(Review archived from January 4, 2019)
Can you believe that I had never played Chrono Trigger until now!? Well it was high time I remedied this blind spot in my gaming repertoire, and an unseasonably cold November seemed like as good a time as any to rectify that. Chrono Trigger is absolutely deserving of the full and long winded review treatment, but on the other hand I’m not sure I could say anything about this remarkable game that hasn’t been said elsewhere over the years. It’s easily one of the best JRPGs I’ve ever played, possibly second only to Final Fantasy VI which takes a slight edge on the basis of personal nostalgia. I’m a bit of a Doctor Who fan, and on several occasions I found myself making mental comparisons between the two. Chrono Trigger is essentially the greatest Doctor Who game of all time … that never was. I know it sounds weird to bestow praise by means of comparison, but I mean that as high praise indeed. It captures that same remarkable theme and spirit of high adventures through time and space with a sense of whimsy and wonder. It’s exceedingly rare that I finish an RPG and am immediately inclined to start a new game just to spend a bit longer with these characters, but Chrono Trigger is just such a game. In fact one of my minor quibbles with Chrono Trigger is that there’s too much content to see it all in one playthrough. There were definitely characters I left to languish more than others, and I’m quite certain that as a result there were any number of techs and character combinations that I never had the opportunity to try out. Thankfully New Game+ mode exists to support exactly this sort of continued exploration, and I’m quite certain that I’ll be returning to the world of Chrono and friends at some point, hopefully before the end of time. If you’re a JRPG fan and like me have somehow foolishly neglected playing this masterpiece, you should definitely make a point of doing so in 2019.
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