Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger is regarded as one of the best games of all time by many people. It was made by a group referred to as "The Dream Team". The Dream Team was made up of Hironobu Sakaguchi of the Final Fantasy series, Yuiji Horii of the Dragon Warrior games, character designer Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball Z and music composers Yasunori Mitsuda of Xenogears and Chrono Cross, and Nobuo Uematsu of the Final Fantasy series. Chrono Trigger is the story of a group of adventures who travel across time to save the future. Along the way they acquire allies from other time periods in an attempt to defeat the alien parasite Lavos that is slowly destorying the planet. You evenutally gain seven playable characters (including Crono, Marle, Lucca, Frog, Robo, Ayla, and Magus, in order of appearance) and travel to more than five different time periods (prehistoric times, the ice age, 400 years from present time, present time, and 1000 and 1300 years into the future, in chronological order, but not necessarily in the order that the characters visit them).

One interesting note about Chrono Trigger is that the main character, Crono, never talks, though the other characters seem to act as though he does. This seems to be for the purpose of allowing the player to be in Crono's shoes, and talk for him. The one exception is in the ending "A Slide Show?" in which Crono says one line. ("What ARE you two doing?! I thought you said something about a nice little slide show?")

Chrono Trigger uses an Active Time Battle (ATB) system. Each character in your party of 1-3 attacks after a certain time period has passed. Attacks can be with an equipped weapon (such as swords and bows) or using "techs". Techs are characters' special attacks which use Magic Points (MP). There are many combo-techs that require two or three characters. Chrono Trigger, along with pioneering the ATB system, also has unique battles because they take place at the actual spot you meet them (not in a generic battle area). The positions of the enemy and of your party are important for many techs. For example, some techs will damage multiple enemies only if if they are close together. Other techs will attack in a straight line and only damage enemies in that path.

Some player consider one of the main problems with the game is its short playtime. It takes approximately 20 to 25 hours to complete the game, which is a very short timespan for a SNES RPG (Final Fantasy IV, for instance, takes about 40 hours). To solve this problem, the developers of the game created quite a few multiple endings that the player could earn, including several secret endings. Also, they inserted the "New Game +" system, which allowed you to start an new game with all the various rare and powerful equipment and experience you ended another game with. This allowed the player to reach all 12 endings very quickly.

The remake for the PlayStation features Anime movies spread through the game at key sequences and an "extras mode." Each ending reached unlocks more of the following:

• All 10 of the added anime movies
• 69 songs from the game, including a few unused songs
• Statistics on all of the monsters
• A list of all of the endings with a screenshot from each
• An art gallery with 16 anime-style drawings of characters
• A list of all characters' techs
• Descriptions of the bosses
• a "treasure map" which shows the locations of hidden items

A side story for Chrono Trigger was released for Nintendo's Satellaview[?] add-on for the SNES and was called Radical Dreamers. Radical Dreamers was completely redone for the PlayStation and released in the U.S. in the year 2000 as Chrono Cross. The original Radical Dreamers was a very short game, available only in Japan. However, Chrono Cross was redone with many more characters, a complete and total revisal of the plot, and other such advancements to convert Radical Dreamers into a full-size RPG, Chrono Cross.