The GWJ JRPG Club - Q4 2020 - Chrono Trigger!

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Welcome, friends, to our fourth and final game of 2020! It's fitting that we end 2020 with an uplifting, optimistic tale of three friends, and their companions, who travel through time, and strive against all odds, to prevent a global apocalypse.

This 1995 game is widely regarded as one of the greatest, and most influential, games of all time. It combines the RPG "dream team": Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy; Yujii Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest; and Akira Toryama, the artist responsible for Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball's iconic looks. Many of us played Chrono Trigger. I certainly did: it was my favorite game, in late-middle and high school, and I definitely got every single ending. It'll be fun, I'm sure, to revisit what made this game so great, and how well it's held up.

Oh, and that music ...

Spoiler Policy: While some of us probably remember every detail of this game, others don't, and still others haven't played it. There's no need to spoiler-tag tactics and strategies, nor even most details: after all, this game has been written about everywhere. But there are a few major story beats worth preserving, for first timers, and for people who might have forgotten about them. My suggestion: please spoiler-tag any major story beats during or after the Ocean Palace.

Club Completion: There are multiple paths to the game's final confrontation, including one available within about 5 minutes of starting the game. Chrono Trigger's New Game + gave you the strength to take on the final boss from the jump, and you can access multiple different endings (12 or 13, I think) depending on when you beat it. Given that, I think we need some guidance on what counts as completion, here. You can call it completed, and level up, when you roll credits on some version of Ending 1 or Ending 2. Ending 1 is, essentially, the "true final ending"; Ending 2 requires you to get to the end of the game, but leaves at least one major task undone. There are multiple small variations on each depending on how you access the final boss and how you treat various characters; those don't matter for club purposes. Of course, if you have a NG+ save, and want to use it, feel free!

Happy gaming!

In for a penny, in for a pound!

I already started the game last night. After reading a lot about the Steam versiion, I went with my trusty ROM version on the Wii - I really can't be troubled to find my SNES copy among my boxes, assuming it still works at all.

It was surprising to find out just how much I remember of the game. Pleasant.

Spoiler:

Got to the part when we return from the year 600, just before they thrown Chrono in jail.

My Retroid has reached LA according to the tracking site. Struggling to put off starting until it gets here; JRPGs are something I enjoy much more in a portable form factor. Curse the Switch's anemic SNES catalog!

3DS is charged and ready. I have a New Game++++++ I could use, but I think I am just going to go through a fresh save.

Wow, I did not know this game had 13 possible endings. I think I only found 2-3 of them back when I played it in elementary school. Looking forward to replaying this actually, it has been far too long and I remember the combat being really cool. Hopefully the Steam version isn't terrible because I keep hearing bad things about it.

From what I understand, it's had a few major updates since it was first released. Here's what I've noticed or heard about it:

  • It has that "mobile game" font, which is kind of ugly compared to the original (wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me);
  • The new cut scenes are cool and well-animated, but the game hasn't otherwise been modified to account for them. So, sometimes things will happen in a cut scene, and then you will see the exact same thing play out with 16-bit graphics.
  • General consensus is that the new content -- designed to provide a bridge to Chrono Cross -- sucks.

I'm fairly certain I can get all 13 this time around... If memory serves me right, I only ever got about 10 or so, but I may have gotten all 13 at some point.

I have owned this game in two formats, officially, after all. SNES and PSOne, both physical. It's bound to have happened.

Just checked: there are 12 in the original and 13 in the re-release, plus the bad ending of failing to avert the apocalypse.

Wembley wrote:

3DS is charged and ready. I have a New Game++++++ I could use, but I think I am just going to go through a fresh save.

Me too - starting from Level 1!

I'm in. I bought the Steam version because it was on sale. Then I realized I might have the 3DS version already. I'll play one of the two.

Really excited to get started on this! I'm also excited that it's relatively short, because I'm really having difficulty finishing long games lately.

Wembley wrote:

I have a New Game++++++ I could use, but I think I am just going to go through a fresh save.

I think I have a NG+ save on my DS cart too.

Starting fresh sounds like a good idea.

Malkroth wrote:

Wow, I did not know this game had 13 possible endings. I think I only found 2-3 of them back when I played it in elementary school. Looking forward to replaying this actually, it has been far too long and I remember the combat being really cool. Hopefully the Steam version isn't terrible because I keep hearing bad things about it.

My personal suggestion would be to pay for it on Steam if you don't already own a copy somewhere, and then obtain the ROM and run either the DS or the SNES versions. I don't like the movies they added to the DS version, I think everyone looks wrong, and Crono in particular looks like a huge jerk. But you can turn those off, and it's a good port otherwise. Citra should emulate it well.

For absolute best fidelity, use the emulator 'higan', with a SNES ROM. That will be as close to the original as you can get, short of buying an actual SNES and CT cart. (and those old batteries are probably failing by now, it's been 25 years.) There's apparently one ending fewer in that version, but that's the original, the Way It Was.

Potentially unpopular opinion:

I get that New Game+ was this new revolutionary thing at the time-- I was there, I remember-- but I don't like the way it's implemented in Chrono Trigger. There's nothing fun about steamrolling your way through a bunch of unskippable battles that are trivial and tedious because you have endgame stats and gear.

I got a couple of the alternate endings back in the day, but every time I've replayed the game as an adult, I've gotten bored within an hour of starting a New Game+. I eventually just watched all the endings on YouTube, and every time I replay the game, I do it from a fresh file.

That’s a valid point, but you hardly have to sit through a bunch of unskippable fights - pretty much just the bosses.

How do you figure? The majority of the fights in the game are unskippable.

hbi2k wrote:

How do you figure? The majority of the fights in the game are unskippable.

A good chunk of the fights in the game can be skirted if you walk slowly and time your trajectory carefully. Granted, not all, and some of the fights that you think you've skipped somehow trigger. I'm guessing it was more revolutionary at the time it came out, and rather less impressive or functional today.

One of the big innovations when the game released was the lack of random battles, and being able to see and avoid enemies in the environments. See the “Carefully Crafted Encounters” section of this article: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/featu...

I’d estimate you can avoid 85-90% of the non-boss encounters.

I'd surprised if more than 50% of the encounters are avoidable.

brokenclavicle wrote:

A good chunk of the fights in the game can be skirted if you walk slowly and time your trajectory carefully.

I don't find tip-toeing around an invisible pixel that triggers an encounter fun either.

The planned encounters-- meaning the designers know with a fair degree of certainty what level you'll be at when you reach a given part of the game-- make a first playthrough impeccably balanced and tightly paced.

Unfortunately, they also make a New Game+ a tedious slog.

Booted the game tonight, and almost got killed as soon as I went through the time portal, mostly because I found in the woods in 1000AD a bit before going to the fair, and then fought the robot at the fair. As a result, my HPs were in the teens when I got into the game's first story battle, and I finished with 4

It's nice that not-so-random battles actually take seconds, as opposed to Cold Steel II where they can take forever.

I booted the game up earlier today, and was pleasantly surprised to discovery how wide open the world map is at the beginning of the game! I found that the ferry was selling tickets to Porre, so I figured I could just walk -- and did, all the way to the south of the continent.

Also, remember when you could talk to everyone in a town within 5 minutes? Chrono Trigger remembers!

hbi2k wrote:

I'd surprised if more than 50% of the encounters are avoidable.

brokenclavicle wrote:

A good chunk of the fights in the game can be skirted if you walk slowly and time your trajectory carefully.

I don't find tip-toeing around an invisible pixel that triggers an encounter fun either.

The planned encounters-- meaning the designers know with a fair degree of certainty what level you'll be at when you reach a given part of the game-- make a first playthrough impeccably balanced and tightly paced.

Unfortunately, they also make a New Game+ a tedious slog.

Can you find that statistic? Because I don’t wanna play it again to find out

I just remember being able to cruise through the game back on SNES when I had time to commit the pathing to memory. Magus’ Lair was one of the spots where you had to fight more than others.

Eh you know, what the hell. I’ll finish my iOS play through and start an NG+ and catalogue some dungeons, get a sample size.

It's been awhile since I went through it, but I thought you could just attack/attack/attack in a NG+ and finish fights almost immediately?

Contrast that with FF7, which took like 40 seconds on the fight visuals before you could even enter commands. NG+ on that system would have been truly dire.

It's still stopping every 10s for everyone to get into battle formation, wait for the menu to pop up, attack attack attack, victory fanfare, menu close, everyone gets back in a line behind Crono, wash rinse repeat. It adds up.

Tell you what, when my Retroid comes in and I start my playthrough I'll try to skip every battle I can and keep a running tally.

Alright, I'm in. I fired it up tonight, and put about an hour in, which got me up to the cathedral.

I also tested out the open worldness of this game by going down to Lorre and had the mayor give me 10 gold to spin around and cluck like a chicken. Does he do that later in the game? He has to, since this is a lot of detail for something that is probably entirely missable.

I’ve also been listening to the soundtrack on and off for years now, but now that I’m listening to it in game, there’s no doubt that it’s really good. Especially the battle theme, it’s just got such a good groove to it.

Now, one thing this game is reminding me is why sometimes I have a hard time going back to older JRPGs is the lack of dialogue and character interaction, due to whatever limitations of the time. On the flip side, some of my favorites in the genre now are the Persona games or the Trails games, which go as hard in the character interaction direction as anything out there. I wouldn’t want Chrono Trigger to be as wordy as those games since it would definitely mess with the pacing, but I might still love to see some DQ style optional party chats or something.

I pulled up a video of a Chrono Trigger speedrun and clicked around a little just to get a feel for how many battles are actually skippable.

Excepting the obvious glitches-- of which there are a fair number-- I'd ballpark that the runner skips maybe 75%, but of those, I'd estimate that probably only half could be reasonably expected to be skipped by an ordinary person who's played the game a couple times but hasn't broken it with pixel-perfect, speedrunner-level precision.

So I feel pretty good about my estimate that less than half of the battles are what I'd consider "reasonably" skippable for the average person.

I got started today for just a quick half hour. Loaded up, went to the fair, and then ... well, yeah, stuff happens.

I chuckled at the game start. I don't feel like I've played a ton of JRPGs, but I feel like I've played a ton of JRPGs that start with a boy at home who gets woken up by his mother and told to get out of bed. Or maybe I'm just remembering things from my childhood.

In any case, I'm underway! Everything seems to be working fine on Steam. I've hooked up my Xbox game controller to make things easier, and yeah, no worries. So far so good!

I'm in. I started already on Steam. I played it for about 60 seconds, then thought I'd compare it a bit against the ol' emulator... and I actually ended up liking the Steam version a bit better. So I left off just after picking up Frog.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

I chuckled at the game start. I don't feel like I've played a ton of JRPGs, but I feel like I've played a ton of JRPGs that start with a boy at home who gets woken up by his mother and told to get out of bed. Or maybe I'm just remembering things from my childhood.

Ha! I've had the same thought and so too pondered the memory.

Just started playing. Still mind blowing what a technical masterpiece this is. Ran around at the fair, fought some enemies in the forest.

Started this up last night and spent about an hour running around the fair. Collected enough silver points to do the 80 game twice and the 40 game once. Also leveled Crono and Merle up to level 4. Probably going to go meet Lucca next time I play instead of messing around at the fair more.

I remember I had a 3rd party turbo controller to do the soda drinking ad nauseam. Wanted that Lode Sword at the beginning.

Is there a reason to do the 80 point game twice? I just did the 20/40/80 games once each.

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