable, like comfort food. There's a kind of Zen to playing old-school RPGs -- the pace of the grind lulls the player into a sort of trance. And that's where a game like
Chrono Trigger works its magic. Every so often the game snaps its fingers in front of your bleary eyes and says, "Check this out." And right before your eyes you see something truly original, surprising or worth a chuckle.
Terrible Job #541: Lying in wait to ambush the heroes in a videogame.
So maybe you don't like Japanese RPGs. That's cool. I'm not going to tell you how to hone your tastes. But I am going to point out that no film buff worth their salt would cop to never having seen a silent film by the the Lumière brothers or Charlie Chaplin.
Chrono Trigger is no "Sunrise," but it's a killer example of what the role-playing game can achieve, especially when constrained by technology. Game designers like Sakaguchi are like poets dedicated to a formal approach. Thanks to new technologies they're able to write in free verse, but they learned their craft in a time when sestinas and sonnets were the only way to do things. This new opportunity to play
Chrono Trigger offers players a trip in a time machine to an era when game designers wrote lovely stanzas in chunky pixels.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
