After Final Fantasy 7 warmed me up to the JRPG genre, I decided to try my luck again and finish Chrono Trigger. It seems I had been too harsh in my initial assessment of the genre, because I ended up liking this game a lot as well. While it would be easy to point to the combat system or the plot as the reason why, it’s the less obvious elements like pacing and structure that made the game work so well. While there aren’t explicit chapters, the plot is broken into vignettes set in one of the game’s six time periods. For each time-period shift, the party members in the spotlight usually changes as well, so the story is always progressing on three levels. Firstly, the plot offers a slow progression that pays off occasionally in big moments. Secondly, hopping among time periods steadily provides details about how the world changed over time. Thirdly, the party members are always commenting on the plot, the world, or their own personal situation, providing a constant source of narrative progression. Even the sidequests use this three-part design on a smaller scale, so there’s never a point where the expectation is to run through some padded content to get your team some more levels. Nothing goes to waste, leading to a perfect pacing most RPG’s struggle to establish. It’s a great example of a holistically designed game that’s greater than the sum of its parts, so if you can give Chrono Trigger time to impress you, it almost certainly will.