Chrono Trigger

• 1. Introduction

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  Chrono Trigger is a 1995 role-playing game that Square developed and published for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It began with a research trip. In October 1992, three veteran creators traveled to the United States to study computer graphics. Somewhere along the way, they decided to make something that no one had done before. The finished game sent a band of adventurers through time to prevent a global catastrophe, and it became the first installment of the Chrono series. How did creators from two different companies end up on one team? Why did the hero die midway through the story, and why was he brought back? How did a sound programmer who wanted a raise end up writing the score? And why did a version released more than two decades later draw such angry reviews?

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• 2. The Dream Team

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  Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor of the artist Akira Toriyama, later summed up the project's concept as Dragon Quest plus Final Fantasy. The shorthand fit the people involved. Hironobu Sakaguchi had created Square's Final Fantasy series. Yuji Horii had created Dragon Quest at the separate company Enix. Toriyama had designed characters for Dragon Quest and written the Dragon Ball manga. Square gave the three men the nickname the "Dream Team." Torishima arranged for Enix to lend Horii to Square for the project.

  Even with that arrangement, the trio spent more than a year weighing how hard a new game would be. Then Kazuhiko Aoki called and offered to produce it. The four men met and spent four days brainstorming. Square convened between fifty and sixty developers, including the scenario writer Masato Kato, whom the company named story planner. Work began in early 1993.

  Aoki ultimately produced the game, while the director credits went to Akihiko Matsui, Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita. Toriyama shaped the look of nearly everything, from characters and monsters to vehicles and the appearance of each era. The staff studied his drawings so they could approximate his style. Sakaguchi handled the overall system and contributed several monster ideas, while Horii supervised.

  Sakaguchi compared the job to playing around in Toriyama's universe. He said it allowed humorous scenes that would have been impossible in a Final Fantasy game. Tetsuya Takahashi served as graphic director, and Yasuyuki Honne, Tetsuya Nomura and Yusuke Naora worked as field graphic artists. The programmer Yasuhiko Kamata cited Ridley Scott's film Alien as an inspiration for the lighting. He set the game's brightness and color choices somewhere between those of Secret of Mana and the Final Fantasy series.

  In those early days, the project carried the working title Maru Island, and Square meant to release it under the Mana franchise. Hiromichi Tanaka, who later produced Chrono Cross, recalled that Secret of Mana itself had once been codenamed Chrono Trigger. The name only moved to this new project afterward.

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• 3. Eras and Allies

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  The Millennial Fair in the Kingdom of Guardia, in the year 1000 AD, is where the story opens. Crono and Marle watch as Lucca and her father demonstrate her new teleporter. Marle volunteers to try it. Her pendant interferes with the machine and opens a time portal that pulls her in. Crono and Lucca recreate the portal and follow her to 600 AD.

  In 600 AD, the local kingdom has mistaken Marle for Queen Leene, her kidnapped ancestor. Marle is actually Princess Nadia of Guardia. Because the hunt for the real queen stalls, Marle's own existence is put at risk, which creates a grandfather paradox. Yuji Horii liked that scenario, and he was a fan of time travel fiction such as the television series The Time Tunnel. An uncredited Square employee had suggested the time travel theme. Kato first opposed the idea, fearing the gameplay would turn repetitive and dull.

  With help from a talking frog knight, the party rescues Leene. Back in the present, Crono is framed for kidnapping Marle and sentenced to death by Guardia's chancellor. Another hasty portal carries the fugitives to 2300 AD. There they learn that a creature called Lavos appeared in 1999 AD and wiped out an advanced civilization. The last humans live in underground domes. After Lucca repairs a dormant robot, the party meets an old sage named Gaspar at the End of Time, shown as the year infinity. He gives them pillars of light that act as doorways between eras, and players can visit seven eras in all.

  The heroes come from across history. Crono is the silent, fearless swordsman who wields a katana. Marle is a sheltered princess who wants independence from her royal identity. Lucca is Crono's childhood friend and a mechanical genius. Robo, designated R-66Y and also called Prometheus, was built to assist humans and joins out of gratitude to Lucca. Ayla, from 65,000,000 BC, is the chief of Ioka Village and leads her people in a war against the Reptites.

  Frog was once a squire named Glenn, until the sorcerer Magus turned him into an amphibian and killed his friend Cyrus. Square had asked for a non-human playable character, so the developers adapted one of Toriyama's sketches to create him. Magus commands the Mystics, who are called Fiends in the American and Nintendo DS versions. He was born Janus, a young prince of the Kingdom of Zeal, and he was swept forward through time when Lavos awoke in 12,000 BC. Grown up, he plots revenge and broods over the fate of his sister, Schala. Lavos itself is an extraterrestrial parasite that harvests DNA and the planet's energy to feed its own growth.

  Eventually the party gains a time machine called the Wings of Time, nicknamed the Epoch. The player may rename it. Unlike the pillars of light, it can reach any era directly, without a stop at the End of Time.

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• 4. Battles Without Screens

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  Visible enemies are the first thing that separates Chrono Trigger from the typical Japanese role-playing game of its day. Instead of random encounters, many foes stand in plain view on the field map or wait to ambush the party. Touching one starts a battle right where the party is standing, with no separate battle screen. Tanaka credited the ROM cartridge format for making that seamless transition possible.

  The cartridge itself was a compromise. Square had hoped to release the game on Nintendo's planned Super Famicom Disk Drive. When Nintendo canceled that project, Square refocused on a standard cartridge. The team had planned for 24 megabits, then chose a 32-megabit cartridge, which made room for extra graphics and music.

  Katsuhisa Higuchi programmed the battle system and found it extremely difficult to load fights without slow-downs or a brief black loading screen. The animated monster sprites made matters harder. They used far more memory than the static enemy graphics of earlier Final Fantasy games.

  Battles run on "Active Time Battle 2.0," a refinement of a system Hiroyuki Ito designed for Final Fantasy IV. Each character acts when a personal timer, set by that character's speed, counts down to zero. Magic and special physical moves are called Techs, and they spend magic points. Some Techs damage monsters huddled together, while others strike enemies lined up in a row. Because enemies shift position mid-fight, the player has a steady supply of tactical openings.

  The Tech system has a unique twist in its cooperative moves. Every character learns eight personal Techs, and compatible ones can be paired into Double and Triple Techs. Crono's sword-spinning Cyclone joins with Lucca's Flame Toss to form Fire Whirl. When characters have enough magic points for a pairing, the game offers the combination automatically.

  Outside combat, Kitase and Tokita devised a system they called "Active Time Event Logic." They described it as one "where you can move your character around during scenes, even when an NPC is talking to you." That freedom let each scene play out in many different ways.

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• 5. Death and Endings

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  In the ice age of 12,000 BC, Lavos awakens and kills Crono in the middle of the story. Kato and Horii were the ones who first proposed his death. They meant it to be permanent, with the party retrieving an earlier, living version of Crono to finish the quest. Square judged that scenario too depressing and asked the team to bring him back later in the story.

  The finished game makes his revival a choice. Gaspar hands the party a device named the Chrono Trigger. It swaps Crono for an identical double just before the moment of death. Using it is optional, and the ending changes depending on the player's decision.

  Kato also created the game's multiple endings, because he could not branch the story into different paths. There are twelve unique endings, or thirteen in the DS, iOS, Android and Steam versions. Which one the player sees depends on when and how the final battle is reached. The party can face Lavos at any point after meeting Gaspar.

  If Crono was revived, Marle's father, King Guardia XXXIII, cancels his sentence after hearing testimonies from Marle's ancestors and descendants. In another ending, Crono's mother accidentally wanders into the time gate at the fair, and fireworks light the sky as the heroes set out in the Epoch to find her. In a third, Marle helps her father hang Nadia's bell and is carried away by balloons, and Crono leaps on to join her. Kato wanted to avoid what he described as "a long string of errands," and the endings helped him do that.

  The New Game Plus option extends the game further. After finishing, a player can start over with the characters' levels, techniques and equipment, though not their money. Key story items, such as the sword Masamune, are removed and must be found again. Square later used the idea in Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy XV, among other games. Sakaguchi pointed to the beta testers, who wanted to "travel through time again," as proof that the feature was wanted. He said small changes in behavior produced subtle differences in how people reacted.

  Those same testers had complained that the game was too hard. Horii explained, "It's because we know too much." The developers worried that players might get stuck and reach for a walkthrough, so they built the End of Time as a place to find hints. Gaspar himself was once meant to be a playable character, and Toriyama had even sketched him, but he was cut early in development.

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• 6. The Score

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  Yasunori Mitsuda was a sound programmer at Square when he grew unhappy with his pay and threatened to leave unless he could compose music. Sakaguchi suggested he score Chrono Trigger and added, "maybe your salary will go up." Mitsuda wrote new pieces and also drew on a personal collection he had built over the previous two years. He wanted music for an imaginary world that fit no established genre. He often talked through settings and scenes with Kato, who was a close friend.

  Mitsuda slept in his studio on several nights and credited some pieces, including the ending theme "To Far Away Times," to dreams. Each tune ran about two minutes before repeating, which was unusual for Square's games then. He also reused leitmotifs from the main theme to give the soundtrack a sense of unity.

  Then a hard drive crash wiped out around forty tracks that were still in progress. Soon afterward, Mitsuda developed stomach ulcers. Nobuo Uematsu, the veteran Final Fantasy composer, joined to write ten pieces and finish the score, and Noriko Matsueda contributed one track. Mitsuda returned to watch the ending with the staff before release and cried when he saw the finished scene.

  The number of tracks and sound effects was unprecedented at the time, and the 1995 commercial soundtrack filled three discs. Square also released a one-disc acid jazz arrangement that year called The Brink of Time, by Guido. Mitsuda chose that style because few others were working in it in the Japanese market.

  For the 1999 PlayStation release, Square produced another one-disc soundtrack of orchestral tracks used in cutscenes. Tsuyoshi Sekito wrote four new pieces for the bonus features. Some fans were disappointed that Mitsuda had no part in the port, since some of its instruments sounded different from the originals. For the Nintendo DS version, he worked with Square Enix to bring the music closer to the Super NES sound. Fans who preordered it received a disc of two orchestral arrangements directed by Natsumi Kameoka.

  The music has since traveled to concert halls. The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra performed it live in 1996 at the Orchestral Game Concert in Tokyo. Mitsuda attended the world premiere of the Play! A Video Game Symphony suite in Chicago on the 27th of May 2006. The suite included "Reminiscence," "Chrono Trigger," "Chrono Cross~Time's Scar," "Frog's Theme" and "To Far Away Times." At the 2020 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, "Frog's Theme" and "Robo's Theme" were among the game music performed. In 2022, the main theme was still in the setlist of the 8-Bit Big Band, led by Charlie Rosen.

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• 7. Localization and Ports

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  A build dated the 17th of November 1994 went out to magazine reviewers and game stores a few months before release. The team had planned a late 1994 launch, but it slipped to 1995. That early build held music, locations and features later changed or removed, including a dungeon called Singing Mountain. Some names differed too. The character Soysaw, known as Slash in the American version, was once called Wiener, and Mayonnay, known as Flea, was once Ketchappa. The ROM image eventually appeared on the internet, and fans documented its differences.

  Sakaguchi asked the translator Ted Woolsey to prepare the English version and gave him roughly thirty days. Without a modern translation team, Woolsey memorized the scenarios and studied drafts of commercial player's guides to understand the dialogue. He said he would have preferred months. He blamed the short schedule on a prevailing attitude in Japan that games were children's toys. Space limits forced some of his work to be cut. Nintendo of America also censored dialogue about breastfeeding, drinking alcohol and religion.

  The North American version was built before the Japanese release gained its ending art and running item counts. It therefore kept leftover traces of earlier development, such as the Singing Mountain tune.

  The game later reached many platforms. In 1999, Tose ported it to the PlayStation in Japan, timed to come before Chrono Cross. That version added anime cutscenes made by Toriyama's Bird Studio and animated at Toei Animation. In North America, it arrived in 2001 alongside a newly translated Final Fantasy IV as Final Fantasy Chronicles. Reviewers criticized its lengthy load times.

  A Nintendo DS version was announced on the 2nd of July 2008, with Kato overseeing it and Tose programming. Mitsuda reacted to the news with a delighted "finally!" Kato chose the Super NES game as the base, then revisited the PlayStation extras. The DS version added a revised translation by Tom Slattery, a dual-screen mode and a monster-battling Arena. It also added new areas called the Lost Sanctum and the Dimensional Vortex, which drew mixed reviews. It was the 22nd best-selling game of 2008 in Japan.

  Square Enix released a Windows version on Steam, without any announcement, on the 27th of February 2018. Reviewers were harsh. Forbes wrote: "From pretty awful graphical issues, such as tiling textures and quite a painful menu system, this port really doesn't do this classic game justice." Square Enix answered with a string of major patches, starting on the 10th of April 2018, and a sixth major patch on the 11th of March 2022 added ultrawide support. Alex Donaldson of VG247 later argued that the patched version could be called the best way to play.

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• 8. Acclaim and Afterlife

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  Two million copies sold in Japan within two months of release, and the game finished 1995 as that country's second best-selling title, behind Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation. Critics were warm. Nintendo Power and Next Generation called the gameplay innovative, and both magazines, along with Super Play, singled out the visible enemies and the combination attacks. Nintendo Power, Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Magazine System praised the graphics and music. Opinions on the story were split. Electronic Gaming Monthly found it compelling, but Next Generation and Super Play compared the character arcs unfavorably to Final Fantasy VI. Super Play judged Frog's story the only meaningful one.

  Rankings piled up for years. In 1997, Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked it the 29th best console game of all time. IGN placed it second on its top 100 lists in both 2006 and 2008. In 2004, it finished runner-up to Final Fantasy VII in the first GameFAQs video game battle. GamesRadar put it first on a best JRPGs list in 2012 and named it the second best Super NES game, behind Super Metroid.

  By March 2003, the Super NES and PlayStation versions had shipped 2.65 million copies, with 2.36 million of them in Japan. The DS version had sold 790,000 copies by March 2009. By March 2025, all versions together had shipped more than 5 million copies worldwide.

  The game also spawned related releases. On the 31st of July 1995, three Satellaview titles appeared, including a racing game based on a minigame from the original. A sixteen-minute animated short, Dimensional Adventure Numa Monjar, was shown at the Japanese V Jump festival in 1996. That same year, Kato wrote and directed Radical Dreamers, a text-based Satellaview side story, because he felt the original left unfinished business. It never received an official release outside Japan, but fans translated it into English in April 2003.

  In 1999, Square released Chrono Cross for the PlayStation. It followed a teenager named Serge, who is thrust into a reality where he died years earlier, and it shipped 1.5 million copies. Kato described it as an effort to redo Radical Dreamers properly.

  Fans were less fortunate. Square Enix ended two 3D remake attempts with cease and desist orders. It did the same to Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes, a feature-length ROM hack developed from 2004 to 2009, days before its planned May 2009 release. A more complete leak followed in January 2011, so the game could finally be played from beginning to end.

  No new Chrono game is planned, though interest has stayed high. At E3 2009, Square Enix executive Shinji Hashimoto answered the demand for a sequel by saying that people who want one should buy more copies. Yoshinori Kitase, meanwhile, said he used the game's time travel mechanics as a starting point for Final Fantasy XIII-2.

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