Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix


Introduction
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What can I say that hasn't already been said about this gem of an RPG? There's a reason it's considered one of the best, if not THE best, RPG of all-time. If you have not played this yet, you are in for one hell of a treat! If you have played it before but haven't recently, you need to play it again to remind yourself of how amazing it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8I45TYVHmc

Gameplay
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Chrono Trigger is a simple looking, but deceptively deep turn-based RPG. You have a lot of your usual RPG goodness here, such as leveling up via experience points, learning new skills, collecting items and equipment, and multiple party members. One of the main things that Chrono Trigger offers is how it allows you to combine individual skills from separate characters into dual or triple techniques. For example, the main protagonist Crono has a skill called Cleave (or Spincut if your old like me) that is a single target attack for big damage. This can be combined with 2 other party members for techs called Ice Sword and Fire Sword, enchanting Crono's blade to do big elemental damage to his target. Each party member has at LEAST 3 dual tech combos with every other party member, and some even have a triple tech they can use if you have the right party composition. The fun part is figuring out these combos and finding out what works best for you!

At it's core, this game is a sprawling time-travel adventure. You'll discover and explore about half a dozen different time periods, and complete dozens of battles in each to progress the story. You'll meet a huge variety of characters, both good and evil, and eventually end up with a very diverse cast of playable characters that each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. And since the game involves time travel, you will discover a lot of cause-effect situations. What you do in one period will affect something in another period. You will see this most frequently in the side-quests, of which you should do ALL of them.

Graphics
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This game offers some of the best 16-bit graphics of the SNES era. Now of course this has been upscaled and improved a bit for the PC release, but there are options to have the original look and feel of everything. Honestly it doesn't matter which you prefer, as the game looks great either way. I came from the time period that the game originally released, so I am very used to this graphic style and the 16-bit look, and may be a tad biased. Watch some gameplay videos and decide for yourself if you like it! I know graphics can be a big deal for some players.

Sound and Music
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This game has one of the best OSTs I've ever heard in a video game, and I say this as a huge fan of video game music. It's basically all I like, and I listen to something from Chrono Trigger daily, in addition to a lot of other games. There are quite a few extremely iconic tracks in this game, mostly boss and character themes, but a lot of the town and ambient themes are amazing too. I'll link a couple of examples below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGe9vsXu1V4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6MjRKKEWLE

The rest I will leave for you to discover on your own! I promise you'll enjoy all the thrilling battle themes and emotional scores from key moments of the story.

Performance
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I never had a problem with running this game, even when it originally released. There were a lot of reports of frame drops, crashing, and a lot of issues with the UI and such when it first came out, but all of that has since been fixed with numerous patches over the years. I would even go so far as to say this is the definitive and best version of Chrono Trigger. Highly recommend a controller.

There is only one glaring issue in the game, dealing with a password you have to input to open a door. If you explore the area you'll find the password X A B Y. However, the door doesn't accept it. Due to some weird glitch or perhaps an oversight with input programming for this particular instance, the password that is accepted is now [b/A X B Y[/b].

Final Thoughts
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Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece, and it should 100% be played by RPGs fans no matter how old you are. I'd even recommend it to players new to the genre. It's fairly short for modern RPG standards, roughly 20-25 hours for new players, so it's a great start for new RPG fans or for people who can't sink the time needed for other longer RPGs. Players who know what they're doing can likely finish it in about 15 hours. Compare this to something like Persona 5 Royal, which can take anywhere from 100 to 150 hours to finish, depending on the player.

PLAY. THIS. GAME.

Final Verdict:
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