A lot is said about how Chrono Trigger looks great and has a bitchin' soundtrack. And yeah, it does, but a lot of games have those things, and the gameplay isn't all that deep. But I've come back to this game what must be about twenty times at this point. I think it has a lot more to do with the story.
Chrono Trigger is a story about discovering that the world is more complex than it appears. Masato Kato seems to have a love for such stories, judging by his later work on Xenogears. I also love this sort of narrative. It evokes the same feeling as, say, learning that the world isn't as fair as you thought. Maybe problems don't have solutions as simple as fiction likes to present them. Maybe the systems that govern our lives are too complicated and insidious for that.
Xenogears has many layers of obfuscation and discovery about the world. It has so many that at some point it becomes convoluted to the point of comedy. I do like Xenogears a lot, but Chrono Trigger is a much brisker and tighter experience that still has an impact.
I haven't seen much actual plot analysis for Chrono Trigger, so I'm going to try and break down my thoughts on it.
The initiating incident is that Crono meets a princess at a festival. After some time shenanigans and a kidnapping plot, he has to save her. Rescuing a princess is about the most archetypical video game plot there is, and it sets up a simple premise. There are no other known conflicts at this point. Saving the princess will solve everything, like in Mario, Zelda, etc.
It doesn't quite work out that way. Right afterward, Crono is put on trial for kidnapping the princess. Bringing the princess back only created a new, more complicated conflict. The world is not as simple as saving a princess and getting rewarded. The player is judged for it, and even for the most innocent actions committed at the start of the game. Video games have a tendency to present important decisions in an obvious way. Here, though, it even matters if you picked up the princess's pendant before trying to talk to her.
The trial scene is when the game seems to grab most people. It comes out of left field, and it's neat how well the game hid the decisions that influence it during the festival. At this point the main story of Chrono Trigger, about trying to stop the apocalypse, hasn't started. But this entire stretch leading into the first visit to 2300 AD is a microcosm of the story's structure.
Next, we have the visit to the post-apocalypse of 2300 AD. The protagonists learn that a massive monster called Lavos will destroy the world in 1999 AD. They vow to prevent that. When they get back to 1000 AD, they hear that Magus created Lavos in 600 AD.
Now we're onto the main story. This time, the archetypical plot we're starting from is in the framework of Dragon Quest. It's a huge escalation in scale compared to the princess story, but it looks like there's a straightforward path. If the Hero (Frog) gets the MacGuffin (Masamune) and defeats the Bad Guy (Magus, named Maou in Japanese, the title that many Dragon Quest villains hold), then the day will be saved.
And again, this turns out to be much more complicated. Lavos has actually existed since long, long before Magus. As we learn more about the shared history between Lavos and humanity, we learn that this is a problem with no obvious solution. The rise of human civilization coincided with the arrival of Lavos. Humans built a great empire with the energy that Lavos provided, but Lavos also destroyed that empire. There's technology in 2300 AD that the pendant reacts to too, so unless the Guru of Reason built it all, Lavos's energy was presumably harvested at some point after 1000 AD. And again it destroyed civilization.
There's a lot that someone could read into Lavos and what it represents. The game never goes out of its way to explain what it is or where it came from. But on a basic level, Lavos is a great and enticing, but dangerous, energy source. Not just dangerous, but really, really obviously dangerous. And yet people continued to use it until they destroyed themselves. Twice, assuming that this is what happened in 1999.
No longer is this a story about good and evil and beating a villain with a magic sword. Magus wasn't evil, and even Lavos isn't. It's just a creature trying to survive and reproduce. The people of Zeal just wanted their magic floating cities. And what you're left with is a giant, mindless creature that, even now, seems unstoppable. You've been free to fight Lavos since a couple hours into the game, but you can't win. (Or, well, you can with a lot of grinding. But let's say players are being reasonable.)
There are a lot of stories about impending disaster or climate change allegories or the like. But I love that Chrono Trigger presents its impending disaster as having one simple, straightforward solution before telling the player that, actually, it doesn't work that way. The first time you're forced to actually go up against Lavos, the player's self-insert dies, and Zeal meets the same fate that it would have if you never came at all.
After this whole arc of the story concludes, the story becomes open-ended. You could go straight to the final dungeon and not even revive Crono, if you wanted. You can revive Crono, fix every problem in every era, collect all the best stuff, then do the final dungeon and fight Lavos. You can fight Lavos without going through the final dungeon too, like you've always been able to. At the start of this segment, you're still probably not able to kill Lavos, but it's up to you to come up with a solution. In the end, it's not that hard to kill Lavos. The solution comes down to getting strong enough that you don't immediately die when it hits you. But you have to decide how to do that.
Anyway, there's plenty of little character moments throughout the game that I like too. The scene where Lucca relives when her mother loses her legs always gives me chills. It says everything you need to know about what motivates her in a couple of minutes.
But the overarching story isn't about the characters as individuals. Crono has no personality because he's you, the player, learning about the world. The time travel is a mechanism for slowly unraveling the world's history and the truth about Lavos. It's all in service of creating a sense of discovery in a world that once seemed simple. It's limited as a Super Nintendo game and Xenogears gets way, way more complicated, but at least this game was finished, and I can get to the end in fifteen hours.
Chrono Trigger is a story about discovering that the world is more complex than it appears. Masato Kato seems to have a love for such stories, judging by his later work on Xenogears. I also love this sort of narrative. It evokes the same feeling as, say, learning that the world isn't as fair as you thought. Maybe problems don't have solutions as simple as fiction likes to present them. Maybe the systems that govern our lives are too complicated and insidious for that.
Xenogears has many layers of obfuscation and discovery about the world. It has so many that at some point it becomes convoluted to the point of comedy. I do like Xenogears a lot, but Chrono Trigger is a much brisker and tighter experience that still has an impact.
I haven't seen much actual plot analysis for Chrono Trigger, so I'm going to try and break down my thoughts on it.
The initiating incident is that Crono meets a princess at a festival. After some time shenanigans and a kidnapping plot, he has to save her. Rescuing a princess is about the most archetypical video game plot there is, and it sets up a simple premise. There are no other known conflicts at this point. Saving the princess will solve everything, like in Mario, Zelda, etc.
It doesn't quite work out that way. Right afterward, Crono is put on trial for kidnapping the princess. Bringing the princess back only created a new, more complicated conflict. The world is not as simple as saving a princess and getting rewarded. The player is judged for it, and even for the most innocent actions committed at the start of the game. Video games have a tendency to present important decisions in an obvious way. Here, though, it even matters if you picked up the princess's pendant before trying to talk to her.
The trial scene is when the game seems to grab most people. It comes out of left field, and it's neat how well the game hid the decisions that influence it during the festival. At this point the main story of Chrono Trigger, about trying to stop the apocalypse, hasn't started. But this entire stretch leading into the first visit to 2300 AD is a microcosm of the story's structure.
Next, we have the visit to the post-apocalypse of 2300 AD. The protagonists learn that a massive monster called Lavos will destroy the world in 1999 AD. They vow to prevent that. When they get back to 1000 AD, they hear that Magus created Lavos in 600 AD.
Now we're onto the main story. This time, the archetypical plot we're starting from is in the framework of Dragon Quest. It's a huge escalation in scale compared to the princess story, but it looks like there's a straightforward path. If the Hero (Frog) gets the MacGuffin (Masamune) and defeats the Bad Guy (Magus, named Maou in Japanese, the title that many Dragon Quest villains hold), then the day will be saved.
And again, this turns out to be much more complicated. Lavos has actually existed since long, long before Magus. As we learn more about the shared history between Lavos and humanity, we learn that this is a problem with no obvious solution. The rise of human civilization coincided with the arrival of Lavos. Humans built a great empire with the energy that Lavos provided, but Lavos also destroyed that empire. There's technology in 2300 AD that the pendant reacts to too, so unless the Guru of Reason built it all, Lavos's energy was presumably harvested at some point after 1000 AD. And again it destroyed civilization.
There's a lot that someone could read into Lavos and what it represents. The game never goes out of its way to explain what it is or where it came from. But on a basic level, Lavos is a great and enticing, but dangerous, energy source. Not just dangerous, but really, really obviously dangerous. And yet people continued to use it until they destroyed themselves. Twice, assuming that this is what happened in 1999.
No longer is this a story about good and evil and beating a villain with a magic sword. Magus wasn't evil, and even Lavos isn't. It's just a creature trying to survive and reproduce. The people of Zeal just wanted their magic floating cities. And what you're left with is a giant, mindless creature that, even now, seems unstoppable. You've been free to fight Lavos since a couple hours into the game, but you can't win. (Or, well, you can with a lot of grinding. But let's say players are being reasonable.)
There are a lot of stories about impending disaster or climate change allegories or the like. But I love that Chrono Trigger presents its impending disaster as having one simple, straightforward solution before telling the player that, actually, it doesn't work that way. The first time you're forced to actually go up against Lavos, the player's self-insert dies, and Zeal meets the same fate that it would have if you never came at all.
After this whole arc of the story concludes, the story becomes open-ended. You could go straight to the final dungeon and not even revive Crono, if you wanted. You can revive Crono, fix every problem in every era, collect all the best stuff, then do the final dungeon and fight Lavos. You can fight Lavos without going through the final dungeon too, like you've always been able to. At the start of this segment, you're still probably not able to kill Lavos, but it's up to you to come up with a solution. In the end, it's not that hard to kill Lavos. The solution comes down to getting strong enough that you don't immediately die when it hits you. But you have to decide how to do that.
Anyway, there's plenty of little character moments throughout the game that I like too. The scene where Lucca relives when her mother loses her legs always gives me chills. It says everything you need to know about what motivates her in a couple of minutes.
But the overarching story isn't about the characters as individuals. Crono has no personality because he's you, the player, learning about the world. The time travel is a mechanism for slowly unraveling the world's history and the truth about Lavos. It's all in service of creating a sense of discovery in a world that once seemed simple. It's limited as a Super Nintendo game and Xenogears gets way, way more complicated, but at least this game was finished, and I can get to the end in fifteen hours.