Chrono Trigger DS

Chrono Trigger DS : An altered rendition of the celebrated 1995 Super Nintendo RPG.

Story : An ordinary, silent joe who just happens to be a sword expert named Chrono (or whatever you’d like to name him, as most text-based RPGs of the time let you name the characters after any profanity you choose) gets involved in his best friend’s experiment gone awry, and their mishap evolves into a quest that involves traveling through time, having no regards for altering the course of history and aiming to stop an evil force. It’s simple and occasionally illogical, but at the same time is also interesting, charming and moves at a brisk pace without under-developing characters or shoving mountains of dialogue down your throat. The translation is improved here from previous releases, which simply means that the game feels more…right, this time around.

Normally I get upset whenever a game is altered and released at full price on another console instead of just posted on a digital distribution service in all of its original glory and at a price that reflects the fact that you’re playing a ten-plus year old game. But Chrono Trigger gets an easy pass in my books for being, well, Chrono Trigger, and for not only holding up phenomenally well by modern standards, but providing steep competition for contemporary RPGs.

Seriously, most RPGs of today are either vaguely interactive movies, mountains of character dialogue, or exercises in extreme patience in grinding to level up your party. Here’s a game that manages to find just the right balance.

Chrono Trigger is a game that you have to look very hard at in order to find genuine faults. There are no random battles; instead every encounter is scripted in terms of appearance and enemy placement and the player even has a little freedom to pick his fights. Combat is simple, you either attack, cast magic or use items, but there is some depth in how certain spells will affect multiple enemies based on their location, and how allies can learn an assortment of double-team attacks. Unless you run away from every single enemy fight thrown at you, you’ll never need to grind to level up, yet major battles will still find a way to test you. It’s a much more accessible RPG than the more needlessly convoluted releases of recent history.

So my one thought, coming into this DS re-release wasn’t whether or not Chrono Trigger would be worth the money, but whether or the changes Square Enix made to the game would completely screw up the experience.

The answer to that question is “yes, but the game equips you to handle it.”

The game lets you go to menus and determine how you want all of the options to appear. You can choose to use one screen to display the battle as it happens and the other to display all the menus or use the traditional screen setup (which you’ll probably want to, as to avoid constantly shifting your eyes.) You can control movement and menus with either the stylus or the d-pad…and you’ll probably prefer the latter. You can choose to have the game insert the sleek but out of place anime cutscenes that the Playstation re-release of Chrono Trigger included, or not.

Now, some changes aren’t optional, and for people who played the original to death, there’s going to be a slight learning curve. Many items have been renamed as a result of the translation, as have several smaller enemies. The “Roly Poly” now answers to the less intimidating “Roundzilla.” Shop menus have been restructured to display info on both screens. These aren’t game-crippling flaws, just something to adjust to.

Just like how someone who’s never played Chrono Trigger before might have to adjust the 1995 graphics. No, I’m not going to insult the graphics, as the game still looks great, thanks in part to the art style contributed by…whomever was the guy that did art for Dragonball Z (which will also explain why you keep swearing Chrono looks like Goku and the imps look like some green dude.) But certain sequences, like the Mode 7 racing scene, which looked technologically awesome back in its heyday, are going to look awful to the untrained eye. Those players are just going to have to trust me when I say the game is worth adapting to.

As for what else is new in this re-release…well there’s some kind of bonus sub-game where you train some kind of monster and can pit it against other players, but it only supports local multiplayer against other Chrono Trigger DS owners so it can bugger off. There are also a new end-game side-quest that the game tries to justify by explaining that it takes place “in an alternate dimension”. This side quest gives you a chance to collect second copies of already rare items in the game, but all the artwork for the enemies and locales are reused and the story as a whole is uninteresting.

I wouldn’t say that there’s anything in Chrono Trigger DS that’s worth existing fans of the series to go out of their way to buy this version. I would say, however, that if you don’t already own Chrono Trigger, that this is the must-have RPG of 2008. Even if you have little to no previous experience with the genre, this game is friendly at breaking people into the RPG realm and compelling enough to keep you sucked in. Few other games have aged this gracefully.

Pros : After beating the game, you unlock a bonus mode where you can start over with all of your items and stats from your previous save, as well as the option to challenge the final boss at any time to make available hidden endings.

Cons : Sound effects are a bit crude by modern standards. The end-game sidequests are going to need a strategy guide.

4 ½ stars

I think I’ve settled into a theme for December.