Review: Chrono Trigger DS

[NewClassic_v1legacy]

I was suprised by just how much I still love the crap out of this game and just how much ANY excuse to replay Chrono Trigger is a good one.

For me, this "any excuse" was writing a wordy article about one of my favorite hobbies. Huzzah!

ha! I live in the Netherlands and got the game like a week (yes we europeans can import as well.) I'm near the end boss and somehow the game feels easier than before but maybe it's experience. But I'm realy glad I can play this game without having to buy a region adapter for my snes. If square and nintendo only could find it in their hearts to release Super Mario RPG on the DS That game is awesome as well and never saw the european shores as well.
but then again we got Terranigma. Another gem amongst the 16-bit rpgs.

Unless I'm mistaken, Super Mario RPG has made it to the Virtual Console for the Wii. Although not quite the DS, still a cheap and easy medium to enjoy a classic and fantastic game. And I'm jealous, Terranigma was among my favorite Enix titles of yore.

What's especially shocking is that a game this good could come out of not one, but two committees. Now that Square and Enix are together, can we hope that a sequel might come into existence?

Not likely. Chrono Cross was probably as close as we're likely to get. Although, I fear, if sequel does come to fruition, we'll all be screwed into a gaming series much akin to Final Fantasy [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_179/5544-The-Battleship-Final-Fantasy], which is something I don't think anyone wants.

 

[ZeroMachine]

This should be reason enough to get any form of Chrono Trigger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20N6syuwc

I favorited that video within twenty seconds XD

Anyways, I experienced Chrono Trigger for the first time a couple years back, and it has since been one of my favorites. I never get sick of it, and I'm crossing my fingers for there to be a time machine under my Christmas tree for me this year!

 

[ccesarano]

I got it for Christmas on the SNES years ago, and it became one of my top games ever. Got it with the FF4 port on the Playstation, and stopped playing before I even got to the Millenial Fair simply because of how long the load times were. Now I got it on the DS, and while I don't like giving Squenix money, I do like Chrono Trigger enough to shut up and deal.

Chrono Trigger is definitely in the same vein as EarthBound, in that both are classic RPG's fun to this day that other companies didn't rip off enough. It isn't merely the double and triple techs that helped make the game interesting, but enemies are designed that you have to use different strategies. A cave full of enemies where you have to use magic to kill them. Enemies that, when damaged, will strike weaker enemies and absorb their damage. Lighting an Ogan on fire so he tosses his hammer away. You just don't find ideas like this in games, yet they helped make the ATB fun.

What also amazes me is Chrono Trigger does so much more in a 20-25 hour story than most JRPG's can hope to accomplish in 40-80 hours today. None of the dungeons take too long, so they don't feel like an endless and boring grind. There are no random encounters, making you fight on your terms. There aren't a ton of plot twists added in for the sake of extending the play hours. Chrono Trigger should be a reminder to all JRPG developers as to how a JRPG can manage to be fun in an era where it seems the JRPG has ceased to evolve, while every other genre continues forward.

 

[Daiquere]

Since it wasn't in the review I guess I'll ask it here. Will I get lost and have no idea what I should be doing to advance the plot like in every Final Fantasy port I've played?

 

[Archereus]

i saw the game over at wal-mart and i bought it and i dont even have a ds hahahahahaha

 

[Dele]

Chrono Trigger is horribly underrated and unknown to modern gamers.. Good thingy that they made a DS version.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

As good a game as Chrono Trigger was, it suffered from one real fault. Stereotypical character design. I mean, the gameplay was about as good as one could get from a JRPG and the story was pretty awesome but pretty much every anime/video game stereotype is there for nitpicking on.

Gonna spoiler cover just in case anyone has been under a rock for the past 15 years and has no idea about what the characters are.

You have mute hero, runaway princess, nerdy genius, transformed knight, robot with a heart of gold and slutty girl with a tail. And, of course, what game/anime would be complete without stereotypical badass.

I guess all that recycled anime characterization works though, because people love the game. And I am, by no means, calling it bad. I just get picky about things like that, especially since I've heard several internet people call Chrono Trigger the best game ever. Although, Ocarina of Time gets that monicker thrown at it hundreds of times over and I can nitpick that game to hell and back.

It could be argued a lot of these "steriotypes" BECAME steriotypes because of Chrono Trigger. Magus-type characters, certainly, weren't all that common in RPGs before CT.

This wasn't my first game, but it's still easily my favorite.

 

[Kstreitenfeld]

Way back when I never had a SNES only thing I had was a SEGA genesis and that big fat old gameboy so I never got to play Chrono Trigger.

I've heard many good things about it so I just had to buy it for the DS.

 

[Lvl 64 Klutz]

I honestly don't understand why people love Chrono Trigger so much. It was a good game, I can give it that. But I didn't feel like it was ever anything so special. Even taking into account that I played the PS remake, I felt like had I played it when it was originally released I would have felt the same way. The plot was good, the combat was decent, and frankly the game was kind of short. Sure, you could play it over and over again to get every single ending, but I never felt like the game was good enough to warrant that.

And just to show that timing had nothing to do with it, I played Earthbound three years later and loved it.

I'll even go as far as saying that Chrono Trigger was a great game, I just hear too often that it was one of the best games ever made, and I don't agree one bit.

 

[Hazy]

This should be reason enough to get any form of Chrono Trigger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ20N6syuwc

You do credit to your name, I must say.