Chrono Trigger Review

Chrono Trigger is what happens when an all-star team, the producers of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest with Akira Toriyama drawing the cast, plays with house money and wastes none of it. Time travel is the design engine, not just the premise: planting a seed in the Middle Ages grows a forest in the future, a courtroom weighs choices you made an hour earlier, and the doomed year 1999 sits in the timeline as a standing dare, since the final boss can be challenged from almost any point, seeding thirteen distinct endings and the New Game Plus structure it invented.

The fights dispense with random encounters, enemies visible on maps that flow seamlessly into combat, while dual and triple techs make party composition a chemistry set. Yasunori Mitsuda's score and some of the SNES's most expressive sprite work carry real emotional range, from carnival brightness to the ruined future's despair. Pacing, generosity, warmth: no RPG of its era balances all three better.