One of my pet peeves that I see a lot on r/JRPG and r/finalfantasy is people naming a favorite game but then qualifying it by saying another (usually well-loved by fan consensus) game is objectively better. "FF8 is my favorite by far! But FF6 is objectively perfect." "I love Breath of Fire 2 but 4 is objectively the best." It just smacks of hedging your bets to avoid stepping on the toes of anyone with a different favorite, and doesn't take into consideration that because different people value different things in their games, there is no one game that can considered 'strictly better' than anything elWAIT scratch that, Final Fantasy 5 is my favorite game of all time but Chrono Trigger is objectively the best and I will brook no arguments.
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Poor Glenn is such a tragic figure. One of the most skilled swordsmen in the kingdom but lacking grit and courage, he watches his best friend and mentor figure (and possibly lover) brutally killed before his eyes. He completely freezes up in fear which means Cyrus' sacrifice is for naught as he gets zapped by a magic spell and turned into a frog. And because the universe likes to kick him when he's down, the Hero Medal - symbol of the fallen Cyrus' bravery - literally falls into his cowardly lap. And when the heroes later arrive before him bearing not only his lost Hero Medal but also the legendary Masamune, old wounds are torn open. Eventually he takes up the sword and the medal, and the rest is history (ha!).

The first time I played this in high school, I heard the epic music start playing and saw the mopey frog guy who talked all funny slice through a SODDING MOUNTAIN and I whooped and cheered. This time, something in the mix of tragedy and triumph moved me, and I teared up. The epic music wasn't playing because he had defeated any monsters yet - it was playing because he had won a battle against his inner demons, deciding to become the hero Cyrus should have been. Not because he deserved it, but because destiny dropped the tools to avenge his friend and protect the kingdom he loved right in his lap.

The storytelling in Chrono Trigger is exceptionally good because everything is human, intimate, personal. It's why, like the Frog example above, some of the most memorable musical moments depict not the action on screen but the emotions of the characters. Lavos' first descent into Earth's atmosphere is accompanied not by an ominous Latin chorus but with a sad and almost lonely track, because the advanced-but-proud race of Reptites has just chosen extinction over Ayla's offer of cooperation, and humans will endure the coming Ice Age alone. It's not like other games don't try to meld the macro / micro and the individual character arcs / large-scale stakes, but Chrono Trigger does it so well because it has the perfect storm of an extremely tightly-knit and well-paced narrative, a perfectly-sized cast with enough side content to keep everyone relevant to the storyline, and a fantastic translation that blows everything else Square has done to that point out of the water.

The OST is my favorite one to this day - with all due respect to the body of work Mitsuda-san would go on to do, he peaked right here. Nearly every single track is a certified intergalactic banger! As a musician and a music nerd, I like analyzing and trying to reverse-engineer the music I listen to, especially in video games. With some games the music is really easy to figure out, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing (FF6's excellent soundtrack is very easy to analyse). But Chrono Trigger's soundtrack carries a certain magic that I still can't explain - I don't know why it works, but work it does.

Do you value good gameplay? That's here too! Thanks to varied sets of resistances, unique counterattack scripts, and needing to take positioning into consideration, enemy formations often require more strategy than simply spamming attacks and healing when needed, but each character's varied skillset means that you rarely ever feel railroaded into one approach to dealing with a tough enemy or boss fight. The single/dual/triple tech system combined with each character's relatively low MP values adds a very cool layer of strategy - do you go with each character's strongest techs for maximum DPS, or elect to go with the multi-techs that are flashier and more MP-efficient but force the faster characters to wait for the slower ones? The skill system is hardly the most extensive, but due to the game's relatively streamlined runtime, learning and trying out new combinations of characters and techniques kept me engaged all through my playthrough.

I think I've rambled and gushed enough about this game. Its epic overarching plot, deeply human storytelling, impeccable pacing, exceptional music, and engaging combat are as close to perfect as you can get. Chrono Trigger is what you would get if you eugenically bred JRPGs for a hundred generations - it's a celebration of the best qualities of JRPGs but genre-transcendingly good at the same time.

Unlike Chrono Trigger (which unsurprisingly has a perfect ending sequence as well), I have no idea how to end this log. So in lieu of a nice sentence to wrap it all up, please enjoy the beautiful music from one of the game's most emotional moments.