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Chrono Trigger DS Review -

About the only problem with this version of Chrono Trigger is the $39.99 price tag, which is $10 higher than most of the rest of the DS releases on the racks. The “Square Enix tax” has become one of those things that gamers just have to live with these days – all Square Enix DS games tend to cost more than the average – but in the case of the company’s other releases, at least they were practically defensible on the grounds that they included lots of pre-rendered cinemas and spoken dialogue that called for expensive high-capacity cartridges.

Besides a few low-key interface upgrades, a couple of bonus areas, and the short cinematics from the 1999 PlayStation remake, this is just a portable Chrono Trigger, more or less. Chrono Trigger, though, is probably the most beloved RPG ever made, which is why a lot of people will lay those 40 dollars down without a second’s thought.

They’ll be happy with what they get. The DS version isn’t unusually fancy, but it didn’t need to be, and there aren’t any drawbacks to the game itself. Chrono Trigger is still very close to perfection – if you don’t already happen to have a reason to love it, play it now and you’ll certainly find one.

Back In Time

For those few who haven’t played it (or had someone who has played it rave their ear off about it), Chrono Trigger was one of Square’s biggest hits back in the company’s 16-bit heyday. It was actually a collaboration between Square and Enix, several years before the RPG giants teamed up for good. Dragon Warrior designer Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama worked with Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy’s producer, back in those days) and a team of Square’s most capable composers to make a game that lived up to all of their reputations.

From Toriyama, the game got its colorful cartoon characters, like the mad inventor Lucca and the sword-swinging amphibian Frog. Sakaguchi gave it a sweeping, epic story, starting a million years in the past and finishing up at the end of the world. You can see Horii’s influence in the way that story never sweeps gameplay out of the picture, though. Chrono Trigger’s pacing is nearly perfect. The plot is full of twists and turns, but they unfold in a way that never takes control out of the player’s hands for very long.

Trigger’s battle system was quite the innovation at the time, and even today it’s a lot more interesting than the combat in some RPGs. There’s no hard cut between exploring the world and getting in a fight – when monsters appear, the battle starts right there on the field map, and it’s right back to exploring as soon as the battle’s over. That helps the game keep moving briskly, and so does the active-time combat itself. Battles move very quickly, but there’s just enough challenge involved in timing your attacks and taking advantage of team-up special moves that they don’t wind up feeling too easy or too repetitive.

The game as a whole is actually designed to encourage repeat play, which is something you don’t often see in a console RPG. While the scenario is comparatively linear up to a point, past that point you plenty of freedom to wander back and forth in time, explore hidden corners of familiar locations, and poke around a wide range of optional quests and minor forks in the plot. Finishing the game once unlocks a special “New Game+” option, which makes a second trip a little smoother by letting the party start the quest with all their experience and equipment, which is handy if you want to try and unlock every one of the story’s dozen endings.

Something Old, Something New

Although you can play this version of Chrono Trigger in a stripped-down “Classic” mode, the expanded DS mode has some welcome additions. The bottom screen includes a handy macro-scale map of whatever area the party happens to be exploring at the moment, and it’s surrounded by quick shortcut icons for different status screens and sub-menus. If you want to save the game or swap a character’s equipment, all you have to do is tap the corresponding shortcut on the touch-screen, which saves a few moments of button-pressing and wait time.

Perhaps the only flaw in the DS version is the English font, which is a point or two smaller than it needed to be. It’s not too hard to read, but it would have been easier if the letters were just a bit larger, and more often than not the text boxes have plenty of extra space to fill. There’s nothing wrong with the script itself, though – the English dialogue is very well-written, and Square Enix’s editors neatly handle the way the story shifts in tone throughout the game. Chrono Trigger has some very funny moments, but it’s also not afraid to take itself pretty seriously, and the English version is just as effective either way.

Adding it all up, the DS Chrono Trigger may not have 40 bucks worth of voices or video, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t 40 bucks worth of game. (It helps to remember that the Super Nintendo version cost $80 or $90 in 1995’s money. ROM is a heck of a lot cheaper than it used to be.) This is a genuine classic, and portability just makes it that much better.

Article by: D.F. Smith