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Game Debate #75: Chrono Trigger


Reed Rothchild

Rate it  

59 members have voted

  1. 1. Rate based on your own personal preferences, NOT historical significance

    • 10/10 - One of your very favorite games of all time.
    • 9/10 - Killer fucking game. Everyone should play it.
    • 8/10 - Great game. You like to recommend it.
    • 7/10 - Very good game, but not quite great.
    • 6/10 - Pretty good. You might enjoy occasionally playing it.
    • 5/10 - It's okay, but maybe not something you'll go out of your way to play.
    • 4/10 - Meh. There's plenty of better alternatives to this.
      0
    • 3/10 - Not a very good game.
      0
    • 2/10 - Pretty crappy.
      0
    • 1/10 - Horrible game in every way.
      0
    • 0/10 - The Desert Bus of painful experiences. You'd rather shove an icepick in your genitals than play this.
      0
    • Never played it, but you're interested.
    • Never played it, never will.
  2. 2. Next week's poll



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@RH Whelp, I guess I'm the outlier this time. I give it a 5. I've played it on the SNES/SFC, PS1, and DS, and all three times I couldn't get into it and ended up putting it down somewhere between 2 and 10 hours in. I don't really like how the battles work; Lunar: The Silver Star did the battle style better and three years earlier.

The story also doesn't grab me. I also watched my girlfriend play through the entire thing, so I've seen most of the story, but only a fraction of the endings. I found out by watching her play that the story only got mildly interesting 20+ hours in, and I ain't got time for that. I'm also unwilling to play the game multiple times to get a good ending.

I'd rather play about half of the other RPGs on the SNES/SFC before Chrono Trigger again. Great music, though.

 

Edited by Philosoraptor
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I wouldn't rave about it, I don't hate it, but I'll never understand how so many people have been put under the fog of it being the best RPG on the system (or debateably so) as it's flawed, not largely, but it's not a perfect game.  Quite honestly I've never actually finished it because I get bored playing it.  Sure it has some really high level graphics and audio, it's a quality late SNES effort, but the annoying multiple dead end and endings to it I find detract from the game.  I also don't care for the pacing in places, feels like a painful boring slog that I just get worn down into just stopping.  The writing people call original, I really don't see it, it's more of a mash up of a few stories jammed into a time travel platform.  They were ultimately quite creative with it, including the unique battle format the game uses vs well anything else they released in the US, so that is a benefit.

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1 minute ago, MagusSmurf said:

Care to elaborate? I don’t understand what these “dead ends” refer to or how the endings could detract from the game.

It's been many years, but I recall there were a lot of non-optimal/lose scenario wins.  Depending the kind of game saver you are, you can easily back yourself into a crappy corner.  Then well there are the various ok to great endings too, and depending again how far you progress along those, you'll get excluded out of some others again depending how you play/save.  Ultimately if you have like no life or a hell of a lot of free time on your hands and it's your only game, maybe this would be great for you?  But for most how many 100s of life sucking hours would be needed to see all the endings, or if you had bad luck, to track yourself into the winning endng?

This is all laid down on in the day not having the Nintendo official guide or a very early era gamefaqs txt file to abuse but playing it blind as technically intended.  I find having all that against you, whatever the game, a bit demoralizing and demotivating if you can throw dozens of hours into the shitter and not even be aware of it until it's too late.

If I come around to playing it again sometime, and I have considered it, I do have the official guide and I would definitely use it to not waste time going down a dead end road to failure to have to start all over again.

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10. My second favorite game of all time right behind Xenogears.

I've mentioned it elsewhere before, but Chrono Trigger was the first game I bought with money I'd earned. In the years before, all the money I made went to helping my parents keep us afloat, so the one other time I bought a game was SMB3 with birthday money from my great grandmother.

One weekend, my cousin and I rented CT and Mario RPG, and as was always the case, I was relegated to watching. He played Mario RPG until he got stuck, got mad like usual, and switched games. When it came to CT, he got bored within minutes, said it sucked and that was that...but I was intrigued. I had the rental for a couple more days, so after he left the next day, I started playing CT and was hooked. I extended the rental, and got near the end (though I didn't know it then) and decided not to bother extending it again since I would do what I needed to to buy this game.

I mowed lawns for the next couple of months and when the day finally came to where I had enough (it was $115 after tax, pretty expensive in mid-90's money), I went to the newly opened Walmart since none of the other place in town had a copy. The guy in the electronics department searched and searched and finally found a copy behind a bunch of copies of Metal Combat, so my day was made! I read every page of that manual, and looked at every detail in those posters.

Even going back through the game again, the experience felt just as fresh and just as magical. The story, the music, the atmosphere, the characters, the different eras...all of it is just so magical. Near the endgame, my parents got hooked and watched me play through to the end, and we all smiled when the credits rolled while To Far Away Times played for Crono and Marle.

I love Chrono Trigger; it left an indelible mark on me and is a treasured game for many others. The title is synonymous with classic video gaming in my mind, and I really feel that anyone interested in a powerful story should find a way to play this game in whatever way they can. If I had to get rid of my collection tomorrow and could only keep 5 to 10 games, Chrono Trigger stays with me without a second thought.

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P.S.: I love listening to the orchestral soundtrack; Corridors of Time is incredible.

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1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

It's been many years, but I recall there were a lot of non-optimal/lose scenario wins.  Depending the kind of game saver you are, you can easily back yourself into a crappy corner.  Then well there are the various ok to great endings too, and depending again how far you progress along those, you'll get excluded out of some others again depending how you play/save.  Ultimately if you have like no life or a hell of a lot of free time on your hands and it's your only game, maybe this would be great for you?  But for most how many 100s of life sucking hours would be needed to see all the endings, or if you had bad luck, to track yourself into the winning endng?

This is all laid down on in the day not having the Nintendo official guide or a very early era gamefaqs txt file to abuse but playing it blind as technically intended.  I find having all that against you, whatever the game, a bit demoralizing and demotivating if you can throw dozens of hours into the shitter and not even be aware of it until it's too late.

If I come around to playing it again sometime, and I have considered it, I do have the official guide and I would definitely use it to not waste time going down a dead end road to failure to have to start all over again.

You seem to have been misinformed here in a way that hurt your motivation to continue the game. Chrono Trigger’s endings do not work how you were thinking. The “best ending” is the one you get just by playing the game to the end and there is zero reason to worry about it at all. Other than I guess the bad end for losing to the final boss, you’re not meant to access the others your first playthrough. Guide or not, they’re unreasonable to get at that point and are meant for New Game+, where you can zoom through the game in under 10 hours and see all of the cool, weird, and goofy alternate endings along the way.

Edited by MagusSmurf
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Editorials Team · Posted
1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

It's been many years, but I recall there were a lot of non-optimal/lose scenario wins.  Depending the kind of game saver you are, you can easily back yourself into a crappy corner.  Then well there are the various ok to great endings too, and depending again how far you progress along those, you'll get excluded out of some others again depending how you play/save.  Ultimately if you have like no life or a hell of a lot of free time on your hands and it's your only game, maybe this would be great for you?  But for most how many 100s of life sucking hours would be needed to see all the endings, or if you had bad luck, to track yourself into the winning endng

None of this is true.  Something has greatly mislead you.

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5 hours ago, Estil said:

PS: Didn't Frog or one of the others at some point in the game remark how Chrono is such a ladies man or something? 😄 

I believe that you're thinking of Lucca when Chrono first showed up with Marle in tow, who said: "Wow, Chrono; how'd you ever dig up a cutie like her?"  ...

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7 hours ago, Tanooki said:

It's been many years, but I recall there were a lot of non-optimal/lose scenario wins.  Depending the kind of game saver you are, you can easily back yourself into a crappy corner.  Then well there are the various ok to great endings too, and depending again how far you progress along those, you'll get excluded out of some others again depending how you play/save.

You must have played a vastly different Chrono Trigger from everyone else...

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I don't get the comments, but whatever.  I mean I have the guide here, it clearly shows each way you can get screwed if you made a poor choice in the game to get the less than right(good) ending.  The game clearly has branching paths which can be good or bad as you travel through time, some going early right into the day of Lavos which is lights out.  I never actually played it originally with the guide either.

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Editorials Team · Posted
2 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

I don't get the comments, but whatever.  I mean I have the guide here, it clearly shows each way you can get screwed if you made a poor choice in the game to get the less than right(good) ending.  The game clearly has branching paths which can be good or bad as you travel through time, some going early right into the day of Lavos which is lights out.  I never actually played it originally with the guide either.

Then you're interpreting something wrong.

I (and many of these other guys) have played through the game many times.  There is absolutely no way you can lock yourself out of the normal, regular ending, or a full playthrough.  

All of the other endings are bonus, New Game+ sorta thing.

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Can also confirm that you don’t need to do anything special to get the normal ending of the game.

I played it as vanilla as you can get and the ending was normal and satisfying.

I definitely wouldn’t let multiple endings be the reason to not play the game.

Unlike Earthbound, the hype is pretty justified for this game imo.

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4 hours ago, Tanooki said:

I don't get the comments, but whatever.  I mean I have the guide here, it clearly shows each way you can get screwed if you made a poor choice in the game to get the less than right(good) ending.  The game clearly has branching paths which can be good or bad as you travel through time, some going early right into the day of Lavos which is lights out.  I never actually played it originally with the guide either.

The game doesn't have branching paths. You just defeat lavos at earlier points along the only path there is or just ignore some of the character side quests after the main story to view the other endings. Perhaps you are confusing Chrono Trigger with a different game?

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9 hours ago, Bearcat-Doug said:

I can't get into RPGs either anymore. I barely had the patience to play them when I was a kid and now I really don't feel like messing with a game that's going to take at least a month for me to finish.

Seriously tho Chrono Trigger can be beat by anyone on a first playthrough in about 25 hours.

0 grinding required. If you stick to fighting the encounters you run into naturally, you'll get to the final boss at around lvl 52 and that's more than enough to fight him. There are 2-3 points in the game that might feel like difficulty spikes, but they aren't really. It's just the game throwing a curveball and you have to figure out an appropriate strategy, ie some bosses will have nasty counterattacks and you have to fight them in such a fashion that it doen't trigger those counterattacks.

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