Chrono Trigger: When the Dream Team Built a Time Machine

The Super Nintendo had a lot of role-playing games, and most of them followed the same recipe. Chrono Trigger, released by Square in Japan in March 1995, followed a different one, and it did so with an unusually strong lineup behind it.

That lineup was billed as the “Dream Team”. It brought together Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest, and Akira Toriyama, the artist behind Dragon Ball and the character designs in the Dragon Quest series. Those were the most recognizable names in Japanese role-playing games at the time. The game was directed by a team that included Takashi Tokita, Yoshinori Kitase and Akihiko Matsui. The music was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, with Nobuo Uematsu, the longtime Final Fantasy composer, contributing after Mitsuda reportedly fell ill during production.

The premise is a time-travel story. A boy named Crono meets a girl at a fair, a demonstration of a teleportation device goes wrong, and the party ends up moving through several eras: prehistory, the Middle Ages, the present, and a devastated future. The game’s structure is unusually flexible. You can visit different periods in a broad range of orders, and actions in one era have consequences in another, which lets the story treat time as a mechanic and not only as a setting.

Several design choices set it apart. Enemies appear on the map instead of ambushing you with random battles, so you can see them and choose whether to engage, which removes a common source of frustration. Battles take place in the same space where you are exploring, with no separate transition. Combat uses the Active Time Battle system, but it adds “Techs”, combination attacks that use two or three party members together, giving the party a sense of teamwork. And there are multiple endings, with a New Game Plus mode that allows you to reach them, an idea that was still rare in console role-playing games.

It was also a game with a light touch. Its story has real stakes, but the tone does not take itself too seriously, and its side quests are among the most memorable parts. The characters are vivid without becoming complicated, and the writing, including the English localization credited to Ted Woolsey for the North American release later in 1995, is sharp and economical.

Critical reception was very strong, and the game is routinely listed among the greatest video games of all time. It was later re-released on the PlayStation, with additional scenes and animations, and on the Nintendo DS in 2008, again with new content. A mobile version followed in 2011 and a PC version in 2018, which had a rocky start and was patched after complaints about its visuals. A sequel, Chrono Cross, was released in 2000, taking a very different approach.

There is an interesting question about why Chrono Trigger has stayed so beloved. Part of it is pedigree, but a bigger part is restraint. It is a role-playing game of modest length that respects the player’s time, and it moves at a pace that feels closer to a good film than to a marathon. It is not an easy thing to get right.

The opinion part: many games have tried to copy its structure, but few have matched its balance. The Dream Team label is a marketing phrase, but for once the results lived up to it.