The GWJ JRPG Club - Q4 2020 - Chrono Trigger!

RPGs being 80-100 hour monstrosities became more of a thing starting in the PS1 era, I think. Chrono Trigger is definitely more tightly paced than most even for the time, but Final Fantasy VI wasn't all that much longer IIRC.

I've knocked out the last of the endgame side quests with only the final dungeon left before the fight with Lavos, and I'm at about 18 hours. I feel like I was around 13-14 hour when I started the sidequest run, and I should be done by the 20 hour mark. With that in mind, if you skip the sidequests (and you probably don't need to do all of them but I appreciate the levels), then 15 hours to beat the game seems reasonable.

I've also been purposely switching my team up to spread out Tech points a bit, and at this point everyone but the last character who joins you has learned all their Techs. So if I do a NG+, I'll be ready to go.

I spent a bit more time with the game today, just a quick half hour before dinner. We're back in the present day, up to the trial now, so still very early in the game. At Level 7 at the moment.

Now that I've fixed the controller issue, the game is 100 times more enjoyable to play. No problems controlling attacks at all in combat today, and even regular movement is much smoother.

After 11.5 hours, I'm now about to start going through the side-quests (I just finished the Death Peak section). If I had known this game was this short, I would have replayed it a while ago. If all goes well, I should finish it this week.

I'm happy to report that, so far, it's as good as I remembered it to be!

Me too! I've just finished that ...

Spoiler:

Crono is back! It was not quite the tender reunion I remembered, because I didn't have Marle or Lucca in the party when I entered that final screen.

Also, I love the clue that you're going to be successful: one of the last chests before reaching the summit (maybe the last) is a new sword for Crono.

I'm at 11:39 now, and ready for some side questing!

I just crossed the bridge in 600 AD. It's so nice having magic for my party members, gives Marle something to do besides spam attack. Around 6 hours in myself currently.

Annnd, I’m done! I finished the game, just around 21 hours, with the Beyond Time ending. And it was actually quite a satisfying ending.

Since early on when the game was selected for the club, people were mentioning that this was an nth replay or an all-timer, I was keeping a special eye for how it holds up, or how it sticks with me. I don’t know if this falls into my list of favorites, but I think that’s really just a function of when I first played it. My first introduction to it was in college on the DS. If I had played it on the SNES at a more formative time, I think it would have had a much bigger impact, as many games at the time did (which is why I still love Super Mario RPG). Even if I recognize it’s quality now in a way I didn’t back in college, I still don’t know where I would rank it, since I’ve been accustomed to some modern conventions in JRPGs, like bigger worlds to explore or more character interactions that this game doesn’t have.

That said, I still think it’s probably one of those games that is greater than the sum of it’s parts, even if those parts are really good; the battle system is good to great, the music is great, the pacing is fantastic, the lack of random encounters on the world map is great, the story is good to great, the style is good, the characters are good if a bit simple, etc. I don’t think I can name a bad part of this game, and it all pulls together into a coherent package. In that way, I sort of compare it to another time traveling game, Radiant Historia, that didn’t quite reach those levels. In that game, the story was good, the music was good, the characters were good, the combat system was good (but could have gotten a bit more difficult at the end) – everything was good and well executed on, but it didn’t feel like it transcended it’s individual pieces to become something more like Chrono Trigger does. I can’t quite put my finger on why that is, but that’s my take.

I may or may not NG+ this later to collect a bunch of the different endings (and their achievements). For those who have beaten multiple endings, were any particularly good?

Congratulations!

There are a few endings that stand out to me, if you decide to replay and get them. If you beat Lavos right before going to Tyranno Lair, you get a world where the Reptites survived the ice age, and became the dominant species. Chrono Cross made this ending into one of its alternate histories.

There's also a joke ending where Lucca and Marle rate who's hot, and who's not, among the male cast. This ending is notable because it's the only time where Crono has any dialogue.

And, there's the ending where you get to meet the developers, which is pretty good. To get this one you need to beat Lavos in the Ocean Palace, where it's extra-strong, or at the beginning of the game before you have a full party.

I nudged things ahead a bit again tonight. Moved on past the trial to the next area, about two and a half hours into the game. This is quite a chill game, really enjoying things.

Still not sure I'm getting the subtleties of combat yet, but it doesn't seem complicated and we're having no problems as of yet.

I'm inching closer to that grand finale. I've completed a few of the endgame sidequests: gotten the strong armor from Ayla's village, re-planted a forest, and exorcised and renovated an old chapel. Right now, my guys are exploring Giant's Claw in search of the elusive Rainbow Shell, and I had forgotten that the Claw was basically a sunken Tyrano Lair! That was a pretty cool surprise.

Finished the game, saw the most common ending (with the Millennial Fair parade). Took Ayla through the Black Omen so I could Charm everything, including a bunch of Speed Tabs from Panels.

Took Crono, Ayla, and Robo into the final fight. Lavos went down like a punk. I highly recommend anyone around here who hasn't beaten the game yet go into that fight blind. You can only do it for the first time once.

Spoiler:

Realizing, "oh wait, that thing on the RIGHT is the Lavos Core?! WTF?!" is one of my top 10 gaming memories of all time.

Congratulations, and welcome to Level 1!

And, I agree, that twist at the end was great.

hbi2k wrote:

It's a small thing, but how nice is it that they added "Equip" to the shop menu in the DS version?

This post kind of got my wheels spinning because I thought it was in the original release, but apparently it was not.

Me being wrong isn’t notable, but I happen to be playing Breath of Fire 2 on Switch and it has this feature, pre-dating even the original Chrono Trigger release by 4 months.

Also notable and off topic is that the BoF2 translation is reprehensible compared to CT. Oof.

BoF2 is one of the worst-translated games I've played. I remember thinking that even as a teenager playing it, and that was during an era when translations were a lot poorer than today.

There's a really good patch out there that you can use to clean up the translation.

Put it on my Switch for me?

In general the game pales compared to FFVI and CT, more in line with FFIV. Glad they got their act together for BoFIII.

I really love the Breath of Fire games. Three is the pinnacle of the series in my opinion. I remember having to ask my parents' permission to call the Nintendo help line because I got stuck in BoF1 or 2.

The primary reason I’m playing it now on Switch is I got stuck pretty far in, and now I can use walkthroughs and YouTube to make sure I finish it. The game’s got heart, for all its blunders.

III and IV, for me, are the better games in the series. I still enjoyed the odd experiment that V was, but ultimately my favorite is IV. Breath of Fire, that is.

Spent some time this week on the sidequests, and I finished the last one a few minutes ago! I might have been a bit overleveled for poor Ozzie, the poor guy and his pals never had a chance.

I should have some time tomorrow to go through the Black Omen and wrap this up. I might get a list of the different endings and try a new game + afterwards. The game is short anyway, and I certainly wouldn't mind play it some more. After Cold Steel II, this feels like a walk in the park length wise. And difficulty wise.

Edit: Made it to the final boss, but got my ass handed to me. I will try again later today.

bobbywatson wrote:

Edit: Made it to the final boss, but got my ass handed to me. I will try again later today.

The final form got me twice. Once with the thing he does with status ailments, and the other because I guess I got too aggressive on offense and wasn't healing fast enough. For an otherwise fairly easy game, it definitely dials up a bit at the very end.

Some of the boss fights sure can feel like they're going totally fine and you have everything under control - but then you mis-time something and one party member goes down, and then it's damn near impossible to recover.

That happened to me the first time I fought the Lavos spawn. Not quite a boss fight, but harder than a lot of other encounters. The lack of a good party-wide healing ability made it hard for me to recover.

Spoiler:

And without Crono in the party, I was also missing Life, plus missing a couple of curing double-techs

Sundown wrote:

That said, I still think it’s probably one of those games that is greater than the sum of it’s parts, even if those parts are really good; the battle system is good to great, the music is great, the pacing is fantastic, the lack of random encounters on the world map is great, the story is good to great, the style is good, the characters are good if a bit simple, etc. I don’t think I can name a bad part of this game, and it all pulls together into a coherent package.

I'm always amazed by the sheer complexity of what they created, compared with the amount of memory they had to work with. They had only four megabytes, total, for everything. Music, sound, graphics, dialog, everything. I've always imagined them searching and searching for ways to save another few bytes, to make stuff just a little more efficient, so they could squeeze a little more game in. I have a mental image of someone announcing they'd saved twenty bytes, and their teammates all saying 'yay!' and waving tiny flags at their desks before returning to work.

And the trial sequence kinda blew my mind, when I first played it. I didn't come to the game until late, via PC emulation, probably around 1998, and I was still amazed by the underlying mechanic. I hadn't seen that kind of interactivity before, particularly not in a console game.

Spoiler:

It remembered what you did, and brought that behavior up later!

I thought that was a fantastic idea. Even now, all these years later, I tell people unsure about Chrono Trigger to play through the trial sequence; if they finish that and aren't having fun, they should just drop the game, as it's shown them its best.

There's another really interesting thing with the pendant chests (major spoiler):

Spoiler:

Many of the chests can be found in multiple eras. The later in time (not play time, but the in-game era) you open the box, the more powerful the treasure inside will be. That alone is very cool, that putting off opening a chest when you first find it means you can get a much better item.

But then, hey, you're a time traveler, right? So if you open a box in the far future, then if you can find the same box in the present, you can open it there too, and get a weaker version of the same item. I was trying to think of examples, and I believe there's a flame armor you can get in a chest somewhere. The most powerful version actually heals the character wearing it if they take fire damage, where there's at least one earlier version that protects from half the damage. There might be an in-between, no-damage version (ie, better than half, but not as good as actively healing the character), but I don't remember for sure.

As another example: I think there's an earring you can get in the far future that reduces all spell costs by 2/3, and then you can also grab the just-prior chest with an earring that reduces MP by half. Those two items make a gigantic difference in the party's resilience. But if you didn't twig to A) items get more powerful, and B) if you open from last to first, you can loot the same chest multiple times, you could entirely miss one or both.

Combine those things with the various side-quests and alternate outcomes, and I remain in awe at the skill of that team. Being able to do so much with so very little, and to make a game that's still absorbing and fun twenty-five years later, is very nearly a superhuman achievement.

I've seen it written that brilliance means hitting targets that other people can't hit, where genius means hitting targets that other people can't see. I remain convinced that the Chrono Trigger team was firmly in the latter territory.

Sundown wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

Edit: Made it to the final boss, but got my ass handed to me. I will try again later today.

The final form got me twice. Once with the thing he does with status ailments, and the other because I guess I got too aggressive on offense and wasn't healing fast enough. For an otherwise fairly easy game, it definitely dials up a bit at the very end.

My first attempts were with Crono, Marle, and Lucca. That didn't go so well, neither Lucca nor Marle could survive the rock attack. I ended up changing my party to Crono, Ayla, and Frog, and I managed to get Lavos on second attempt (with most of the damaged dealt with the Drop Kick Ayla/Frog dual tech). I had to up Ayla's Magic Defense with an accessory, and I used Megalixirs to heal whenever I needed to instead of relying on multi-heal techs. Since New Game + uses the last save data (and not a save data created after the final fight), I figured I could just use them with no consequence on future playthroughs (unlike my use of Zeram Capsules in Cold Steel II).

I got the regular ending. The timer on my last save data says 16:59. Without counting game overs and adding 30 minutes or so for the final boss and ending, that playthrough took 17.5 hours. Not bad!

With New Game + unlocked, I can definitely see myself playing some more of this over the next few weeks. Or not. For the first time in I don't know how long, my "now playing" list is completely empty, so I think now is a good time for a videogame break!

Damn, the Black Omen is LONG. Totally possible to steal HyperEthers and MegaElixers from lots of random enemies, though, which is nice.

... aaaaaand done!

My final save's timer was 16:36, which was pretty close to bobbywatson. Probably around 17:00, including the final boss.

For a game with small dungeons, that moved very quickly, both the Black Omen and the Lavos fight felt like they added a lot of time. I wasn't sure that the length of either was strictly necessary, especially with Lavos essentially making you re-battle all of the story bosses. That said, that idea fit pretty well thematically with the final battle's reveal about Lavos, and it was fun to see how much more powerful we had grown by the end of the game.

I ended up swapping around my party members during the Black Omen to make sure everyone finished earning their techs, and to see the triple techs I hadn't yet used. But, once that was done, I pretty much just used Crono, Marle, and Ayla. I made a lot of use of Ayla's stealing, especially after learning that I could steal Speed Tabs from the Panel enemies. That made 13 extra speed tabs, I think, which was enough to max Crono's speed, max Ayla's speed, and I think Marle's too. For the final fight(s) I used Crono, Marle, and Frog to make sure I had some powerful party-wide heals.

Also loved the Rainbow + Frenzy Band combo on Crono, at the end. Hitting & critting.

Hah just a weird thought that comment sparked.

If they ported or remade this game for current systems they would add in achievements like unlocking all triple techs and such, wouldn't they? And ones for different endings, etc.

Edit: wait the Steam version does have achievements? Now I need to go see what they did.

Edit2: just 13 achievements, one for each ending. That's nice.

Yeah, I really like that the achievements are just those, and not stupid nonsense like "Beat Heckran without casting a spell."

I don't know... I'm kind of disappointed that "Charm Ozzie's pants off" isn't an achievement.