Monday, September 17, 2007

Chrono Trigger - Achieved all major endings

I love Chrono Trigger. It may be my favorite RPG ever and it is definitely in my top ten all-time favorite games. I have fully replayed it from beginning to end four times now. It rocks.

I could go through all the reasons why it is so good. I could talk about the fact that there are no real random encounters. You usually see enemies before you fight them. Even better, when you fight enemies, you fight them on the same screen you were walking around on - no awkward transition to the battle screen. I could talk about how the game's battle sytem is great. It made the best use of Square's active time battle system by introducing dual and triple techniques - basically magic spells that require two or three characters to act in order to execute them. I could talk about how no grinding is required in the game yet the game is not too easy. The pacing is set up so that, as long as you don't run from/avoid every combat, you will never be overwhelmed by the boss battles but you will need to use the right characters and a good strategy to prevail. It also has a nice story with interesting characters and handles time travel and the mute protagonist cliche suprisingly well.

Anyway, I sadly do not own the SNES version of the game, but instead the Playstation version. Playing this on the original Playstation was supposed to suffer from horrid slowdown and be intolerable. I have only played it on my PS2 and there it is tolerable if not exactly good. The reason I bring this up is that the PlayStation version tracks which of the twelve major endings you get and unlocks various extras dependent on that. I have always wanted to check out the different endings of the game (I have only ever gotten the main one) and so having the Playstation version and this being the fun club RPG of the month inspired me to do so.

Some of the endings are short or just don't have much to them, but some of the alternate endings have a surprising amount of work put into them for things that are completely optional. The Oath, Dino Age, A Slide Show, and The Dream Project were all particularly memorable. Once again, I love this game.

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