overdrive's Chrono Trigger review

Just reading this makes me want to play it. Again. I don't think I'm still in the single digits on this one.

If there's an RPG designed for many, many playthroughs, it's this one. I think, because it was made so well, that makes its brevity and general ease a bonus. I have a lot of RPGs I really liked and wouldn't mind playing again, but don't want to set aside 60-100 hours to do so OR there's that one area I really didn't like because it was frustrating or something like that.

With CT, you go from place to place at a brisk enough pace that if there's an area that's more of a drag to you, it'll be over soon. And, after playing it a few times, the only thing that always will challenge me is that boss fight with Giga Gaia. It just brings the pain at the beginning -- if you don't obliterate an arm very early, you will be destroyed by its big group attacks.

I really envy those people who played CT in 90s. Because of fact that game wasn't released in Europe and SNES was too expensive (hard times, yeah, but seriously, new console was like 2 month salaries), only thing I could do is to read articles about how CT is good in various magazines. I played this game in 2007 and even then found it awesome. What I can say today — Chrono Trigger IS a timeless game.

I'm playing the DS version right now. I played it on SNES circa 2000 but wasn't really in love with it at the time. All the stuff about time travel felt campy and a bit dumb to me, like the game was trying to be deep like a teenager writing poetry.

Replaying it now as someone with a big more appreciation for its fine details, it's an absolute masterclass in design. I don't think it's too short; I think it's just smarter about how it uses the players time. There are so many times when CT just puts an object on the screen and assumes the player will figure out what to do. For example, when you first go through the teleporter at the fair, that's it. There's no "where am I?" soliloquy or talking to an imp or whatever. It's very good at explaining things without resorting to exposition text.

I like the combat more than I thought I would. I usually don't like it when characters have set growth and little to customize, but it works here because each combat encounter feels hand crafted and different, even if it's the same enemy. I love how so many normal enemies have movement patterns, weak points that you need to wait to exploit, etc.

I'm about 3 hours in and just reached the end of time. It's just bonkers that I could try to fight the final boss already.

One time, shortly before one of my replays of this game, I found a site online dedicated to talking about just how great the pacing of this game is. It analyzed it dungeon by dungeon discussing how you have periods that build up to epic parts and then you'll have a little breather area so you can recover from that stuff and then it'll build up again. It was one of those really cool and in-depth reads that really shows how much power this game has. It's one of my all-time favorites and it inspired that person to essentially write a small book online breaking it down moment by moment. Not every game pulls that off!