Uno de los mejores juegos de la historia, creado por un dreamteam de desarrolladores de JRPGs y que cambió la forma de ver los videojuegos para siempre.
Siempre se dice que la edad de oro de los JRPG fue en Playstation 1 con esa imparable Squaresoft y, probablemente, están en lo cierto. Pero yo creo que esa edad de oro nunca habría llegado sin los de la época de SNES. Final Fantasy IV, V y VI, Dragon Quest V (el mejor) y VI, Earthbound, Illusion of Time, Terranigma... Si en esta época, se hubiese tenido la tecnología de la posterior, probablemente esta sería la mejor y no el preludio de.

Pero hablado de Chrono Trigger... Una de las historias más bien contadas de los juegos, a pesar de tener viajes temporales, que siempre complican más las cosas. Unos personajes extremadamente carismáticos, ya no sólo por lo bien escritos que están, sino porque el diseñador fue el mismísimo Akira Toriyama. Una banda sonora de ensueño compuesta por Yasunori Mitsuda... Todo, es que todo en este juego rezuma calidad.

I think playing this game so soon after Sonic 2 was a mistake, because it was hard not to make comparisons. This game is beautiful with a lovely style… because it looks like Sonic. The designs and music just aren’t quite as good. It’s not really fair to make comparisons, I know, but it’s hard not to.

The main mechanic, Ristar’s stretchy arms, is really creative and definitely has some fun and unique uses. I enjoyed it, mostly. But it feels like it definitely needs another coat of polish. There are times it really doesn’t feel as smooth as it should. I’d say I wish this game had some more time but considering it was already one of the last Mega Drive games before the Saturn, that might have led to it lounging in even more obscurity than it already did…

A story like a thin, 15 hour-long rain puddle that, when stepped into, sucks you deep into a dark, flooded underground cave, submerged for 122 hours, re-emerging, itching to dive in again.

A story like Atlas, holding you up with the world, knees buckling.

A story like a family, found, picked together from lint and scrap and old furniture, a story of broken people feeling a little more whole with each other.

A story of many arms, holding pieces of a whole, each visibly broken.

A story as a book, as a game, as an exhibition, as a play, as a hotline, as a painful auction, as a phone call with a loved one about to pass on.

A story that respects and knows art, architecture, theatre, computers, games and this broken scrapyard of a world as deeply as it respects you.

My favourite story ever created.

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10 years down the road, ten years after I gave the first act a preliminary playthrough, unsure if I'd like it due to its (then perceived) mixed Steam reviews - in 2023, I can't overstate the significance that Kentucky Route Zero has had in my life. When I begin to describe it with my voice, I get choked up- This story has, in near every facet, shaped the person I am; my aspirations, my goals, my loves, my dreams.

Part of me wants to say "I can't believe it's over now", but that's not true, nothing could be further from true than that. Kentucky Route Zero was a preamble to our current days; to the injustice of a global system built on the glowing bones of workers, soldiers, debtors, the other.

Kentucky Route Zero knows: We will be buried in time. All of this is vain. Businesses fail. Unpaid houses are abandoned. Jobs are left vacant by necessity or death. Monuments wash away in the cyclical tides of time.

People remember people, but that circle of support and awareness doesn't turn forever. Community is strong, mutual aid is strong, but it's all temporary. The systems, the money, the specific sense of gnawing on everything wins out against aspirations, goals, loves, dreams. This story needed no villain - a human price put on a quickening of entropy was villain enough; a price on food, on health, on community, on work, on addiction, on loneliness.

From within that anthropic erosion, Kentucky Route Zero asks us to hold onto each other, and pick up the ones that society has dropped. The world isn't evil; people aren't evil. The systems people build to elevate themselves over other people, themselves just as mortal, just as filled with blood and guts as them - those systems are an evil construct, and must be rejected, operated around, dismantled.

Kentucky Route Zero is a tragedy, but its catharsis isn't voiceless and meaningless; it's the strength needed to carry on and understand what to do.

Developing video games independently has been a hard road. Maybe someday, my landlord will change the locks.

Until then, with the voices of this story, I will sing.

I'm very emotional as I write this. This is my favorite single player game ever - it's not even close. I could talk about some of it's flaws, but while they might be flaws to most people, they're not to me. I love everything about this game.

Tonight I finally did it. I wish I had an audience to witness me. My 120th star - 100 Coins in Hazy Maze Cave - and I went outside, got shot out of a canon and met that scum bag rat fuck son of a bitch bastard Yoshi for my very first time!!!

My childhood is complete <3 this is a true coming of age moment for me.

Shigeru Miyamoto has gone on record saying that Mario “isn’t the kind of game you necessarily have to finish, it should be fun to just pick up and play,” and as a kid I often really would boot it up solely to jump around Bob-Omb Battlefield for a bit and feel myself or whatever. A pattern I’ve observed with a lot of gamers is that, as they get older, they slowly prioritize finishing games over simply the inherent fun of playing them — and while I definitely feel that was accurate for my late teens/early twenties as well, I’ve since returned to craving those more innate pleasures.

It’s wild how much Nintendo got right about Mario’s animations and the overall sound design on this first attempt, conveying that perfect sweetspot between weight and nimbleness, something I honestly don’t get as much out of 64's successors. Similarly, the level design also manages to find this nebulous since-unmatched middle-ground between open-ness and tight pacing, with many of the stages presenting you with vertical, spiral-shaped layouts, made up of multiple digestible paths that intersect so seamlessly that you never stop to think about them as anything other than one cohesive whole.

Aspects that feel like obvious limitations, like being booted out of the level when grabbing a Star or the rigid camera, end up aiding the game’s pacing and overall structure the more you actually think about it. The way you bounce between different paintings within Peach’s castle, completely at your own leisure, mirrors how you tackle the obstacles inside those worlds; loose and free-form and whichever way seems enjoyable to you at the moment without even having to think about it. It all seems so simple, and yet I’m still waiting for another platformer that is this immediately fun and endlessly replayable.