One of the comments pointed out that I got a fact wrong about Dreamstone at around 17:14 - 17:16. I originally said that it was connected to Lavos, when the game obviously shows that the Dreamstone was around prior to Lavos' arrival on the main planet. I edited that out using RUclips's trimmer tool. If you notice a cut at 17:14, that's why. Thank you @Camkitsune for pointing this out.
You should look into rewrite. It's a interactive story type game. Very much up your alley imo. Also spirit circle would be a good manga to cover if you do that kind of content
I also thought the dreamstone show up due to the arrival of Lavos. When he first burried himself to sleep in the earth. But the Cavemen were using it? No?
@@mikhailstewart Dreamstone was around before Lavos. In fact, the chunk that Ayla gives you had been passed down from chieftain to chieftain for some time, and that was before Lavos touched down.
No i dont respect every brand because they where the first to do something specially when their a life saving drug trying to drain every dollar they can in profits or a entertainment industry that sues and attacks anything that comes close to what you made for some vague bs claim that it hurts your brand when you put your brand also on a console like ps5 and xbox that parts are sourced how again i dont respect the monopolies unity and unreal have over the market that keeps them from innovating their own product into something as impressive as PlayStation dream and i dont respect most of these brands like metal gear because i just didnt like it as a series and wasnt blinded by nostalgia goggles because i preferred the n64 all around then the gamecube and alot of the other better series on the ps2 when i finally got around to metal gear i beat it but was more impressed with devil may cry and then the ps3 massive lineup more then anything metal gear was doing and then was burned by the ps4 so now im a pc gamer who always loved square enix zelda mario 3d games like final fantasy 7 chrono trigger mario 64 and ocarina of time / majoras mask cash and spyro i replay these games all the time i have this repiayability list of games i crave to rebeat like luigis mansion sunshine twilight princess and windwaker and i have alot of games on it in the act of rebeating i question do i still love it and only further my love for these games
Also, Chrono Trigger has perhaps the most terrifying "bad ending" of all time. "BUT THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE...", while seeing the earth change from it's blue green natural state to a gray, lifeless one, and followed by the most nightmare inducing alien croak imaginable. Gave me nightmares as a kid!!!
Live-A-Live has an even more terrifying bad ending. Oersted doesn't just destroy the world, he utterly obliterates the whole universe in EVERY TIME. Past, present, future, it's all gone into pure nothing.
@@Mr.KokoPudgeFudge Just watched it myself, damn, that is DARK... I think what terrifies me more about CT's bad ending is the all caps writing and hearing Lavos' creepy alien noise.
Nah CT is still pretty tame on that scale. If you want a real gut-punch you have to get into visual novels. Even if the world doesn't end, watching a character you grew to love over the last 10-60 hours die in the most unfair way possible will fuck you up even at the GOOD ending. Sharin No Kuni, Cross Channel, Fate Stay Night, Ever 17, and A Drug That Makes You Dream are good examples.
You say that Glenn is the only one with emotional depth explored in the main story, and while he certainly gets a large share, I'd argue Marle also goes through a significant arc. Crono may be party lead, but it's Marle who said "No, fuck Lavos, we're saving the future!".
Honestly, i think the simplicity of CT is a big part of what makes it so great. There are no arbitrary overcomplications to hinder the message to shine through, and all of the content in the game has meaning. There are no throwaway side quests, it's all part of the big picture. It just tells it's story well, and that's why it shines so bright, as compared to many other games in the genre. The game also deserves massive recognition for it's pacing, something many JRPGs mess up on such a massive scale that it's almost unbelievable. Chrono trigger is easily one of the best JRPGs ever made, and even though some other juggernauts of the genre get more recognition, i think it's fair to say that CT is one game that has stood the test of time (pun intended) amazingly well.
One of my biggest complaints with a lot of JRPGS is that many of them cram so much content, tons of random sidequests, and loads of game mechanics into them that it can honestly get so overwhelming to keep track of. I shouldn't need a spreadsheet to play a game. Some series (Breath of Fire and Lufia being HUGE offenders) bury you in meaningless sidequests that exist only to pad the game's length. Not CT - as far as player experience, it's close to perfect.
The fact that CT is easily beatable in under 20 hours for a first time player is such an underrated strength. The story is always briskly moving forward. No wasted time or energy....just PERFECT pacing.
@@krausewitz6786 People don't talk about this aspect enough. CT is very efficient in its pacing and at no point does a player ever feel bored. I'll take 20 hours of a perfectly paced game with an engaging story over a 60 hour grindfest.
@@krausewitz6786 That, and the short playtime makes it easy to replay it immediately, because you're not bored yet. You can easily go for one or two of the other endings.
@@nathank2289 I like Chrono trigger soundtrack over OoT, but that may be purely nostalgia speaking, I didn't own my own copy of OoT until the Nintendo power freebie GameCube edition, and I'm embarrassed to say I've never beat the game 😬
When Gaspar gives you the side quests at the end, he tells you that they can help in your battle against Lavos. What's interesting is that five out of seven of those quests are more then the typical "pick up OP item" but also help resolve a personal issue. Rainbow Shell = Marle reconciling with her father, Mother = Robo reconciling with his purpose, Cyrus ghost = Frog's guilt, Forest = Robo and Lucca and their resolve, and the Black Omen and Magus putting his mother to rest. (Also interesting how four out of seven also touch on the subject of mothers). Ozzie's Fortress is also interesting in that there's no big prize at the end, it isn't about getting an OP item at the finish line, but ends up being something that helps tensions between the humans and the mystics.
Ozzie’s Fort is about Magus leaving his villainous ways behind in order to fight for a better future. Finishing off the enemies in the Fort is a way for him to slightly atone or redeem himself from the countless lives his war took.
"It is in moments like these, where we maintain our integrity and our courage in the face of impossible odds, that legends are born. That power is not exclusive to super heroes in the realm of fantasy. That power, is something we all possess." Being nearly 40 and having struggled most of my life to make it, I seriously burst into tears when you said that... Thanks man for the feels, take care, I wish you a good life.
I mirror you by everything you said even your age and emotions as I also started bursting into tears after that and I’m nearly 40 myself. I was 10 when the game came out but haven’t played it till 1998 and since then I have hailed it as the best game of all time along with metal hear solid. I’m extremely happy to see such hommage being made to it after all these years by Max. Words cannot express enough gratitude, I’m so pleased to see it’s still respected to this date as one if not the best games of all times. It was even featured as part of the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony. But truly I have never seen such in depth analysis or breakdown of it’s philosophy before and I am truly grateful for it. This video by Max has truly made my day, nay, my entire year. This is a timeless game for the ages, ever lasting till the end of time.
Your comment hit me right in the feels. I'm 41, and some days, I feel exceptionally lost. Thus, his statement is correct, we merely must turn the wheel that is the ship of our lives, directly into the storm, because if we can navigate that, ANYTHING is possible
Man I gotta say I am right there with you man! I'm 39 so guess that makes me almost 40. We are that age, who were fortunate enough to be the age where this game could be part of our childhood. This was and is my favorite game of all time. And like he said about all the endings and sidequests being hard to miss. It was still do able back then if u loved the game enough to want to explore every inch of it and I'm glad I did. Sadly I've reached this age having accomplished maybe 5% of what I assumed is would be this time. Life can be a struggle. And for me it has never been anything else. ,what u have said I feel like maybe I can do something to change that for once. By needing to want it. I need to change from Frog to Glenn
I was born at the end of 84 and played FF6 and Chrono Trigger when they were released, both tied for best game of all time IMO - I am lucky for being born to experience those games at that age
For real, I never thought about that, I was within the PERFECT age range in my childhood to optimally experience CT, FFVII and FFVI("3"), Earthbound, Illusion of, Secret of, other Secret of, Breath of I & II, SMRPG, and of course LOZ:ALTTP, and also to a slightly lesser extent Soulblazer, 7th Saga, Lufia I & II, and Stardew Vall... Harvest Moon, all timeless masterpieces each of which I got to experience in thier totality as they were released. 🤔Sh*t, that might have been the highlight of my life...f*ck now i'm sad ☹
I'd just like to point out that the entire sidequest with Magus attempting, and failing, to save Schala from the Dream Devourer was not in the original SNES release. It was added to the NDS version as a way to better connect the events of Trigger with Cross. In this way, it's sort of "working backward", and is (imo) tonally strange because it relies heavily on the idea that the player of NDS Trigger was likely already familiar with Cross and doesn't really "fit" with the rest of the themes of CT as a standalone story.
Came down here just to say this. This was really just a way to retroactively set up Cross and the character of Guile (who is Magus but isn't acknowledged as such in the game).
Even if it had, the implementation of those characters in Chrono Cross felt so vague and shoehorned in to me. I was not a fan of CC at the 11th hour. In response to the story of CT being "the lesser element", quite frankly I believe the simplicity is a strong point. After all these years after having last played it I could still give you the gist of plot and characters. CC is hazy at best probably because at the time Square was riding the success of FF7 and complex dense stories equaled good plus money. And while the enormous cast of playable characters might have been a good idea on the face of it, half of them were redundant and inconsequential. Kinda like if you bloated the cast with different skins of Gogo and Umaro.
@@Laurell_Silentshade a lot of the Cross development decisions were from the director not really wanting to do a sequel to Trigger. Even now when he was hired to make Another Eden (which has time travel) he states he has no interest in treading similar ground to Trigger.
Your observations have kind of inspired me: Glenn and Magus are actually corresponding shadows of ones another. Both are those who feel they failed and lost the ones they most loved and identified with, the people whose shadows they occupied and felt overcast by. They chose similar but corresponding responses to their failures: Magus embraced the very failings that were responsible for his sisters loss "mistaking power for strength", Glenn/Frog fell into self condemnation for the very things that Cyrus found to be his virtue. While forgiveness from Cyrus was the story redemption for Glenn I actually think his redemption is subtly contained in whether or not you choose to have Magus join you or whether you slay him. The correct path for Glenn is to to realize that his failure was not in failing to slay Magus but in failing to realize that was the wrong intention in the first place, Glenn has as his greatest virtue his gentleness which is why his element is water. Magus never actually comes to understand his failures except somewhat in the later versions of the game which is why his quest is still to wander, he has yet to understand what his failure actually is and this is somewhat shown by his ending where he forgets his identity except a vague sense of searching. Schala states as much in her dialogue at the end: until people stop relying on power she will forever be attached to Lavos. Until mankind stops seeking to control and dominate others for their own goals beauty, purity, and innocence will forever be intertwined with power and destruction.
Magus can’t “realize his failure” because the Schala storyline isn’t resolved. He does realize he needs others to achieve his goal, though, which is definitely apparently character development…
It probably is fair to call Chrono Trigger "The Citizen Kane of Video Games," or are least JRPGs. It really was that important to the genre, at least in terms of how different JRPGs that came after it were.
@@troyounce3295 I find Citizen Kane quite boring, but it was by far the most innovative cinematography for a film to that point and helped shape film making to an incalculable amount even to this day.
@@Tonzoffun0420 It's hard to appreciate the impact of most works from a modern perspective because we're so familiar now with things which were a big innovation back then. That being said I didn't like Citizen Kane at all either, it was really boring and unrelatable for me 😅
@@Tonzoffun0420 incalculable? Is that why movies are such garbage today? Are you being intentionally dense? You don't have to pretend that something is important if you don't know why lol.
@@tryhardnobouken465 the super Nintendo cartridge is the fastest. I had the ps1 version with the extra anime cutscenes but there is significant slowdown during battle transition and when you go to the menu screen. Maybe a rom if you have the access
@@troyounce3295 I remember the load times being horrible on PSX, so much so that I would avoid using the menu if I didn't absolutely have to. I still have the SNES cartridge.
What I love about Chrono Trigger is that it has a so many ideas that are executed really well and it never over stays its welcome. A lot of RPGs these days are bloated and that is not necessarily a bad thing sometimes, but Chrono Trigger was really focused and dense at the same time. I can’t remember the last RPG I played where there’s so much in so little time.
Bloatedness is almost always a bad thing and it seems that todays media is all about bloating shit until it bursts. There is a tribute game to CT and its one of the best "J"RPGs ever made. Its called"Chained Echoes".
Chrono Trigger has long been my favorite game of all time. When I was a kid, I would play through it, then play it again. I could never quite put my finger on it but I always loved it. As I got older and wiser, through subsequent replays, it started to make more sense. It's the perfect combination of a comforting atmosphere but also a high-stakes narrative that really gives each character time to shine. It really is just the perfect culmination of musical direction, art direction, and story planning that make it so timeless (no pun intended). I am (a very small) part of the Chrono Compendium team and let me tell you, those guys are still analyzing the story implications of this game to this day. That alone should emphasize the magnitude this game has when given the right audience. Edit: Also, Max, since you're going to emulate Chrono Cross, there are a few things you should know. I'm not doing this to promote my own channel or whatever, but you should take a look at my video here (no spoilers in this video): ruclips.net/video/ZFI0yEQZPtU/видео.html I was able to use Retroarch to get the original PS1 version to look very good and even run at a higher framerate. It requires a bit of tweaking but if you're interested in getting the game to look like this, feel free to hit me up and I can help you set it up. Stay yellow!
That campfire scene fucked me up 20 years ago and I've never had a bigger WTF moment in gaming. I actually put down the controller and took a walk. It caught me completely off guard.
You will never fully appreciate Chrono Trigger unless you faked sick for days in a row in 1995 to get out of school in order to so deeply immerse yourself in this mind blowing new gaming experience which forever altered your life. Seeing it on the shelf at blockbuster video for the first time after reading about it in magazines. Looking at its beautiful cover art which appeared in the states before DBZ and exposed you to an art style you’ve never seen before. Listening to its hypnotic brilliant music and it’s deep time travel plot that you had never experienced in a game before. It was life altering for those of us who were there and that’s why it’s at all the top of the lists today.
This is the video essay I've always wanted to write. Chrono Trigger has a grip on me that is almost impossible to describe, and in no small part due to the absolute mind-melting terror I experience at even the thought of Lavos.
One of my major philosophical concepts of why Chrono Trigger was so great, is it is secretly and fittingly designed like a clock. You had the main plot which was the bare bones of the game. If you wanted to you could look at it as a very simple journey from point A to B to C. Then wrap it around again is like unscrewing the back and looking inside. You had 'secrets' and then SECRETS. Every side quest for wrapping up side characters was impossible to miss as long as you tried but as a kid you still felt like you were unearthing something secret. Then the kinds of secrets you can miss like say getting both the Rainbow and Maiden Suits (I'm going off memory) or stealing stuff, which made you feel even more clever. You can tell time on the surface easily, but underneath is a hidden world of gears which really represent the device. Each one works to move the whole thing forward and it's a joy to find each one and see how it all fits together. 6 fixed characters. Think hours going around a clock face. Each represents a part of the story you have to travel through, except Crono who is, as the hand of the clock, able to adapt to each one as the lynch pin of the group. Ayla from prehistory is late night. Early humanity surviving in the dark. Magus is early afternoon, the rise of civilization. Marle and Lucca are the afternoon and late evening. One could argue which is which, Lucca for Cronos childhood or technology, Marle for feudalism or getting married. Robo is obviously twilight, dusk, and the end of the day. You have 3 magi, each representing the past present and future. You have the beginning and end of time as the same place. There are absolutely no loose ends except Schala who is THE loose end. The thing you wish you could fix. It's just the perfect mix between simple and complicated. Unique and ubiquitous. It's not just nostalgia; if any game needed to be preserved for humanity and we had to choose the smallest memory size possible to fix on a zip drive, and get the most bang for our buck it should definitely be this one. There are plenty of other games which deserve to be called 'the best' for different reasons, but as far as the size of the game for how much story is contained in it, this game is perfect. It's like a perfectly constructed pocket watch.
Heck yes. I'm so glad you went in depth with the side stuff. It really makes the game what it is. The campfire scene is one of my favorites in gaming history.
When I was a child my older brother sat me on a been bag chair and played through this game among practically all the great games to come out for the ps1&ps2. This is by far his and my favorite game.
Played Chrono Trigger several times, it's my favorite JRPG of all time. Not ONCE did it occur to me to think of Lavos as a Lovecraftian/Eldritch creature. Mind freaking blown. I always just thought of it as the biggest alien parasite in existence, kind of like John Carpenter's the Thing, but on a waaay bigger scale.
If you subscribe to game theory's assertion, Lavos is analogous to the beast of revelations while Crono is analogous to Christ. I like the idea of it being a lovecraftian eldritch abomination though. Makes a horrific monster even scarier.
@@SamsarasArt ¿Could Magus be an "Anti Christ" figure? He's the polar opposite of Crono in everyway with his motivations and stakes in the conflict against Lavos being rather selfish compared to Crono's altruistic and empathetic desire to save the planet from incoming Apocalypse. I wish more people realized the dualistic parallelism that's found throughout both Chrono games as i feel one could argue for some deeper existentialist symbolism.
So glad my older brother brought these cartridges back from the game store! FF1 taught me reading so I could play my own safe file after my brother beat it and I watched him play through the game Then Chrono trigger came and it’s the only JRPG on par with FF6 in my opinion of the era, such amazing worlds man. So glad I got to experience them at that age because it made this even more magical
It doesn't need to ask profound questions - it answers the "what if" by telling you that an unlikely group of people would band together to stop an existential threat if it so happened. It is absurdly optimistic and we need that when our own planet is getting more and more inhospitable.
When it comes to the sad ending for Magus, it is important to note that the fight against the Dream Devourer (aka Lavos fused with Schala) is more of an attempt to tie Chrono Trigger with its sequel - Chrono Cross than anything. The original version of the game had a loose thread when it came to Schala's fate and she inexplicably reappeared in Cross in weird circumstances. The DS version added this boss battle in order to explain what became of her! By the way, Chrono Cross is also an awesome game. It is very polarising due to not being a "true" sequel to trigger but it does have some similarities with Xenogears
Isn't it interesting that even as a kid you get hooked on this game while not having the knowledge of all those concepts yet that underline it? It's as nothing in this video is new information to me but I would never have been able to actually put it into words and that it's a main reason to why I love this game so much.
Man zygard gaming did a full run down that i have to watch weekly. The delivery of material and even the info that isn't made clear thru regular gameplay is just fantastic. The little girl from the future (shala?) is sent back in time to frogs time and found by ozzie. That little girl is magus. The 3 sages were sent with her and all 4 were sent to seperate times. 1 ended up at the end of time the other in the future where with no hope of escape he began building the chrono trigger because he had visions if whats to come and left the people a chance to survive. The other, ended up in Chronos time... That part alone a whole game. Yet its a minor part of chrono trigger. Ayla is the first queen in marles family line.. The reptiles are ozzis ascendants. Which is related to why ozzie turns glenn to a frog. A reptile.. A subtle hint. Those 2 families have battled thru time from prehistory to the end.. Another could be full game. The 3 sages are named after the 3 wiseman from the holy bible.. The team that made that game was the dream team. The only team to come close is the saga frontier team.. Its impossible to say enough about it. Such an awesome story.
when i first tried Chrono Trigger, I didn't even know english, I just kept playing because I was fan of Dragon Ball and the techs looked dope to me. xD When I found out they could combine techs then i kept playing and leveling just to see more combos... BUT... then I met spekkio and he told me to walk the room CLOCKWISE, and that word was unknown to me and my dictionary didn't have this word in it... so I had to give up the game for months till later I found the word's meaning in aonther dictionary... well there was no internet at that time to do quick researchs like today xD
I was just about the say the same thing It might not be very profound but it is god dang masterpiece Worth every single second of the time spent to play it
Its absolutely profound. It just doesn't shove its profundity into the story. The profound part is 8n the subtlety. The information not given directly. Which in itself is a level of profound I've yet to see in any other game..ruclips.net/video/_JoPAn_dbr0/видео.html
It's a tragedy and a crime what SE have done to CT with the NDS and Steam\mobile versions, by removing the more-profound and lively original English translation that's in the SNES version of the game and replacing it with one that's extremely sterile, dull, stilted and unenergetic. The SNES translation is full of character and heart, while the NDS\Steam\mobile translation is very dry and reads as if all the characters are the same single character and personality talking. If people played with the SNES version of the game, they would find the writing and character relations deeper than what they would if they only played the NDS or Steam\mobile version. And I have no doubt that a lot of the people who think Chrono Trigger doesn't have a lot of personal moments and didn't have profound writing played the NDS or Steam\mobile version and would have a different opinion if they'd played the SNES version of the game. At the end of this video, Max says that he'll be playing Chrono Cross, he says, "Don't worry... I won't be playing the 'remastered version' (lol). I will be emulating it." Yet, playing the Steam version of Chrono Trigger is a much bigger mistake than playing the Steam version of Chrono Cross. The Steam version of CC includes the option to play the original PS1 version of CC, without the art changes and performance issues of the "remastered" version. But the Steam version of CT doesn't include an option to play the original game without all the technical issues of the Steam version and without the extreme bastardisation of the script that the NDS and Steam\mobile versions of CT suffer from.
@@thischannel1071 I couldn't agree more. People who rag on Ted Woolsey's localizations completely miss the point; he added *character.* His scripts weren't 1:1 conversions of the Japanese for a reason, and while this was partly because of cartridge space limitations and Nintendo censorship policies, it's also creatively important to take liberties or you end up with something completely stale. Japanese is a very to-the-point language that often lacks nuance, while English is almost the exact opposite, and translators should keep this in mind when localizing fiction.
It amazes me how popular Chrono Trigger is but how underrated it's story actually is. It's it's character writing where it really succeeds in my opinion. great video as always.
This a very interesting philosophical take on chrono trigger. Although you didn't mention, and I can only speak for myself I think the pacing is one of the reaons why this game is so beloved and work as well as it does. A lot of Jrpgs can't have a rocky start or can drag at some point. but in chrono trigger everything flows naturally and everything is purposeful, even the sidequests. The game is fairly short, but there is no fat.The game knows what it wants to be and tell it's story perfectly and how you tell your story it's much more important than the story you are telling. That is why this game it's work of art, a timeless classic.
I'm going to have to disagree with the statement, most people only experienced the main plot and miss the side quest. I would argue that the "side quests" and just the part of the main quest, and how they were presented, was an experiment in none linear gameplay( which was a big deal at the time) and not only was the intention for the player to do these side quests but the game was designed in such a way that missing them would be very unlikely on a player's first playthrough. The guru at the end of time gives pretty specific hints, and by this time he's already guided you, and talking to him at least once a visit should be part of the gameplay loop. Second beating Lavos before doing all the side quests is actually kinda hard, and unless you really know the mechanics( which a first-time player probably wouldn't) you would have to grind, something you never do until that point indicates you're doing it wrong. Lastly the normal standard ending is unlocked by doing all the side quests showing that that was intention. The dream team knew exactly what they were doing, you the player has a free wheel, but the design of the game means that it takes great effort to overcome the fate of getting a standard ending. Also, I think it's pretty cool that in almost every game with multiple endings, you unlock the other endings by doing more "side quests", but in Chrono Trigger you unlock endings by completing less of the game. And the top-secret ending is unlocked by doing none of the game.
This can be even further seen in the inclusion of New Game+ as being something more than a simple mechanic of a video game. We the players are now participating directly in time travel through the vehicle that is New Game+ with the characters and thereby, attain the top secret ending as a result. Further still, we are the will of the planet guiding Chronos and the others to save earth.
I think he just means through their first playthrough. Sure, they couldn't avoid all of the side quests, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the majority of the people back when this game released, would have missed a huge chunk of the side quests. I know I definitely missed the one for Frog, Robo and Lucca and yes the guy at the End of Time talks about these locations but some of these locations/triggering events weren't exactly in plain sight. I mean they were in plain sight but sometimes (most of the time) it required you to talk to a series of random people to trigger the questline and since back then we didn't didn't have the help of the internet to guide us I could see people missing these side quests.
I think you underestimated the player. I, as twelve year old, found all but 1 ending and did most of the side quests. I even tried different outcomes that lead to the same ending. I grew up without much access to the internet so I discovered it mostly through trial and error. I THINK, that although some of the best and most interesting content of the game is Optional, it was a great choice as it allows for more players exploration. I played it again in 2018 and looked a few things up. I found that there were some small things I missed. It is important to note that when this game came out people tended to explore games more and play more rather than beating it and moving on. There was also a lot of hearsay. You would ask people at school or your friends or hear rumours about the game. Maybe casual players would miss all those side quests, but there are a lot of hints and indications if you talk to the NPCs. I loved finding new things to do in new game +
I think it's interesting to note that that official illustration of the Dreamstone simultaneously looks like Lavos's shell and Crono's hair. It's like it's making reference to that duality in referencing the two most major characters at either side of the conflict.
As I said on the announcement post,I will never call this the "best" RPG ever made,but I absolutely agree with calling it "perfect". Even today,I can still go back to this game and enjoy myself,which is rare for me with games of this vintage. Thank you for covering it.
17:16 I think you misjudged the timeline of events, and therefore got the implications of the Dreamstone inverted. The first time you go back to 65 Million BC, you are specifically on a quest to retrieve the Dreamstone to reforge the Masamune - these events occur _before_ Lavos has landed. This is also a bit of clever story-telling, because elements established in this random fetch quest wind up becoming relevant later at multiple different points later in the story. Dreamstone's use in the knife that disables the Mammon machine and as a component of several characters' final weapons suggests that, far from being connected to Lavos, it is actually somehow anathema to it. My personal reading is that Dreamstone exists to underline Lavos's status as an entity that does not belong on Earth - that elements of the planet itself fundamentally reject Lavos's presence. Then again, considering the entire game is about time travel, this might all be moot.
It's worth mentioning that in both sequels to Chrono Trigger Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross the so called *Frozen Flame* plays a role somewhat similar to Dreamstone by also granting people's dreams and desire in exchange of "binding their soul" to Lavos's in turn allowing Lavos to become even more powerful. It's safe to assume that just as the Frozen Flame came from Lavos's very being so did the Dreamstone come from the Planet itself as a means to counter it.
@@crawdad The Planet: Dreamstone/Dragon Tear, the Dragonian race, the Terra Tower, the Dragon God and the Einlanzer sword. Lavos: Frozen Flame, the Human race, Chronopolis, the FATE supercomputer and the Masamune sword. There is a clear element of duality in the Chrono series that saddly tends to be overlooked by it's lack of relevance throughtout the games's storylines.
also, the "entity" has been stated by developers to be Shala. When she submitted to the void and became empty like it, she became a god like being both existing, and not existing. This gave incredible god like powers to perceive the universe, but cannot physically interact with it at all. Her personality split, and her positive and negative sides became almost separate beings fighting with each other. One side was helping lavos and pushing towards undoing existence, but the other side, the positive side, the small amount of love within her became a postive force of nature, caring for and loving human kind. This is the entity that creates the time gates, allows the Chrono Trigger to work, and in Crono Cross is what saves SERGE from dying as a kid.
I too had the theory that is was the Lavos/Schalla fusion in the Darkness Beyond Time, as it would make a lot of both Trigger and Cross make sense. However, recently, I'm pretty sure Masato Kato confirmed it was "The Planet". Where did you see this information?
The entity is the Planet, since you visit the past before Schala and Lavos exist on the planet. However if they ever make a third Chrono game, I think it'd be cool if it were retconned to be Crono himself. Whatever causes his disappearance prior to the events of Chrono Cross leads to his ascension to a higher level of existence. He could be a god of Time for example. So he relives his life and subconsciously creates time gates
@@pwnranger3496 "before" and "after" matter very little when the Time Devourer is beyond time altogether. Intemporal and eternal, they exist in a singularity where they dont have an "origin", or at least it ceased to matter.
@@pwnranger3496 Interesting, considering Crono had no father, that would make sense. That he's the son of God and was sent to repent for mankind's sin. I guess the Game Theorist's theory about Chrono Trigger retelling the event of the Bible makes much more sense now. I betcha Chrono Trigger was originally a bible game and Squaresoft just change the title so players wouldn't notice. Crono die same as Jesus, had the power to raise the dead, had no father, was betray by someone, was resurrected, etc.
@@BinaryDood in the game its implied the entity is reliving its memories which is why the time gates are where they are and go to where they go. Both Lavos and Schala weren't on Earth for a portion of the prehistory plot, so how could they relive memories neither one of them had?
I actually panicked and failed the first time through. After figuring out how that code worked which is actually consistent through every version of the game even on Playstation,I have made sure not to fuck up again. And yes,Triangle counts for A in the Playstation releases.
I am in my late 30's and I have played through this game multiple times over the last 20 years. A true masterpiece and definitely has a place among the top games ever made. It is simple, yet at the same time thought provoking and beautiful.
Considering this is my GOAT, and the only game I've ever learned enough to speedrun, even if this video were 5 hours long you wouldn't tell me anything I already knew or read about over the last 27 years, but I appreciate the effort anyway. It's wild to me that a game in which your main character actually dies, a game which depicts the world ending as a soon-to-be historical fact, where humanity's peak of civilization ended thousands of years ago by their own hubris, that it still manages to be MORE hopeful and uplifting than almost any other video game (the art style and music certainly help), on top of being a masterpiece of design.
I love this game! I remember playing it in Junior High and High School over and over again thanks to New Game+. This was also the first video game that I bought for myself and I still have the cartridge to this day! It needs a new battery though.
There's nothing else I can say here rather than this is the best Chrono Trigger video essay I've ever seen. It's totally straight to the essence of the game. Chrono Trigger has been my favorite game of all time and after this video it became even more so.
Great to see someone go past skin deep on Chrono Trigger's narrative. As someone on the spectrum who played it at 14, it made my mind go racing with existentialist questions due to how the game's components communicate with each other. Gameplay, music, story and themes so inter reflective and intertwined and makes this "simple" game fertile ground for your own creativity. Unbeknownst to me, many of the thoughts and theorys I had when first playing Trigger would later be explored in Cross, such conductive lines of thought thus gaining texture and identity. I think the one think you haven't payed much attention to in this video is Lavos itself. He(it) is the glue the holds the entire Chrono series together. I had this theory that the hypothethical ultimate form of Lavos, as he is a Furnace of God, hoping from planet to planet absorbing all of the DNA and energy of every living thing to create the Perfect Lifeform (as we see during the boss rush in the final battle, as well as the unfinished result of Lavos' harvest mimicing the party's formation itself..), lying farther in the future would be the Entity the characters speak of. As it would gain complete control over time itself, it could will itself into existence: sending one of its spawns back in time, in other words the one you see falling in 65 000 000 bc, in order to create itself to form its own destiny. I no longer think in this way since playing Chrono Cross, but there are similair aspects. (Might be considered SPOILERsm even thought this can be deduced when playing Chrono Trigger, as I did back in the day) When I realized humans only exist because the reptites were extinguished by Lavos, it made me question our own world considering the obvious parallel it mirrors. If we humans only get to exist because a meteor fell into Earth, something outseide its already established homeostasis, does that make us, in some way, incompatible with it? Thinking on how humans hurt nature back and forth to perpetuate their own evolution could be a determistic resultant chain from we being "not meant to be" in this world. So that Lavos itself is the source of magic, the thing that gave Zeal all of its advances, its like it was giving us the "flame of creation" only for us to advance themselves unknowingly that it was all for the better harvest of the cosmic parasite. An evolution not by their hand, but by something "outer", which supplanted the worlds homestasis to create its own, uncaring fr the world its in. Humans are parasitic because Lavos is so... This I first thought playing Chrono Trigger. And I remember this dread I felt in a nightmare I had at the time, that It was the same with the meteor which killed the dinossaurs in the real world. Not that it was sentient, but an existential extension of the universe itself, sort of the opposite of the Antropic Principle. Our every effort in our evolution and history the determistic chain from something that deviated us the from ever being able to coexist with our mother world. Our very evolution a ploy doomed to failure since the very start, and that was just the nature of things since the "Big Fire" fell. The heavens have sided with the apes indeed. (If you kill Lavos before he falls, everyone on the planet is a reptite)
@@javiervasquez625 Thank you! I ain't no philosopher, I just tend to overthink thing shehe. I reread my post, so many spelling mistakes! I guess that is the difference when you use a modern chiclet keyboard as opposed to a mechanical one...
I just made the connection between Frog and the snake enemies (Gnashers, I think) around his hideout. They eat the frog enemies in battles so he lives there for training.
Did you really find it that hard to locate all the sidequests at the end? I feel like you can find most of them pretty naturally by just revisiting areas where your curiosity would say, "Hmm, I feel like we weren't quite done with this part of the story yet." Marle's unresolved tiff with her father, the parts of 1000 and 2300 AD you can only reach after the Epoch can fly, that strange new whirlpool in the desert. I have to wonder if maybe CT's assumption that you'll go explore and pick up on those loose threads only feels "hard" in an age of journal entries and endless waypoints like we have in modern gaming. It doesn't hold your hand the way Skyrim would, but it doesn't go out of the way to hide these endgame quests either. The most esoteric may be restoring the sun stone.
^this 100%. also have to mention that that whole era of JRPG's was filled with "hidden" side content. the majority of which was only available once the world map becomes fully unlocked near the end of a game. it was just standard practice and rarely felt like any of that content was particularly hard to find.
I was stuck on this comment for quite awhile thinking back on this game. I was very fortunate to have grown up around people who owned an actual snes cartridge back when it came out, and I remember making it a point to have completed everything, only going after Lavos with my party in the 70s level wise which is wildly overkill. But I also remember that in those playthroughs of the game when I was... give or take 8ish years old I never had a save file that was on the last chapter of the story according to side quest completion. I was fully aware of the existence of video game strategy guides, but I was also too poor to buy them and didn't want to impose those costs on my parents who already had been more than generous enough just getting me an SNES that gave me the opportunity to borrow games from friends or rental stores like Blockbuster. The internet of the late 90s was also not a well explored territory for me so gamefaqs boards and the like were also out of the question. In perfect hindsight, I could run through the game in around 10 hours completing absolutely everything, but that's with countless playthroughs of the story in the back of my memory. The game does provide a very strong ending hub with Gaspar directing the player to the many critical side quests after obtaining the completed Epoch but I suspect that for a truly blind run it's actually not super obvious. Some of the ending side quests don't even feel like they have relation to one another like the Rainbow Shell being tied to Marle's resolution with her father or the seemingly random sinkhole dungeon in the middle ages being a story for Robo and Lucca ending quest rather than Frog's or Magus', further complicated by the ending quest rewards often providing the most benefits to characters not related to those story beats. I recall that completing the Sunstone quest was something I intuitively figured out VERY early on when I played the game (though defeating the Son of the Sun was impossible without first doing enough side quests to obtain anti-fire armor). For me the most confusing side quest was finding the Rainbow Shell since I didn't understand the significance of pouring the "soda" on Toma's grave when I was young (and because the translation in the game was dumb as rocks), I only ever found the cave at all because my uncle told me you can just go into the cave even though there's no indicator that it's a new zone.
I disliked Skyrim for this reason lmao it's like the direct opposite of Chrono Trigger. You both wake up, but Skyrim treats you as some dormant powerful being with a great destiny, a dragonborn. Chrono Trigger puts you, the player, in the eyes of Crono to experience the world around you.
I was surprised when you announced your next video was going to be on Chronno Trigger. I don't know why people told you it's not profound. Maybe it doesn't ask deep questions, but it's a beautiful story just like its sequel. Nothing is dumbed down. I remember crying when I played the game just because I felt the character in the game the same way as a character in a book. One of the best games I've ever played.
Because it's not profound. That doesn't make it bad, of course. It's just a simple, likeable story, with just a very small bit of "What if?" near the end.
Damn ! That was one fine essay on this masterpiece. Agreed that Chrono Trigger is a timeless (ahem) pivotal game in the rather young videogame history, and even dare I say, in the much older storytelling history ! I played it when it came out when I was 15, and it left a burning mark in my brain. Even today, at 41, I still remember it clearly (when I replayed it for the second time, something like 15 years ago, I STILL discovered new stuff in it, including the forest campfire scene, which blew my mind !). It's absolutely one of these master pieces that defined their era ! Much like Michael Jackson, U2, Madonna, ET, Terminator, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya modelled the 80's (still the absolute best decade in existence for entertainment that I experienced), Chrono trigger, along with the SNES, The Cranberries, Oasis, Street Fighter 2, Final Fantasy 4, 5, 6, and 7, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, and The Matrix spearheaded the 90's. You just HAD to experience them when they came out, because they were all part of an entire ecosystem of an era, and it made your mind grow a certain way. Now don't get me wrong, I'm still glad you got to discover it (and make such a kickass video about it), but imagine having experienced it at 15 in a world waaay prior to Internet, Star Wars Prequels, the MCU, etc... Your mind would have exploded !
Ngl, watching videos like these really helps someone like me who is very new (due to age and geography reasons) to JRPGs and turn-based games in general of how great these retro games are, especially in terms of story. You folks back in the 90s seriously had some amazing experiences. Also, I am usually wary of time-travel stories but so far, this game (based on your video) and Steins;Gate are two of the only media that I have seen that did time travel so well.
My favorite is the soundtrack of Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana... incredible beautiful soundtrack that still to this day reminds me profoundly of being a kid. While I gave Final Fantasy 6-8 more "hours"...Chrono Trigger & Secret of Mana are the ones I love the most due to it giving me this feeling of how I felt back then...same with "Mystic Quest" (German title) on the Nintendo Game Boy ...
I remember playing CT on an emulator on my old pc in 2005 - the music, the story, the dialogues & characters - literally TRANSPORTED me everytime i played it. Needless to say I binge played and unlocked all endings. Now I like to listen to the OST everynow and then along with the great works of hisaishi and uematsu
Man, I love this game :3 Frog is one of my favourite video game characters. When he finally gets to confront Magus is such a great moment - it still gives me goosebumps. Excellent video, Max
I had a couple of things happen the last few months and just now went to check on your channel... I can't believe the massive amount of great videos you uploaded!!! Max, you are definitely one of the great content creators of our time. Thank you specifically for this video about Chrono Trigger.
Really great essay, thanks so much for taking the time to make this. So many different avenues to go down when discussing this game: the multiple story lines, the music, the dream team behind the whole thing, etc. Great stuff!
Chrono Trigger is the most special to me... I remember the shivers down my spine when seeing black omen for the first time appearing on the sky. It was really beatiful for me, maybe it was because of the aesthetics of the game but this game does not get old in art.
I think that you best summarized why Chrono Trigger remains on top of the lists of one of the best RPGs of all time. Heck, it was also like that back around 14 years ago, when I discovered it in 2008 by doing random internet searches and wanting to experience all these games that I missed previously. What Chrono Trigger does is it gives the player option to simply immersive and play the game at their own pace. It does not guide them like many games do, it does not force them to take certain paths. It just sets a simple, yet very enjoyable stream, for a player to traverse through. If the player so wishes, they can then expand on it through all the additional and side quests that have been mentioned in this video. What I like about CT side quests, is that they do not simply extended the playtime, but rather, fill out more puzzles to the already massive world. This, combined with charming and well-aged graphics and outstanding musical composition, truly make this game a lasting gem.
Before jumping to Cross it might be a good idea to do Radical Dreamers first. I heard it from the forum days that it makes Cross better, and helps the connect to Trigger.
I couldn't get into Chrono Cross until I played Radical Dreamers. They should have brought it over, it would have helped alot of TRIGGER fans CROSS over.
I wouldn't say Radical Dreamers helps all that much in that regard. The best advice I would give to someone struggling to enjoy Cross is to have patience. It's no secret that the plot is convoluted as hell. But it does make sense and very well thought out. It just takes a few playthroughs for it to click. If you want an in between primer to Cross, you're better off just playing CT DS (Steam). The old Ted Woolsey translation will just further confuse you once you move onto Cross. More specifically, all the "entity" talk.
@@Magus12000BC Just have patience shit is like the "it gets good after 25 hours" shit people said about FF13. Radical Dreamers ties the world of Cross to Trigger alot faster. Just needed a frame of reference of where/what/when the fuck am I doing here and wtf does it have to do with Cross. Dreamers does that in like a half hour.
@@johnsmith-xw7hv - It doesn't tie anything up. The only similarities are Lynx killing Lucca and Kid being her usual self. The stories of Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross are literally nothing alike. If you want something that ties the two games together, it confirms that Crono and Marle died when Guardia got invaded by Porre. That's pretty much it. Beyond that, it ties nothing together. It's merely a separate timeline that has no bearing on the overarching plot. You don't need connections handed to you in a few hours. They wanted you to follow another character and give you a different motivation for proceeding. And quite frankly, a teenager that should be dead that's walking around is far more interesting than a bard that has no aim or purpose. A sequel doesn't have to constantly reference the predecessor to be a sequel.
Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece of a game. I played this game when I was 9 years old and i still play it at 35 years old. The music, the emotional connection, the gameplay, oh my goodness, the memories! ❤
Magus was chained by guilt to his past. After failing to rescue his sister, the only person he cared about in Zeal, he dedicated his life in 600AD to destroying Lavos. Remember, Magus was too young to remember his mother, the queen, before she had been twisted by Lavos. Lavos robbed him of his mother, his sister, and his kingdom. Ironically, Magus' magic power is also derived from Lavos. At least in part. He must have hated using the magic he relied on to succeed in revenge. By existence, Magus doesn't mean his life. He means the person he had become after having made a life of hard choices had reached a dead end. He had to accept his ultimate failure and find a new purpose, but he didn't know how. Him losing his memory is him being reborn without the weight of his past. He's no longer chained to the grief and guilt that followed him his entire life. He was free to finally choose a life that is meaningful to him. In many forms of Buddhism, being reborn often means being reassigned to a new realm for rebirth. Magus had more than enough evil to be reassigned to hell, or the demon realm. Instead he was kept whole and returned to earth, implying that in accepting his failures he had achieved some level of enlightenment. This might earn him a second chance in the human world. Magus has the most one of the most understated character arcs in SquareSoft era games. But taking a moment to consider Magus' path reveals something quite profound.
I truly enjoyed your thorough examination of this amazing game called Chrono trigger, I always think of the man musical theme and I always hum it and it just takes me back. Honestly music is one of the best triggers for going back in time to enjoy time past that we're beautiful. Of course it has the negative effect as well doing the same thing for negative feelings but I tend not to focus on that my Amazing Brother. I am so grateful for you doing this and it truly help me see that Chrono trigger was just more than just a video game. I truly love that game and I am so thankful that I had the chance to play it back then on the SNES. Continue to do this amazing work we greatly appreciate you. 💯💪🏾☮️❤️🙏🏾
You could do an entire video just on the backstory of the soundtrack and how perfect that alone is. Surprised you didn’t touch on the 600 AD theme, or Schala’s theme. Both are fantastic pieces of music.
Beautifully done, man. I knew Chrono Trigger was gonna be special as soon as I saw the pendulum swinging on the title screen. Very few games telegraph their significance so bloody early to me.
I feel like it's easier to elevate existentialism in stories because you can have it exist for PCs at the expense of NPCs. Like what about Cyrus? He was brave, he tried hard, and he got iced. What about the Guardia bridge soldiers who were fighting without food and got turned into a big skeleton? It's like existentialism for the PCs, but pessimism and/or determinism for the rest.
What I love about the plot that many people miss is that Chrono and crew have very little effect on time or the future. Nearly every event would have happened regardless if they were there or not. The only significant changed they make are: Janus survives summoning Lavos, The raising of the Black Omen, and killing Lavos to prevent doomsday. I found it very impressive that the made a Time Travel story that doenst really change much of time
Chrono Trigger was the closest games have come to the vinyl hunt for me. It was before online ordering, so I spent years looking (and traveling) for a copy. Finally got one, and then they started to release remasters and ports. I wasn't even mad, because that game needs to be seen by more people. Still does. I've never played an RPG before or since that has pacing as perfect as Chrono Trigger.
Keep re watching this video and I think I really realize how this game is one of the reasons I didn't kill myself many years ago. the exploration of themes here definitely subconsciously embedded into me, I played this game in my early adult years on just before a darl period in my life. gosh diggity damn I love this game. it also hits me how almost any song from the game is moving to me if I hear it. I used to hang out at the edge of time and listen to that music and just be still there. freaking amazing experience, I'm happy I lived to play this game 🥰🥰🥰
Max Derrat: Post a video about Final Fantasy 9 being an existentialist masterpiece Me: Well I'll play Max Derrat: Do it again in Chrono Trigger Me: Ah Sh*t, here we go again :)
Generally the playerbase divides between the players who like Trigger more than Cross, and vice versa. Maybe this is related about what game you play first, that will create a bias. I played Cross first, at first I thought it kinda weird compared to FF7 or FF8, that were games from the same generation. But as ones mature, Cross keeps becoming wonderfully complex and interesting. Definitively one of the best story I ever see. Worth pointing out, though, Cross is NOT a direct sequel of Trigger. There is a long story between both, we can explain Cross from 2 PoV, the real and the directors. The real PoV is that the "Dream Team" from Trigger was dissolved. So SE picked only one person from that team to make the sequel. Trigger embodied a team of PoV while Cross is a single directors PoV. And that single director didnt actually approve all directions that Trigger followed and decide to retell many aspects. As that director was responsible for the middle age time in Trigger, we can see it more often than the rest in Cross. The directors PoV is, as he decided to retell many key points in Trigger, he himself told Cross isnt a sequel of Trigger but an alternative reality derived from one specific ending from Trigger. And that choosen ending was the 13th ending that was introduced in DS version of Trigger. Despise the directors egoist intention of messing with Trigger story, it must be recognize that the end product is unique. He managed to create a sequel that you dont really see any connection with Trigger, but as you unveil the complexity of the dimensional jump, you can completely see that Trigger is there. Once I read that the best books are those that every time you read it, you always learn something new despite being the same text. It is the same with Cross. No matter how many times you play Cross, you will always learn something new there. Its almost like a new game every new gameplay.
I still think Cross, just makes the events of trigger, seem pointless, and Serge, ,is basically like screw you, and your pals chrono, you ruined my existence you have to admit there’s to many party members, and it isn’t as charming with it’s cast like Trigger, since they are such a close nit that get development, also personally for it’s just full of ridiculous plot that melts my brain, and i love deep stuff.
Cross is definetly a sequel. You can't have a "direct" one when the og game has 12 different endings, which form its overall identity which shouldnt be robbed just beecause it "needs" a traditional sequel. All endings from Trigger are canon in their own way in Cross, as it explores time laterally as Trigger does linearly..
I hate cross so much it's unreal. With time people love it more and more. Eventually None left will remember trigger. Much to my chagrin, you Cross fans have won. As what's newer will always be seen as better by the majority.
As someone who mostly plays games for a good story or compelling characters and their arks, I really enjoy when you cover these narrative games. Most of my friends play competitive multi-player games and, while they are pretty fun most times, I don't really have anyone to talk about single player games and their stories or what I enjoy about them. You're that person for me Max. It's really refreshing to see someone else have that enjoyment and express it. Thanks for the content as always and I hope you're doing well dude :)
Playing Chrono Cross BEFORE I ever played Trigger definitely affected my perception of Trigger's story. I played the whole game with a tragic sense of dramatic irony. Despite that, I still found joy in the characters' triumphs. The ultimate ends of a story are insignificant. Meaning is personal and it is found in the moment, not in an overarching narrative.
playing cross before trigger is actually way better lol. I feel bad for cross as people wanted a CT2 back in those days, refusing to treat it as its own thing. IVe got the remastered edition and damn its a beautiful game.
Wow, my condolences. I choose to completely ignore CC's story, I don't see it as canon or even having anything to do with CT. While they are technically supposed to be the same characters and universe, it is so radically different in every way, so much in opposition to everything that Trigger stood for, in game design, storytelling, characterization... it isn't a surprise the people who made it treated the cast of Trigger that way, they clearly despised everything it stood for in the larger sense (besides Yasunori Mitsuda, he had nothing to do with all that, and his score for Cross is sublime). They had such disregard for the characters and source material they were working with, I don't see why I should take anything they wrote seriously, is how I honestly feel. And I actually like Cross on its own merits, it's aesthetically gorgeous and a great deal of fun if one like JRPGs... I just think it is a horrible sequel to Trigger, even ignoring the disgusting disregard it has for the characters who were supposed to have a happy ending, everything about its storytelling and gameplay are the total opposite of how Trigger's most basic design principles, it just has no business claiming to be the canon sequel to something as utterly iconic and singular as Chrono Trigger. I am even annoyed by the anime cutscenes that are included with all modern ports of the game, as they are both not originally supposed to be there, and also the final one attempts to tie into and realize the nonsense insanity of what Cross says happens imminently after the end of Trigger. A bigger pile of horse shit I haven't encountered in my life, lol. And it blows me away how many people can't simply dismiss Cross on that basis, and insist that it must be taken seriously if you like Trigger.
@@jedgrahek1426 I never really thought of it as a sequel per say. I mean, just play Radical Dreamers if you want something even more disjointed than CC. The Devourer of Time was essentially responsible for creating all these paradoxical dimensions and realities. Defeating Devourer and freeing Schala stopped Lavos for good and allowed the Trigger crew to live in the reality they worked towards, rather than that depressing final scene of Trigger's "good" ending. I think of it more as a tool to give us closure for Trigger. That's my interpretation anyway.
@@jedgrahek1426 Could you elaborate a little on why the creators of CC deliberately despised the things that represented CT? I'm legitimately curious and uninformed, and I assume there's reasoning for that other than resentment towards how CC diverged from CT.
I could go on about my personal history with Chrono dating back to 1995 and how it changed my life. But I have to mention how awesome it is that you name checled System Shock 2 alongside the likes of Ocarina, MGS, and FF7. So deserved.
Wow, that really does show how radically different the meaning of "simple" (and many other words) can be depending on perspective and context. I would only ever say Chrono Trigger is simple if I were talking about the relative complexity of time travel narratives, with Primer being the contrasting example of "complex". Or "simple" in the sense that its narrative is wholly comprehensible to most people who can read, as opposed to its ostensible sequel, whose narrative is one of the foremost examples of senselessly convoluted JRPG writing, which couldn't be more different from Chrono Trigger's clean, sensible progression of events and character motivations. It is however, as you have learned, very thematically dense, and in terms of masterfully crafting an experience for the player, very, very far from being "simple" in how it operates. Amazing how malleable and sort of useless such epithets can be. I'm really, really happy you decided to play Chrono Trigger. It is one of those rare touchstones of nearly perfect beauty which we experience so rarely, for how much time we spend seeking out such things. edit: Oh, I love that you made special mention of how most of the cast have different, 'true' names than the ones they use by default. When I first played this, when it was brand new, I was 14, and I came up with a pet theory that something special would happen or be unlocked by playing or completing (or ???) the game with every character having their true name. Of course, it doesn't work both because not all the characters do (though the Epoch even does lol), and moreover because nothing in Chrono Trigger would ever be that cryptically hidden: one of the many things I have always admired the game for is how every sidequest, every secret, everything in the entire game is plainly findable for anyone who is simply talking to everyone and paying attention to all the information they are given, and it is all amazingly clear and lucid how it all works, given that there is not a whiff of a modern 'quest tracker' or anything like that. It is shocking how few games, especially RPGs, Japanese or Western, truly live up to this design paradigm, and instead force to player to consult external sources to find many secrets or even figure out how mechanics work fully. Thank you, it is always beautiful to witness someone encounter this game for the first time. It says a lot that you were able to recognize it for what it is so quickly, given your going into it aware of its reputation and seeing it as an older "classic", many of which can be difficult for people who never played them when they were new to truly appreciate.
The gameplay is fairly simple. It's brilliant though, the way double and triple techs are implemented makes the gameplay have depth while being easy to comprehend. Nothing is overly complicated. It's executed to near perfection
I too noticed that plenty of characters had alternate names that were the right length to fit as the names the player gave the character, and had wondered if something was connected to that, and definitely on my second go around gave them all those names (Nadia, Glenn, R66-Y(?), and Janus) to see if anything happened. And of course I didn't get Robo's alternate name formatted correct, so I had to wait to try that for the third time....
No, it's simple; the video itself ironically proved that, as there is no real "depth", since only one theme was given; will to live and fight. Which is fine, I love the game, but how is that NOT simple?
I had a couple of courses on philosophy of mind and essiantially believe in determinism. But determinism doesn't work for everyday life. So, as you quoted Dostoevsky, I both believe and don't believe in free will. Great video, btw :3
Buddha said: "Life is suffering". We cannot avoid it, we must accept it and despite all pain and evil in the world still believe in goodness and love. In that meaning we willed nirvana/heaven into existence only through our own choice...
I find the video to have been quite a marvel to listen to! Never considered Chrono Trigger to be involved with existensialism but...I do admit that it always felt like the game had some messages that weren't obvious at first glance. You certainly have given me quite a bit to think about! Just one small oddity: IS what Glenn was doing pacifism? I personally don't think so. Pacifism indicates someone who is strictly against violence, but it doesn't necessarily mean that such a person is lacking in self-assertion or will. Here's my take, and apologies if it's too similar to what you say in the video: I wager what can best describe Glenn's problems is that he was too PASSIVE. He initially could not will himself to do more than stand by and let what will happen, happen. You could say...that he had a tendency to not resist whatever came his way...until it resulted in the death of his best friend, which you mentioned discussed in the video. Only then did he start going through the arduous task of attempting to resist the urge to just stand by and do nothing when the time comes. Ironic that he managed to gather the will to try this when it is so much harder when compared to before. I mean...can you imagine how differently things would have gone if he spoke up to Cyrus before on his doubts relating to trying to fight Magus at that point? Maybe Cyrus wouldn't have listened...or maybe he would. But I wager is the fact that Glenn will never know for sure that could have contributed to his guilt for the following decade of his life. And...that's it. That's my take. A bit wordy for a random youtube comment, I know. Apologies for that!
Wish Ozzie's relationship with Magus had been just as relevant as Cyrus and Glenn's to emphasize the duality between both pairs which itself could be seeing as parallel to the duality between the Planet and Lavos.
I don't think younger people quite understand how much of an A-team worked on this game. It's a one and only. The memories of renting this game from the video store and me and my friends debating if the world will end in 1999 lol. Also your review wasn't the original Chrono Trigger
As someone with Bipolar I mania, Zeal is like mania. You find an unnaturally powerful source of energy within and keep tapping into it, living in a dreamworld until you take it too far and the whole thing collapses.
The great part about Chrono Trigger's story - and perhaps, of all time travel stories - is the idea of humanity's struggle against "fate." It is easy to just accept reality and fatalistically go through the motions until we die - and indeed, most people do this. They are the few who choose not to do so - who see what is wrong with their world, and opt to take action to affect real change - who not only make it into the history books, but who quite literally MAKE history, who manufacture new outcomes and alter the very course of "fate" itself. That at least a few of us could be such people.
Or die trying, and end up remembered as traitors and villains. Effort can get you into the history books, success gets you favoured by them. Without effort, there is no success. Magus failed. If he hadn't tried, nobody would have cared about him to mourn his loss.
Ff6 and chrono trigger are the two greatest rpgs I've ever played so far and chrono triggers gameplay is some of the best aswell but it's story is just so great on so many levels
I agree they are both great stories, and they share a lot of similarities since well they used a lot of the engine from FF6, and sound effects are the same between both.
This was an interesting video. Magus's story was to be expanded upon in the sequel, by a specific character. Unfortunately, the sequel was not well received, but I am excited for your delve into the series.
Magus, has such a tragic story though he lost everything due to Lavos, and he just swore revenge plus Ozzie, Flea, and everyone under his vampire cape thought he made Lavos, with dark magic, but in reality he was just merely summoning Lavos, to try, and get a chance to clash with him, and save the world, and all timelines from this heartless being, plus the DS versions added ending where Magus, still couldn’t stop Lavos, and he even failed his sister, by letting her be taken by despair, and so It’s why i sympathize with Magus, because back when i just heard glimpses of Chrono Trigger, i just thought he was evil, but actually it’s his mom that is.
According to the secret ending on the DS and the events of Cross Magus erased his memories in order to become "Guile" who's search of "enigma" could be interpreted as a symbolical search for his lost memories and the fate of his long lost sister.
It is so amazing to see you experience this series and get your thoughts on it. Chrono Trigger is as close to perfect as a game can be. Based upon your thesis here I think you will be very pleased with the narrative direction Cross takes.
I'd say that's arguable. Just because Cross brings up certain ideas, doesn't necessarily mean it handles them well. I see the storytelling of Cross to be a complete betrayal of everything Trigger was about, and I mean that in a larger sense than the literal bad things it does to the characters. It is also a betrayal of the clean, straighforward beauty of Chrono Trigger, opting for a very convoluted mode of storytelling.
@@jedgrahek1426 Cross was never meant to exist. The only reason why Masato Kato wrote the story was because Square was bothering him with the idea of a sequel and the rushed development of Radical Dreamers meant he didn't have the time required to fully adress Schala's fate after the Fall of Zeal happened. This lead to Kato to backtrack with his original conclusion of Trigger's storyline in order to make a brand new fullfledged storyline that would be on the same level as Trigger.
Not sure I've you've covered Final Fantasy 8 yet, but I really want to hear your take on it, since it clearly had ambition, but the execution was messy. I feel like the Time Compression stuff towards the end was going somewhere interesting, even if it was confusing.
me thinking through the video, well, have to comment for him to play chrono cross. Then I see 22:45 :) Glad to know your "top existentialist games", played them all :) ( but didn't finish ff9, broken last disc )
So Terranigma has been called "Europe's Chrono Trigger" and I think there's a really interesting comparison between the stories. In Terranigma you face an imbalance of "Light Side" and "Dark Side," both are faces of the Earth, basically like a God and Devil of equal measure (except when they're not). I believe Chrono Trigger is a science fiction retelling of that story in which the Earth (light side) is fighting against Lavos (dark side). He is embedded within the center of the planet. The beginning of human civilization sees Lavos arrive from the sky and enter the Earth below, while the end of civilization sees him emerge having taken his share of the planet and leave; both light side and dark side are gone at the end of the world, and over time all of existence fades away. This is why a finished game cycles back on itself again and again, and why no matter when or how you fight Lavos it will be the same battle at the moment of separation, Lavos's awakening. Perhaps the reason the Light Side is so well hidden is because its powers are similar to Lavos; maybe both have the power to interact with Dreamstone and to create time portals. The theme of the game is, as pointed out here and by many comments, uncanny hope in the face of absolute destruction. But what makes that threat of destruction so overwhelming isn't a giant space flea, it's the end result of a process of nature that shaped humanity and the whole world. Humans are as much of Lavos as they are of Earth. Is Lavos ever destroyed? What happens if he is? Maybe that's where destiny goes off the rails.
Should we ever get "Chrono Break" as a followup to Cross's ambiguous openended ending i imagine we'll get some major explanation as to who and what Lavos is and wether it's existence has a far larger and complex purpose than beyond simple "balance" between life and death.
I think that because you played this game so much later, you didn't even know that originally, it was a spoiler that Magus was a playable character at all. Me and my friends assumed he was the bad guy, because he's an evil wizard and you spend so much time fighting him. There's even a point in the middle of teh game where you can kill him and his whole character is gone. It blew us all away back then that there was a way to get one of the bad guys to join our party, and only if we did certain things the right way. That was ground-breaking 30 years ago. Also, would have loved a little more time spent on how ground-breaking the music was. Again, if you weren't a kid in the 90s maybe it's hard to understand just how different Chronotrigger's music was from every othr game at the time. It was a revelation. The beauty of the music was what made me first realize video games could truly have artistic value (unlike what my parents said.) "The Entity" who opened the gates is the guy you see in the cut scene when you lose the game in certain situations. Great video though. I played this as a kid, glad to see younger generations are getting into it.
Now I can't wait for your Chrono Cross video. I also now I have an extra reason to replay it! I never did finish it back in the day. There are a couple newer games I think might work for your channel. Bug Fables, an old school Paper Mario inspired RPG. Like Chrono Trigger it hides a lot of it's interesting story in side quests, but it puts a lot of effort into world building. GRIS, a puzzle platformer telling a story without dialogue.
One of the comments pointed out that I got a fact wrong about Dreamstone at around 17:14 - 17:16. I originally said that it was connected to Lavos, when the game obviously shows that the Dreamstone was around prior to Lavos' arrival on the main planet. I edited that out using RUclips's trimmer tool. If you notice a cut at 17:14, that's why. Thank you @Camkitsune for pointing this out.
You should look into rewrite. It's a interactive story type game. Very much up your alley imo. Also spirit circle would be a good manga to cover if you do that kind of content
I also thought the dreamstone show up due to the arrival of Lavos. When he first burried himself to sleep in the earth. But the Cavemen were using it? No?
@@mikhailstewart Dreamstone was around before Lavos. In fact, the chunk that Ayla gives you had been passed down from chieftain to chieftain for some time, and that was before Lavos touched down.
In music history
No i dont respect every brand because they where the first to do something specially when their a life saving drug trying to drain every dollar they can in profits
or a entertainment industry that sues and attacks anything that comes close to what you made for some vague bs claim that it hurts your brand when you put your brand also on a console like ps5 and xbox that parts are sourced how again
i dont respect the monopolies unity and unreal have over the market that keeps them from innovating their own product into something as impressive as PlayStation dream
and i dont respect most of these brands like metal gear because i just didnt like it as a series and wasnt blinded by nostalgia goggles because i preferred the n64 all around then the gamecube and alot of the other better series on the ps2 when i finally got around to metal gear i beat it but was more impressed with devil may cry and then the ps3 massive lineup more then anything metal gear was doing
and then was burned by the ps4 so now im a pc gamer who always loved square enix zelda mario 3d games like final fantasy 7 chrono trigger mario 64 and ocarina of time / majoras mask cash and spyro
i replay these games all the time i have this repiayability list of games i crave to rebeat like luigis mansion sunshine twilight princess and windwaker and i have alot of games on it in the act of rebeating i question do i still love it and only further my love for these games
Also, Chrono Trigger has perhaps the most terrifying "bad ending" of all time. "BUT THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE...", while seeing the earth change from it's blue green natural state to a gray, lifeless one, and followed by the most nightmare inducing alien croak imaginable. Gave me nightmares as a kid!!!
I just love the quote it’s just such a chilling, and intense line of dialogue.
Live-A-Live has an even more terrifying bad ending. Oersted doesn't just destroy the world, he utterly obliterates the whole universe in EVERY TIME. Past, present, future, it's all gone into pure nothing.
@@Mr.KokoPudgeFudge Just watched it myself, damn, that is DARK... I think what terrifies me more about CT's bad ending is the all caps writing and hearing Lavos' creepy alien noise.
@@Mr.KokoPudgeFudge Damn so he’s basically the original Asriel Dreemurr, if he decided to erase everything.
Nah CT is still pretty tame on that scale. If you want a real gut-punch you have to get into visual novels. Even if the world doesn't end, watching a character you grew to love over the last 10-60 hours die in the most unfair way possible will fuck you up even at the GOOD ending. Sharin No Kuni, Cross Channel, Fate Stay Night, Ever 17, and A Drug That Makes You Dream are good examples.
You say that Glenn is the only one with emotional depth explored in the main story, and while he certainly gets a large share, I'd argue Marle also goes through a significant arc. Crono may be party lead, but it's Marle who said "No, fuck Lavos, we're saving the future!".
Honestly, i think the simplicity of CT is a big part of what makes it so great. There are no arbitrary overcomplications to hinder the message to shine through, and all of the content in the game has meaning. There are no throwaway side quests, it's all part of the big picture. It just tells it's story well, and that's why it shines so bright, as compared to many other games in the genre. The game also deserves massive recognition for it's pacing, something many JRPGs mess up on such a massive scale that it's almost unbelievable.
Chrono trigger is easily one of the best JRPGs ever made, and even though some other juggernauts of the genre get more recognition, i think it's fair to say that CT is one game that has stood the test of time (pun intended) amazingly well.
One of my biggest complaints with a lot of JRPGS is that many of them cram so much content, tons of random sidequests, and loads of game mechanics into them that it can honestly get so overwhelming to keep track of. I shouldn't need a spreadsheet to play a game. Some series (Breath of Fire and Lufia being HUGE offenders) bury you in meaningless sidequests that exist only to pad the game's length. Not CT - as far as player experience, it's close to perfect.
The fact that CT is easily beatable in under 20 hours for a first time player is such an underrated strength. The story is always briskly moving forward. No wasted time or energy....just PERFECT pacing.
@@krausewitz6786 People don't talk about this aspect enough. CT is very efficient in its pacing and at no point does a player ever feel bored. I'll take 20 hours of a perfectly paced game with an engaging story over a 60 hour grindfest.
@@AJR-zg2py As far as I remember, Lufia seemed like a very simple and objective jrpg.
@@krausewitz6786 That, and the short playtime makes it easy to replay it immediately, because you're not bored yet. You can easily go for one or two of the other endings.
Any day with a Chrono Trigger video essay is a good day.
if only they would remaster/remake it
@@BeansEnjoyer911 3D Remake like Resurrection tried to do would be excellent.
This game has some of the greatest music in all of video game history.
Most SquareSOFT games do
@@nathank2289 true, but Chrono trigger is an outlier.
@@RPGreg2600 objectively it's probably the best snes soundtrack followed by ff6. Would have been the best cartridge soundtrack if not for OoT.
@@nathank2289 I like Chrono trigger soundtrack over OoT, but that may be purely nostalgia speaking, I didn't own my own copy of OoT until the Nintendo power freebie GameCube edition, and I'm embarrassed to say I've never beat the game 😬
@@RPGreg2600 N64 games didn't age as well as snes games but you can't argue with technology. OoT had an actual orcastra on that soundtrack.
When Gaspar gives you the side quests at the end, he tells you that they can help in your battle against Lavos. What's interesting is that five out of seven of those quests are more then the typical "pick up OP item" but also help resolve a personal issue. Rainbow Shell = Marle reconciling with her father, Mother = Robo reconciling with his purpose, Cyrus ghost = Frog's guilt, Forest = Robo and Lucca and their resolve, and the Black Omen and Magus putting his mother to rest. (Also interesting how four out of seven also touch on the subject of mothers). Ozzie's Fortress is also interesting in that there's no big prize at the end, it isn't about getting an OP item at the finish line, but ends up being something that helps tensions between the humans and the mystics.
Ozzie’s Fort is about Magus leaving his villainous ways behind in order to fight for a better future. Finishing off the enemies in the Fort is a way for him to slightly atone or redeem himself from the countless lives his war took.
@@HypocritesExposd Also pretty sure the best items that can only be worn by Magus are in a hidden room in there.
This is an excellent observation of how character development and story were central to Chrono Trigger. Thank you, Thozmp.
"It is in moments like these, where we maintain our integrity and our courage in the face of impossible odds, that legends are born.
That power is not exclusive to super heroes in the realm of fantasy.
That power, is something we all possess."
Being nearly 40 and having struggled most of my life to make it, I seriously burst into tears when you said that...
Thanks man for the feels, take care, I wish you a good life.
I mirror you by everything you said even your age and emotions as I also started bursting into tears after that and I’m nearly 40 myself. I was 10 when the game came out but haven’t played it till 1998 and since then I have hailed it as the best game of all time along with metal hear solid. I’m extremely happy to see such hommage being made to it after all these years by Max. Words cannot express enough gratitude, I’m so pleased to see it’s still respected to this date as one if not the best games of all times. It was even featured as part of the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony.
But truly I have never seen such in depth analysis or breakdown of it’s philosophy before and I am truly grateful for it. This video by Max has truly made my day, nay, my entire year. This is a timeless game for the ages, ever lasting till the end of time.
Your comment hit me right in the feels. I'm 41, and some days, I feel exceptionally lost. Thus, his statement is correct, we merely must turn the wheel that is the ship of our lives, directly into the storm, because if we can navigate that, ANYTHING is possible
I feel you man.
Man I gotta say I am right there with you man! I'm 39 so guess that makes me almost 40. We are that age, who were fortunate enough to be the age where this game could be part of our childhood. This was and is my favorite game of all time. And like he said about all the endings and sidequests being hard to miss. It was still do able back then if u loved the game enough to want to explore every inch of it and I'm glad I did. Sadly I've reached this age having accomplished maybe 5% of what I assumed is would be this time. Life can be a struggle. And for me it has never been anything else. ,what u have said I feel like maybe I can do something to change that for once. By needing to want it. I need to change from Frog to Glenn
I'm just so damn thankful that I was at the perfect age for Chrono Trigger, FF6 and so many other games and events. I was born in 1981.
Same here 81
I was born at the end of 84 and played FF6 and Chrono Trigger when they were released, both tied for best game of all time IMO - I am lucky for being born to experience those games at that age
For real, I never thought about that, I was within the PERFECT age range in my childhood to optimally experience CT, FFVII and FFVI("3"), Earthbound, Illusion of, Secret of, other Secret of, Breath of I & II, SMRPG, and of course LOZ:ALTTP, and also to a slightly lesser extent Soulblazer, 7th Saga, Lufia I & II, and Stardew Vall... Harvest Moon, all timeless masterpieces each of which I got to experience in thier totality as they were released. 🤔Sh*t, that might have been the highlight of my life...f*ck now i'm sad ☹
Don't forget ff9 on the ps1
Same; don’t forget Earthbound!
I'd just like to point out that the entire sidequest with Magus attempting, and failing, to save Schala from the Dream Devourer was not in the original SNES release. It was added to the NDS version as a way to better connect the events of Trigger with Cross. In this way, it's sort of "working backward", and is (imo) tonally strange because it relies heavily on the idea that the player of NDS Trigger was likely already familiar with Cross and doesn't really "fit" with the rest of the themes of CT as a standalone story.
Came down here just to say this. This was really just a way to retroactively set up Cross and the character of Guile (who is Magus but isn't acknowledged as such in the game).
Even if it had, the implementation of those characters in Chrono Cross felt so vague and shoehorned in to me. I was not a fan of CC at the 11th hour. In response to the story of CT being "the lesser element", quite frankly I believe the simplicity is a strong point. After all these years after having last played it I could still give you the gist of plot and characters. CC is hazy at best probably because at the time Square was riding the success of FF7 and complex dense stories equaled good plus money. And while the enormous cast of playable characters might have been a good idea on the face of it, half of them were redundant and inconsequential. Kinda like if you bloated the cast with different skins of Gogo and Umaro.
@@Laurell_Silentshade a lot of the Cross development decisions were from the director not really wanting to do a sequel to Trigger. Even now when he was hired to make Another Eden (which has time travel) he states he has no interest in treading similar ground to Trigger.
That explains why that wasn't familiar to me. I've only played the SNES and PSX versions.
I'd just like to point out because I do this a lot
MAGUS IS NOT A NAME
MAGUS IS A TITLE
It's an old-timey word for a sorcerer
Your observations have kind of inspired me:
Glenn and Magus are actually corresponding shadows of ones another. Both are those who feel they failed and lost the ones they most loved and identified with, the people whose shadows they occupied and felt overcast by. They chose similar but corresponding responses to their failures: Magus embraced the very failings that were responsible for his sisters loss "mistaking power for strength", Glenn/Frog fell into self condemnation for the very things that Cyrus found to be his virtue.
While forgiveness from Cyrus was the story redemption for Glenn I actually think his redemption is subtly contained in whether or not you choose to have Magus join you or whether you slay him. The correct path for Glenn is to to realize that his failure was not in failing to slay Magus but in failing to realize that was the wrong intention in the first place, Glenn has as his greatest virtue his gentleness which is why his element is water. Magus never actually comes to understand his failures except somewhat in the later versions of the game which is why his quest is still to wander, he has yet to understand what his failure actually is and this is somewhat shown by his ending where he forgets his identity except a vague sense of searching.
Schala states as much in her dialogue at the end: until people stop relying on power she will forever be attached to Lavos. Until mankind stops seeking to control and dominate others for their own goals beauty, purity, and innocence will forever be intertwined with power and destruction.
your interpretations are so interesting
Magus can’t “realize his failure” because the Schala storyline isn’t resolved. He does realize he needs others to achieve his goal, though, which is definitely apparently character development…
It probably is fair to call Chrono Trigger "The Citizen Kane of Video Games," or are least JRPGs. It really was that important to the genre, at least in terms of how different JRPGs that came after it were.
You've never seen citizen kane or you wouldn't say that. Chrono trigger is actually good
Lol I chose the Beatles of JRPG
@@troyounce3295 I find Citizen Kane quite boring, but it was by far the most innovative cinematography for a film to that point and helped shape film making to an incalculable amount even to this day.
@@Tonzoffun0420 It's hard to appreciate the impact of most works from a modern perspective because we're so familiar now with things which were a big innovation back then. That being said I didn't like Citizen Kane at all either, it was really boring and unrelatable for me 😅
@@Tonzoffun0420 incalculable? Is that why movies are such garbage today? Are you being intentionally dense? You don't have to pretend that something is important if you don't know why lol.
The best rpg of my childhood. Still play it once a year if not twice.
Well calling it Vinny, will play it again on stream before he dies, maybe two more lol.
I never played that game. But i am eager to try it. What would u see as the definitiv Version of the game?
@@tryhardnobouken465 the super Nintendo cartridge is the fastest. I had the ps1 version with the extra anime cutscenes but there is significant slowdown during battle transition and when you go to the menu screen. Maybe a rom if you have the access
@@troyounce3295 I remember the load times being horrible on PSX, so much so that I would avoid using the menu if I didn't absolutely have to. I still have the SNES cartridge.
@@tryhardnobouken465 the DS version is the best, but if you don't mind losing the anime cutscenes (I didn't) the mobile version is the same as the DS
What I love about Chrono Trigger is that it has a so many ideas that are executed really well and it never over stays its welcome. A lot of RPGs these days are bloated and that is not necessarily a bad thing sometimes, but Chrono Trigger was really focused and dense at the same time. I can’t remember the last RPG I played where there’s so much in so little time.
Tbh the only somewhat grindy bit of the game was when you hit the hunting grounds for those 100 TP blue monsters to get charm for Ayla
Bloatedness is almost always a bad thing and it seems that todays media is all about bloating shit until it bursts.
There is a tribute game to CT and its one of the best "J"RPGs ever made. Its called"Chained Echoes".
@@CoNteMpTone Just found out about it the other day and excited to try it! Bought Sea of Stars recently; excited to try CE afterward.
Chrono Trigger has long been my favorite game of all time. When I was a kid, I would play through it, then play it again. I could never quite put my finger on it but I always loved it. As I got older and wiser, through subsequent replays, it started to make more sense. It's the perfect combination of a comforting atmosphere but also a high-stakes narrative that really gives each character time to shine. It really is just the perfect culmination of musical direction, art direction, and story planning that make it so timeless (no pun intended). I am (a very small) part of the Chrono Compendium team and let me tell you, those guys are still analyzing the story implications of this game to this day. That alone should emphasize the magnitude this game has when given the right audience.
Edit: Also, Max, since you're going to emulate Chrono Cross, there are a few things you should know. I'm not doing this to promote my own channel or whatever, but you should take a look at my video here (no spoilers in this video): ruclips.net/video/ZFI0yEQZPtU/видео.html
I was able to use Retroarch to get the original PS1 version to look very good and even run at a higher framerate. It requires a bit of tweaking but if you're interested in getting the game to look like this, feel free to hit me up and I can help you set it up. Stay yellow!
That campfire scene fucked me up 20 years ago and I've never had a bigger WTF moment in gaming. I actually put down the controller and took a walk. It caught me completely off guard.
Damn you really needed to go introspect to in the air tonight huh hope you had your walkman setup.
wait why?
@@crono_digger i think the campfire scene in question is right before lucca goes back in time to save her mother from getting paralyzed
@@alexandremaia5515 oh okay i thought it was a scene at the actual campfire thought i missed something
How the 90s were.
You will never fully appreciate Chrono Trigger unless you faked sick for days in a row in 1995 to get out of school in order to so deeply immerse yourself in this mind blowing new gaming experience which forever altered your life. Seeing it on the shelf at blockbuster video for the first time after reading about it in magazines. Looking at its beautiful cover art which appeared in the states before DBZ and exposed you to an art style you’ve never seen before. Listening to its hypnotic brilliant music and it’s deep time travel plot that you had never experienced in a game before. It was life altering for those of us who were there and that’s why it’s at all the top of the lists today.
This is the video essay I've always wanted to write. Chrono Trigger has a grip on me that is almost impossible to describe, and in no small part due to the absolute mind-melting terror I experience at even the thought of Lavos.
This is my favorite game. even after 30 years, I still tear up when Marle brings crono back
@20NintendoFan01 it is close enough . 27-28 years. 2 years is not really that big of a deal
She wears sweatpants the entire game 😂.
almost the whole game* @@_WOR
@@khronosschoty Yep those 8 minutes that she dresses up count lol.
In case you didn't know, if you have Lucca in the party instead of Marle she hugs him also with different dialogue
One of my major philosophical concepts of why Chrono Trigger was so great, is it is secretly and fittingly designed like a clock.
You had the main plot which was the bare bones of the game. If you wanted to you could look at it as a very simple journey from point A to B to C. Then wrap it around again is like unscrewing the back and looking inside.
You had 'secrets' and then SECRETS. Every side quest for wrapping up side characters was impossible to miss as long as you tried but as a kid you still felt like you were unearthing something secret. Then the kinds of secrets you can miss like say getting both the Rainbow and Maiden Suits (I'm going off memory) or stealing stuff, which made you feel even more clever. You can tell time on the surface easily, but underneath is a hidden world of gears which really represent the device. Each one works to move the whole thing forward and it's a joy to find each one and see how it all fits together.
6 fixed characters. Think hours going around a clock face. Each represents a part of the story you have to travel through, except Crono who is, as the hand of the clock, able to adapt to each one as the lynch pin of the group. Ayla from prehistory is late night. Early humanity surviving in the dark. Magus is early afternoon, the rise of civilization. Marle and Lucca are the afternoon and late evening. One could argue which is which, Lucca for Cronos childhood or technology, Marle for feudalism or getting married. Robo is obviously twilight, dusk, and the end of the day.
You have 3 magi, each representing the past present and future.
You have the beginning and end of time as the same place.
There are absolutely no loose ends except Schala who is THE loose end. The thing you wish you could fix.
It's just the perfect mix between simple and complicated. Unique and ubiquitous. It's not just nostalgia; if any game needed to be preserved for humanity and we had to choose the smallest memory size possible to fix on a zip drive, and get the most bang for our buck it should definitely be this one. There are plenty of other games which deserve to be called 'the best' for different reasons, but as far as the size of the game for how much story is contained in it, this game is perfect. It's like a perfectly constructed pocket watch.
not only is the art story and gameplay perfect but the soundtrack...that damn soundtrack
Oh yes and there is a fantastic "jazzed" up version of it too!
Still listen to it to this day.
@@hgpa it's too good
There's a reason why the creative team behind Chrono trigger are called the dream team
Heck yes. I'm so glad you went in depth with the side stuff. It really makes the game what it is. The campfire scene is one of my favorites in gaming history.
When I was a child my older brother sat me on a been bag chair and played through this game among practically all the great games to come out for the ps1&ps2. This is by far his and my favorite game.
Played Chrono Trigger several times, it's my favorite JRPG of all time. Not ONCE did it occur to me to think of Lavos as a Lovecraftian/Eldritch creature. Mind freaking blown. I always just thought of it as the biggest alien parasite in existence, kind of like John Carpenter's the Thing, but on a waaay bigger scale.
I too made more associations like yours, the thing, big parasitic organism, cosmic mosquito-esque. Lovecraft makes so much sense though
I don’t know how you didn’t lavos, is literally a poster child of a Eldridge being.
If you subscribe to game theory's assertion, Lavos is analogous to the beast of revelations while Crono is analogous to Christ.
I like the idea of it being a lovecraftian eldritch abomination though. Makes a horrific monster even scarier.
@@SamsarasArt ¿Could Magus be an "Anti Christ" figure? He's the polar opposite of Crono in everyway with his motivations and stakes in the conflict against Lavos being rather selfish compared to Crono's altruistic and empathetic desire to save the planet from incoming Apocalypse. I wish more people realized the dualistic parallelism that's found throughout both Chrono games as i feel one could argue for some deeper existentialist symbolism.
May I add that John Carpenter's The Thing is a very lovecraftian movie in itself?
This game and FF6 blew my mind as a kid and got me addicted to video games forevermore :)
So glad my older brother brought these cartridges back from the game store! FF1 taught me reading so I could play my own safe file after my brother beat it and I watched him play through the game
Then Chrono trigger came and it’s the only JRPG on par with FF6 in my opinion of the era, such amazing worlds man. So glad I got to experience them at that age because it made this even more magical
It doesn't need to ask profound questions - it answers the "what if" by telling you that an unlikely group of people would band together to stop an existential threat if it so happened. It is absurdly optimistic and we need that when our own planet is getting more and more inhospitable.
Yeah, those tens of thousands of acres per year changing from desert to arable land is really ruining things for us.
@@BWMagusLiking your own comment? Might as well lick your own ballsack there, bud.
Wonder how all that arable land will go when the bees die out.
When it comes to the sad ending for Magus, it is important to note that the fight against the Dream Devourer (aka Lavos fused with Schala) is more of an attempt to tie Chrono Trigger with its sequel - Chrono Cross than anything. The original version of the game had a loose thread when it came to Schala's fate and she inexplicably reappeared in Cross in weird circumstances. The DS version added this boss battle in order to explain what became of her!
By the way, Chrono Cross is also an awesome game. It is very polarising due to not being a "true" sequel to trigger but it does have some similarities with Xenogears
Isn't it interesting that even as a kid you get hooked on this game while not having the knowledge of all those concepts yet that underline it? It's as nothing in this video is new information to me but I would never have been able to actually put it into words and that it's a main reason to why I love this game so much.
Exactly
Man zygard gaming did a full run down that i have to watch weekly. The delivery of material and even the info that isn't made clear thru regular gameplay is just fantastic.
The little girl from the future (shala?) is sent back in time to frogs time and found by ozzie. That little girl is magus. The 3 sages were sent with her and all 4 were sent to seperate times. 1 ended up at the end of time the other in the future where with no hope of escape he began building the chrono trigger because he had visions if whats to come and left the people a chance to survive. The other, ended up in Chronos time... That part alone a whole game. Yet its a minor part of chrono trigger. Ayla is the first queen in marles family line.. The reptiles are ozzis ascendants. Which is related to why ozzie turns glenn to a frog. A reptile.. A subtle hint. Those 2 families have battled thru time from prehistory to the end.. Another could be full game.
The 3 sages are named after the 3 wiseman from the holy bible..
The team that made that game was the dream team. The only team to come close is the saga frontier team.. Its impossible to say enough about it. Such an awesome story.
@@Vaga-Bard Exactly! And if you haven't pkayed it yet.. Expect to see a more complex, twisted and darker plot in Chrono Cross 😉
@@li__suarez really? Ive been thinking about getting that on my switch.
Heres this btw.
ruclips.net/video/_JoPAn_dbr0/видео.html
when i first tried Chrono Trigger, I didn't even know english, I just kept playing because I was fan of Dragon Ball and the techs looked dope to me. xD When I found out they could combine techs then i kept playing and leveling just to see more combos... BUT... then I met spekkio and he told me to walk the room CLOCKWISE, and that word was unknown to me and my dictionary didn't have this word in it... so I had to give up the game for months till later I found the word's meaning in aonther dictionary... well there was no internet at that time to do quick researchs like today xD
“While not profound, Chrono Trigger is perfect.”
No. Lies. Detected.
I was just about the say the same thing
It might not be very profound but it is god dang masterpiece
Worth every single second of the time spent to play it
Its absolutely profound. It just doesn't shove its profundity into the story. The profound part is 8n the subtlety. The information not given directly. Which in itself is a level of profound I've yet to see in any other game..ruclips.net/video/_JoPAn_dbr0/видео.html
It's a tragedy and a crime what SE have done to CT with the NDS and Steam\mobile versions, by removing the more-profound and lively original English translation that's in the SNES version of the game and replacing it with one that's extremely sterile, dull, stilted and unenergetic. The SNES translation is full of character and heart, while the NDS\Steam\mobile translation is very dry and reads as if all the characters are the same single character and personality talking.
If people played with the SNES version of the game, they would find the writing and character relations deeper than what they would if they only played the NDS or Steam\mobile version. And I have no doubt that a lot of the people who think Chrono Trigger doesn't have a lot of personal moments and didn't have profound writing played the NDS or Steam\mobile version and would have a different opinion if they'd played the SNES version of the game.
At the end of this video, Max says that he'll be playing Chrono Cross, he says, "Don't worry... I won't be playing the 'remastered version' (lol). I will be emulating it." Yet, playing the Steam version of Chrono Trigger is a much bigger mistake than playing the Steam version of Chrono Cross. The Steam version of CC includes the option to play the original PS1 version of CC, without the art changes and performance issues of the "remastered" version. But the Steam version of CT doesn't include an option to play the original game without all the technical issues of the Steam version and without the extreme bastardisation of the script that the NDS and Steam\mobile versions of CT suffer from.
@@thischannel1071 I couldn't agree more. People who rag on Ted Woolsey's localizations completely miss the point; he added *character.* His scripts weren't 1:1 conversions of the Japanese for a reason, and while this was partly because of cartridge space limitations and Nintendo censorship policies, it's also creatively important to take liberties or you end up with something completely stale. Japanese is a very to-the-point language that often lacks nuance, while English is almost the exact opposite, and translators should keep this in mind when localizing fiction.
None Detected.
It amazes me how popular Chrono Trigger is but how underrated it's story actually is. It's it's character writing where it really succeeds in my opinion. great video as always.
I love the entire cast.
This a very interesting philosophical take on chrono trigger. Although you didn't mention, and I can only speak for myself I think the pacing is one of the reaons why this game is so beloved and work as well as it does. A lot of Jrpgs can't have a rocky start or can drag at some point. but in chrono trigger everything flows naturally and everything is purposeful, even the sidequests. The game is fairly short, but there is no fat.The game knows what it wants to be and tell it's story perfectly and how you tell your story it's much more important than the story you are telling. That is why this game it's work of art, a timeless classic.
I'm going to have to disagree with the statement, most people only experienced the main plot and miss the side quest. I would argue that the "side quests" and just the part of the main quest, and how they were presented, was an experiment in none linear gameplay( which was a big deal at the time) and not only was the intention for the player to do these side quests but the game was designed in such a way that missing them would be very unlikely on a player's first playthrough. The guru at the end of time gives pretty specific hints, and by this time he's already guided you, and talking to him at least once a visit should be part of the gameplay loop. Second beating Lavos before doing all the side quests is actually kinda hard, and unless you really know the mechanics( which a first-time player probably wouldn't) you would have to grind, something you never do until that point indicates you're doing it wrong. Lastly the normal standard ending is unlocked by doing all the side quests showing that that was intention. The dream team knew exactly what they were doing, you the player has a free wheel, but the design of the game means that it takes great effort to overcome the fate of getting a standard ending.
Also, I think it's pretty cool that in almost every game with multiple endings, you unlock the other endings by doing more "side quests", but in Chrono Trigger you unlock endings by completing less of the game. And the top-secret ending is unlocked by doing none of the game.
This can be even further seen in the inclusion of New Game+ as being something more than a simple mechanic of a video game. We the players are now participating directly in time travel through the vehicle that is New Game+ with the characters and thereby, attain the top secret ending as a result. Further still, we are the will of the planet guiding Chronos and the others to save earth.
I think he just means through their first playthrough. Sure, they couldn't avoid all of the side quests, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the majority of the people back when this game released, would have missed a huge chunk of the side quests. I know I definitely missed the one for Frog, Robo and Lucca and yes the guy at the End of Time talks about these locations but some of these locations/triggering events weren't exactly in plain sight. I mean they were in plain sight but sometimes (most of the time) it required you to talk to a series of random people to trigger the questline and since back then we didn't didn't have the help of the internet to guide us I could see people missing these side quests.
Eh, SOME of the sidequests, maybe, but I doubt most first-timers found them all.
I think you underestimated the player. I, as twelve year old, found all but 1 ending and did most of the side quests. I even tried different outcomes that lead to the same ending. I grew up without much access to the internet so I discovered it mostly through trial and error. I THINK, that although some of the best and most interesting content of the game is Optional, it was a great choice as it allows for more players exploration. I played it again in 2018 and looked a few things up. I found that there were some small things I missed.
It is important to note that when this game came out people tended to explore games more and play more rather than beating it and moving on. There was also a lot of hearsay. You would ask people at school or your friends or hear rumours about the game.
Maybe casual players would miss all those side quests, but there are a lot of hints and indications if you talk to the NPCs.
I loved finding new things to do in new game +
I think it's interesting to note that that official illustration of the Dreamstone simultaneously looks like Lavos's shell and Crono's hair. It's like it's making reference to that duality in referencing the two most major characters at either side of the conflict.
Crono's hair was what I thought about when Max overlayed the Dream Stone on top of a stick figure.
As I said on the announcement post,I will never call this the "best" RPG ever made,but I absolutely agree with calling it "perfect".
Even today,I can still go back to this game and enjoy myself,which is rare for me with games of this vintage.
Thank you for covering it.
If I ever get a time machine, I'm making Nietzsche play Chrono Trigger, and telling him it was your idea.
Don’t you mean the Epoch, this is a pretty Epoch, idea though, ruclips.net/video/_V2sBURgUBI/видео.html
Lol
I'd rather tie him up and force a woman on him.
Was he the one that said there was no God then on his deathbed disavowed it?
Have him play Xenogears afterwards. Dunno how to patch the game to Deutsche.
17:16
I think you misjudged the timeline of events, and therefore got the implications of the Dreamstone inverted.
The first time you go back to 65 Million BC, you are specifically on a quest to retrieve the Dreamstone to reforge the Masamune - these events occur _before_ Lavos has landed. This is also a bit of clever story-telling, because elements established in this random fetch quest wind up becoming relevant later at multiple different points later in the story.
Dreamstone's use in the knife that disables the Mammon machine and as a component of several characters' final weapons suggests that, far from being connected to Lavos, it is actually somehow anathema to it. My personal reading is that Dreamstone exists to underline Lavos's status as an entity that does not belong on Earth - that elements of the planet itself fundamentally reject Lavos's presence.
Then again, considering the entire game is about time travel, this might all be moot.
Came here to say this about the dreamstone.
Max fears this comment
Great response and that makes perfect sense. The Dreamstone being a manifestation of the planets will as well as the time gates line up better.
It's worth mentioning that in both sequels to Chrono Trigger Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross the so called *Frozen Flame* plays a role somewhat similar to Dreamstone by also granting people's dreams and desire in exchange of "binding their soul" to Lavos's in turn allowing Lavos to become even more powerful. It's safe to assume that just as the Frozen Flame came from Lavos's very being so did the Dreamstone come from the Planet itself as a means to counter it.
@@crawdad
The Planet: Dreamstone/Dragon Tear, the Dragonian race, the Terra Tower, the Dragon God and the Einlanzer sword.
Lavos: Frozen Flame, the Human race, Chronopolis, the FATE supercomputer and the Masamune sword.
There is a clear element of duality in the Chrono series that saddly tends to be overlooked by it's lack of relevance throughtout the games's storylines.
also, the "entity" has been stated by developers to be Shala. When she submitted to the void and became empty like it, she became a god like being both existing, and not existing. This gave incredible god like powers to perceive the universe, but cannot physically interact with it at all. Her personality split, and her positive and negative sides became almost separate beings fighting with each other. One side was helping lavos and pushing towards undoing existence, but the other side, the positive side, the small amount of love within her became a postive force of nature, caring for and loving human kind. This is the entity that creates the time gates, allows the Chrono Trigger to work, and in Crono Cross is what saves SERGE from dying as a kid.
I too had the theory that is was the Lavos/Schalla fusion in the Darkness Beyond Time, as it would make a lot of both Trigger and Cross make sense. However, recently, I'm pretty sure Masato Kato confirmed it was "The Planet". Where did you see this information?
The entity is the Planet, since you visit the past before Schala and Lavos exist on the planet. However if they ever make a third Chrono game, I think it'd be cool if it were retconned to be Crono himself. Whatever causes his disappearance prior to the events of Chrono Cross leads to his ascension to a higher level of existence. He could be a god of Time for example. So he relives his life and subconsciously creates time gates
@@pwnranger3496 "before" and "after" matter very little when the Time Devourer is beyond time altogether. Intemporal and eternal, they exist in a singularity where they dont have an "origin", or at least it ceased to matter.
@@pwnranger3496 Interesting, considering Crono had no father, that would make sense. That he's the son of God and was sent to repent for mankind's sin. I guess the Game Theorist's theory about Chrono Trigger retelling the event of the Bible makes much more sense now. I betcha Chrono Trigger was originally a bible game and Squaresoft just change the title so players wouldn't notice. Crono die same as Jesus, had the power to raise the dead, had no father, was betray by someone, was resurrected, etc.
@@BinaryDood in the game its implied the entity is reliving its memories which is why the time gates are where they are and go to where they go. Both Lavos and Schala weren't on Earth for a portion of the prehistory plot, so how could they relive memories neither one of them had?
One of the best RPGs of all time. I replay this every other year or so.
Lucca revisiting her childhood trauma after the campfire is one of the most intense moments I've ver seen in a game.
I actually panicked and failed the first time through. After figuring out how that code worked which is actually consistent through every version of the game even on Playstation,I have made sure not to fuck up again. And yes,Triangle counts for A in the Playstation releases.
I am in my late 30's and I have played through this game multiple times over the last 20 years. A true masterpiece and definitely has a place among the top games ever made. It is simple, yet at the same time thought provoking and beautiful.
Considering this is my GOAT, and the only game I've ever learned enough to speedrun, even if this video were 5 hours long you wouldn't tell me anything I already knew or read about over the last 27 years, but I appreciate the effort anyway. It's wild to me that a game in which your main character actually dies, a game which depicts the world ending as a soon-to-be historical fact, where humanity's peak of civilization ended thousands of years ago by their own hubris, that it still manages to be MORE hopeful and uplifting than almost any other video game (the art style and music certainly help), on top of being a masterpiece of design.
I love this game! I remember playing it in Junior High and High School over and over again thanks to New Game+. This was also the first video game that I bought for myself and I still have the cartridge to this day! It needs a new battery though.
Oh no, I haven't fired mine up in a while, i hope my battery is still good. I'd hate to lose my new game+
There's nothing else I can say here rather than this is the best Chrono Trigger video essay I've ever seen. It's totally straight to the essence of the game. Chrono Trigger has been my favorite game of all time and after this video it became even more so.
My favorite game of all time. It is "perfect." What a lightning-in-a-bottle game. How lucky are we to be alive in a time where it exists? o7
I keep coming back just to hear the first 2 min and 45 seconds, Chrono Trigger is indeed perfect.
That makes two of us
Great to see someone go past skin deep on Chrono Trigger's narrative. As someone on the spectrum who played it at 14, it made my mind go racing with existentialist questions due to how the game's components communicate with each other. Gameplay, music, story and themes so inter reflective and intertwined and makes this "simple" game fertile ground for your own creativity. Unbeknownst to me, many of the thoughts and theorys I had when first playing Trigger would later be explored in Cross, such conductive lines of thought thus gaining texture and identity. I think the one think you haven't payed much attention to in this video is Lavos itself. He(it) is the glue the holds the entire Chrono series together. I had this theory that the hypothethical ultimate form of Lavos, as he is a Furnace of God, hoping from planet to planet absorbing all of the DNA and energy of every living thing to create the Perfect Lifeform (as we see during the boss rush in the final battle, as well as the unfinished result of Lavos' harvest mimicing the party's formation itself..), lying farther in the future would be the Entity the characters speak of. As it would gain complete control over time itself, it could will itself into existence: sending one of its spawns back in time, in other words the one you see falling in 65 000 000 bc, in order to create itself to form its own destiny. I no longer think in this way since playing Chrono Cross, but there are similair aspects.
(Might be considered SPOILERsm even thought this can be deduced when playing Chrono Trigger, as I did back in the day)
When I realized humans only exist because the reptites were extinguished by Lavos, it made me question our own world considering the obvious parallel it mirrors. If we humans only get to exist because a meteor fell into Earth, something outseide its already established homeostasis, does that make us, in some way, incompatible with it? Thinking on how humans hurt nature back and forth to perpetuate their own evolution could be a determistic resultant chain from we being "not meant to be" in this world. So that Lavos itself is the source of magic, the thing that gave Zeal all of its advances, its like it was giving us the "flame of creation" only for us to advance themselves unknowingly that it was all for the better harvest of the cosmic parasite. An evolution not by their hand, but by something "outer", which supplanted the worlds homestasis to create its own, uncaring fr the world its in. Humans are parasitic because Lavos is so... This I first thought playing Chrono Trigger. And I remember this dread I felt in a nightmare I had at the time, that It was the same with the meteor which killed the dinossaurs in the real world. Not that it was sentient, but an existential extension of the universe itself, sort of the opposite of the Antropic Principle. Our every effort in our evolution and history the determistic chain from something that deviated us the from ever being able to coexist with our mother world. Our very evolution a ploy doomed to failure since the very start, and that was just the nature of things since the "Big Fire" fell. The heavens have sided with the apes indeed. (If you kill Lavos before he falls, everyone on the planet is a reptite)
Amazing read sir you may just be a Philosopher in the making(if you aren't one already).
@@javiervasquez625 Thank you! I ain't no philosopher, I just tend to overthink thing shehe. I reread my post, so many spelling mistakes! I guess that is the difference when you use a modern chiclet keyboard as opposed to a mechanical one...
I just made the connection between Frog and the snake enemies (Gnashers, I think) around his hideout. They eat the frog enemies in battles so he lives there for training.
He's evolving over time. He should just get poison skin though, snakes won't eat him.
Did you really find it that hard to locate all the sidequests at the end? I feel like you can find most of them pretty naturally by just revisiting areas where your curiosity would say, "Hmm, I feel like we weren't quite done with this part of the story yet." Marle's unresolved tiff with her father, the parts of 1000 and 2300 AD you can only reach after the Epoch can fly, that strange new whirlpool in the desert. I have to wonder if maybe CT's assumption that you'll go explore and pick up on those loose threads only feels "hard" in an age of journal entries and endless waypoints like we have in modern gaming. It doesn't hold your hand the way Skyrim would, but it doesn't go out of the way to hide these endgame quests either. The most esoteric may be restoring the sun stone.
Gaspar at the end of time also hands out some clues should you talk to him after the Undersea Palace events
^this 100%. also have to mention that that whole era of JRPG's was filled with "hidden" side content. the majority of which was only available once the world map becomes fully unlocked near the end of a game. it was just standard practice and rarely felt like any of that content was particularly hard to find.
I was stuck on this comment for quite awhile thinking back on this game. I was very fortunate to have grown up around people who owned an actual snes cartridge back when it came out, and I remember making it a point to have completed everything, only going after Lavos with my party in the 70s level wise which is wildly overkill. But I also remember that in those playthroughs of the game when I was... give or take 8ish years old I never had a save file that was on the last chapter of the story according to side quest completion. I was fully aware of the existence of video game strategy guides, but I was also too poor to buy them and didn't want to impose those costs on my parents who already had been more than generous enough just getting me an SNES that gave me the opportunity to borrow games from friends or rental stores like Blockbuster. The internet of the late 90s was also not a well explored territory for me so gamefaqs boards and the like were also out of the question.
In perfect hindsight, I could run through the game in around 10 hours completing absolutely everything, but that's with countless playthroughs of the story in the back of my memory. The game does provide a very strong ending hub with Gaspar directing the player to the many critical side quests after obtaining the completed Epoch but I suspect that for a truly blind run it's actually not super obvious. Some of the ending side quests don't even feel like they have relation to one another like the Rainbow Shell being tied to Marle's resolution with her father or the seemingly random sinkhole dungeon in the middle ages being a story for Robo and Lucca ending quest rather than Frog's or Magus', further complicated by the ending quest rewards often providing the most benefits to characters not related to those story beats. I recall that completing the Sunstone quest was something I intuitively figured out VERY early on when I played the game (though defeating the Son of the Sun was impossible without first doing enough side quests to obtain anti-fire armor). For me the most confusing side quest was finding the Rainbow Shell since I didn't understand the significance of pouring the "soda" on Toma's grave when I was young (and because the translation in the game was dumb as rocks), I only ever found the cave at all because my uncle told me you can just go into the cave even though there's no indicator that it's a new zone.
I disliked Skyrim for this reason lmao it's like the direct opposite of Chrono Trigger. You both wake up, but Skyrim treats you as some dormant powerful being with a great destiny, a dragonborn. Chrono Trigger puts you, the player, in the eyes of Crono to experience the world around you.
I was surprised when you announced your next video was going to be on Chronno Trigger. I don't know why people told you it's not profound. Maybe it doesn't ask deep questions, but it's a beautiful story just like its sequel. Nothing is dumbed down. I remember crying when I played the game just because I felt the character in the game the same way as a character in a book. One of the best games I've ever played.
Because it's not profound. That doesn't make it bad, of course. It's just a simple, likeable story, with just a very small bit of "What if?" near the end.
Damn ! That was one fine essay on this masterpiece. Agreed that Chrono Trigger is a timeless (ahem) pivotal game in the rather young videogame history, and even dare I say, in the much older storytelling history !
I played it when it came out when I was 15, and it left a burning mark in my brain. Even today, at 41, I still remember it clearly (when I replayed it for the second time, something like 15 years ago, I STILL discovered new stuff in it, including the forest campfire scene, which blew my mind !).
It's absolutely one of these master pieces that defined their era !
Much like Michael Jackson, U2, Madonna, ET, Terminator, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Dragon Ball and Saint Seiya modelled the 80's (still the absolute best decade in existence for entertainment that I experienced), Chrono trigger, along with the SNES, The Cranberries, Oasis, Street Fighter 2, Final Fantasy 4, 5, 6, and 7, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, and The Matrix spearheaded the 90's.
You just HAD to experience them when they came out, because they were all part of an entire ecosystem of an era, and it made your mind grow a certain way.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm still glad you got to discover it (and make such a kickass video about it), but imagine having experienced it at 15 in a world waaay prior to Internet, Star Wars Prequels, the MCU, etc... Your mind would have exploded !
Ngl, watching videos like these really helps someone like me who is very new (due to age and geography reasons) to JRPGs and turn-based games in general of how great these retro games are, especially in terms of story. You folks back in the 90s seriously had some amazing experiences. Also, I am usually wary of time-travel stories but so far, this game (based on your video) and Steins;Gate are two of the only media that I have seen that did time travel so well.
My favorite is the soundtrack of Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana... incredible beautiful soundtrack that still to this day reminds me profoundly of being a kid.
While I gave Final Fantasy 6-8 more "hours"...Chrono Trigger & Secret of Mana are the ones I love the most due to it giving me this feeling of how I felt back then...same with "Mystic Quest" (German title) on the Nintendo Game Boy ...
I remember playing CT on an emulator on my old pc in 2005 - the music, the story, the dialogues & characters - literally TRANSPORTED me everytime i played it. Needless to say I binge played and unlocked all endings. Now I like to listen to the OST everynow and then along with the great works of hisaishi and uematsu
Man, I love this game :3 Frog is one of my favourite video game characters. When he finally gets to confront Magus is such a great moment - it still gives me goosebumps.
Excellent video, Max
I had a couple of things happen the last few months and just now went to check on your channel... I can't believe the massive amount of great videos you uploaded!!! Max, you are definitely one of the great content creators of our time. Thank you specifically for this video about Chrono Trigger.
I got every ending back in 95, this and FF6 were my favorite games Un High School
Really great essay, thanks so much for taking the time to make this. So many different avenues to go down when discussing this game: the multiple story lines, the music, the dream team behind the whole thing, etc. Great stuff!
Chrono Trigger is the most special to me... I remember the shivers down my spine when seeing black omen for the first time appearing on the sky. It was really beatiful for me, maybe it was because of the aesthetics of the game but this game does not get old in art.
Seeing Lavos, show his ugly mug the first time must have made you shit your child pants lol.
I think that you best summarized why Chrono Trigger remains on top of the lists of one of the best RPGs of all time. Heck, it was also like that back around 14 years ago, when I discovered it in 2008 by doing random internet searches and wanting to experience all these games that I missed previously.
What Chrono Trigger does is it gives the player option to simply immersive and play the game at their own pace. It does not guide them like many games do, it does not force them to take certain paths. It just sets a simple, yet very enjoyable stream, for a player to traverse through. If the player so wishes, they can then expand on it through all the additional and side quests that have been mentioned in this video. What I like about CT side quests, is that they do not simply extended the playtime, but rather, fill out more puzzles to the already massive world. This, combined with charming and well-aged graphics and outstanding musical composition, truly make this game a lasting gem.
Before jumping to Cross it might be a good idea to do Radical Dreamers first. I heard it from the forum days that it makes Cross better, and helps the connect to Trigger.
I couldn't get into Chrono Cross until I played Radical Dreamers. They should have brought it over, it would have helped alot of TRIGGER fans CROSS over.
I wouldn't say Radical Dreamers helps all that much in that regard. The best advice I would give to someone struggling to enjoy Cross is to have patience. It's no secret that the plot is convoluted as hell. But it does make sense and very well thought out. It just takes a few playthroughs for it to click.
If you want an in between primer to Cross, you're better off just playing CT DS (Steam). The old Ted Woolsey translation will just further confuse you once you move onto Cross. More specifically, all the "entity" talk.
@@Magus12000BC Just have patience shit is like the "it gets good after 25 hours" shit people said about FF13. Radical Dreamers ties the world of Cross to Trigger alot faster. Just needed a frame of reference of where/what/when the fuck am I doing here and wtf does it have to do with Cross. Dreamers does that in like a half hour.
@@johnsmith-xw7hv - It doesn't tie anything up. The only similarities are Lynx killing Lucca and Kid being her usual self. The stories of Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross are literally nothing alike. If you want something that ties the two games together, it confirms that Crono and Marle died when Guardia got invaded by Porre. That's pretty much it. Beyond that, it ties nothing together. It's merely a separate timeline that has no bearing on the overarching plot.
You don't need connections handed to you in a few hours. They wanted you to follow another character and give you a different motivation for proceeding. And quite frankly, a teenager that should be dead that's walking around is far more interesting than a bard that has no aim or purpose. A sequel doesn't have to constantly reference the predecessor to be a sequel.
@@Magus12000BC I didn't say it tied anything up you jackass. Keep your snout in your trough, I'll yell suey if I need you to oink another strawman.
Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece of a game. I played this game when I was 9 years old and i still play it at 35 years old. The music, the emotional connection, the gameplay, oh my goodness, the memories! ❤
Magus was chained by guilt to his past. After failing to rescue his sister, the only person he cared about in Zeal, he dedicated his life in 600AD to destroying Lavos.
Remember, Magus was too young to remember his mother, the queen, before she had been twisted by Lavos. Lavos robbed him of his mother, his sister, and his kingdom.
Ironically, Magus' magic power is also derived from Lavos. At least in part. He must have hated using the magic he relied on to succeed in revenge.
By existence, Magus doesn't mean his life. He means the person he had become after having made a life of hard choices had reached a dead end. He had to accept his ultimate failure and find a new purpose, but he didn't know how.
Him losing his memory is him being reborn without the weight of his past. He's no longer chained to the grief and guilt that followed him his entire life. He was free to finally choose a life that is meaningful to him.
In many forms of Buddhism, being reborn often means being reassigned to a new realm for rebirth. Magus had more than enough evil to be reassigned to hell, or the demon realm. Instead he was kept whole and returned to earth, implying that in accepting his failures he had achieved some level of enlightenment. This might earn him a second chance in the human world.
Magus has the most one of the most understated character arcs in SquareSoft era games. But taking a moment to consider Magus' path reveals something quite profound.
Probably because that arc isn't in a SquareSoft game, but invented by SE later.
I truly enjoyed your thorough examination of this amazing game called Chrono trigger, I always think of the man musical theme and I always hum it and it just takes me back. Honestly music is one of the best triggers for going back in time to enjoy time past that we're beautiful. Of course it has the negative effect as well doing the same thing for negative feelings but I tend not to focus on that my Amazing Brother. I am so grateful for you doing this and it truly help me see that Chrono trigger was just more than just a video game. I truly love that game and I am so thankful that I had the chance to play it back then on the SNES. Continue to do this amazing work we greatly appreciate you. 💯💪🏾☮️❤️🙏🏾
You could do an entire video just on the backstory of the soundtrack and how perfect that alone is. Surprised you didn’t touch on the 600 AD theme, or Schala’s theme. Both are fantastic pieces of music.
Beautifully done, man.
I knew Chrono Trigger was gonna be special as soon as I saw the pendulum swinging on the title screen. Very few games telegraph their significance so bloody early to me.
I feel like it's easier to elevate existentialism in stories because you can have it exist for PCs at the expense of NPCs. Like what about Cyrus? He was brave, he tried hard, and he got iced. What about the Guardia bridge soldiers who were fighting without food and got turned into a big skeleton? It's like existentialism for the PCs, but pessimism and/or determinism for the rest.
What I love about the plot that many people miss is that Chrono and crew have very little effect on time or the future. Nearly every event would have happened regardless if they were there or not. The only significant changed they make are: Janus survives summoning Lavos, The raising of the Black Omen, and killing Lavos to prevent doomsday. I found it very impressive that the made a Time Travel story that doenst really change much of time
I think my favorite part of this game is when Crono says "It's Cronin' time"
Chrono Trigger was the closest games have come to the vinyl hunt for me. It was before online ordering, so I spent years looking (and traveling) for a copy.
Finally got one, and then they started to release remasters and ports. I wasn't even mad, because that game needs to be seen by more people. Still does.
I've never played an RPG before or since that has pacing as perfect as Chrono Trigger.
Keep re watching this video and I think I really realize how this game is one of the reasons I didn't kill myself many years ago. the exploration of themes here definitely subconsciously embedded into me, I played this game in my early adult years on just before a darl period in my life. gosh diggity damn I love this game. it also hits me how almost any song from the game is moving to me if I hear it. I used to hang out at the edge of time and listen to that music and just be still there.
freaking amazing experience, I'm happy I lived to play this game 🥰🥰🥰
Man, the idea that the time gates could just be the planet's life flashing before its eyes is stunningly deep and chilling. I love that so much
Max Derrat: Post a video about Final Fantasy 9 being an existentialist masterpiece
Me: Well I'll play
Max Derrat: Do it again in Chrono Trigger
Me: Ah Sh*t, here we go again :)
Do it!
Both games will be played over, and over again like in Clockwork Orange, lol, man that was a great movie, like you have it as a pfp. ALEX D LARGE!.
@Dharma Defender, add FF6 to that as well.
One of my favourite games of all time - i'm 43 now, but i bought the game [NTSC] for just over £120, with the converter, when i was 16.
Generally the playerbase divides between the players who like Trigger more than Cross, and vice versa.
Maybe this is related about what game you play first, that will create a bias.
I played Cross first, at first I thought it kinda weird compared to FF7 or FF8, that were games from the same generation. But as ones mature, Cross keeps becoming wonderfully complex and interesting.
Definitively one of the best story I ever see.
Worth pointing out, though, Cross is NOT a direct sequel of Trigger.
There is a long story between both, we can explain Cross from 2 PoV, the real and the directors.
The real PoV is that the "Dream Team" from Trigger was dissolved. So SE picked only one person from that team to make the sequel. Trigger embodied a team of PoV while Cross is a single directors PoV. And that single director didnt actually approve all directions that Trigger followed and decide to retell many aspects. As that director was responsible for the middle age time in Trigger, we can see it more often than the rest in Cross.
The directors PoV is, as he decided to retell many key points in Trigger, he himself told Cross isnt a sequel of Trigger but an alternative reality derived from one specific ending from Trigger. And that choosen ending was the 13th ending that was introduced in DS version of Trigger.
Despise the directors egoist intention of messing with Trigger story, it must be recognize that the end product is unique. He managed to create a sequel that you dont really see any connection with Trigger, but as you unveil the complexity of the dimensional jump, you can completely see that Trigger is there.
Once I read that the best books are those that every time you read it, you always learn something new despite being the same text.
It is the same with Cross. No matter how many times you play Cross, you will always learn something new there. Its almost like a new game every new gameplay.
I still think Cross, just makes the events of trigger, seem pointless, and Serge, ,is basically like screw you, and your pals chrono, you ruined my existence you have to admit there’s to many party members, and it isn’t as charming with it’s cast like Trigger, since they are such a close nit that get development, also personally for it’s just full of ridiculous plot that melts my brain, and i love deep stuff.
Cross is definetly a sequel. You can't have a "direct" one when the og game has 12 different endings, which form its overall identity which shouldnt be robbed just beecause it "needs" a traditional sequel. All endings from Trigger are canon in their own way in Cross, as it explores time laterally as Trigger does linearly..
I hate cross so much it's unreal.
With time people love it more and more. Eventually None left will remember trigger. Much to my chagrin, you Cross fans have won. As what's newer will always be seen as better by the majority.
As someone who mostly plays games for a good story or compelling characters and their arks, I really enjoy when you cover these narrative games. Most of my friends play competitive multi-player games and, while they are pretty fun most times, I don't really have anyone to talk about single player games and their stories or what I enjoy about them. You're that person for me Max. It's really refreshing to see someone else have that enjoyment and express it. Thanks for the content as always and I hope you're doing well dude :)
Playing Chrono Cross BEFORE I ever played Trigger definitely affected my perception of Trigger's story. I played the whole game with a tragic sense of dramatic irony. Despite that, I still found joy in the characters' triumphs. The ultimate ends of a story are insignificant. Meaning is personal and it is found in the moment, not in an overarching narrative.
playing cross before trigger is actually way better lol.
I feel bad for cross as people wanted a CT2 back in those days, refusing to treat it as its own thing.
IVe got the remastered edition and damn its a beautiful game.
Wow, my condolences. I choose to completely ignore CC's story, I don't see it as canon or even having anything to do with CT. While they are technically supposed to be the same characters and universe, it is so radically different in every way, so much in opposition to everything that Trigger stood for, in game design, storytelling, characterization... it isn't a surprise the people who made it treated the cast of Trigger that way, they clearly despised everything it stood for in the larger sense (besides Yasunori Mitsuda, he had nothing to do with all that, and his score for Cross is sublime). They had such disregard for the characters and source material they were working with, I don't see why I should take anything they wrote seriously, is how I honestly feel. And I actually like Cross on its own merits, it's aesthetically gorgeous and a great deal of fun if one like JRPGs... I just think it is a horrible sequel to Trigger, even ignoring the disgusting disregard it has for the characters who were supposed to have a happy ending, everything about its storytelling and gameplay are the total opposite of how Trigger's most basic design principles, it just has no business claiming to be the canon sequel to something as utterly iconic and singular as Chrono Trigger. I am even annoyed by the anime cutscenes that are included with all modern ports of the game, as they are both not originally supposed to be there, and also the final one attempts to tie into and realize the nonsense insanity of what Cross says happens imminently after the end of Trigger. A bigger pile of horse shit I haven't encountered in my life, lol. And it blows me away how many people can't simply dismiss Cross on that basis, and insist that it must be taken seriously if you like Trigger.
@@jedgrahek1426 I never really thought of it as a sequel per say. I mean, just play Radical Dreamers if you want something even more disjointed than CC. The Devourer of Time was essentially responsible for creating all these paradoxical dimensions and realities. Defeating Devourer and freeing Schala stopped Lavos for good and allowed the Trigger crew to live in the reality they worked towards, rather than that depressing final scene of Trigger's "good" ending. I think of it more as a tool to give us closure for Trigger. That's my interpretation anyway.
@@jedgrahek1426 I had to read your comment twice to make sure I didn’t write it myself. I couldn’t agree more.
@@jedgrahek1426 Could you elaborate a little on why the creators of CC deliberately despised the things that represented CT? I'm legitimately curious and uninformed, and I assume there's reasoning for that other than resentment towards how CC diverged from CT.
I could go on about my personal history with Chrono dating back to 1995 and how it changed my life. But I have to mention how awesome it is that you name checled System Shock 2 alongside the likes of Ocarina, MGS, and FF7. So deserved.
Wow, that really does show how radically different the meaning of "simple" (and many other words) can be depending on perspective and context. I would only ever say Chrono Trigger is simple if I were talking about the relative complexity of time travel narratives, with Primer being the contrasting example of "complex". Or "simple" in the sense that its narrative is wholly comprehensible to most people who can read, as opposed to its ostensible sequel, whose narrative is one of the foremost examples of senselessly convoluted JRPG writing, which couldn't be more different from Chrono Trigger's clean, sensible progression of events and character motivations. It is however, as you have learned, very thematically dense, and in terms of masterfully crafting an experience for the player, very, very far from being "simple" in how it operates. Amazing how malleable and sort of useless such epithets can be.
I'm really, really happy you decided to play Chrono Trigger. It is one of those rare touchstones of nearly perfect beauty which we experience so rarely, for how much time we spend seeking out such things.
edit: Oh, I love that you made special mention of how most of the cast have different, 'true' names than the ones they use by default. When I first played this, when it was brand new, I was 14, and I came up with a pet theory that something special would happen or be unlocked by playing or completing (or ???) the game with every character having their true name. Of course, it doesn't work both because not all the characters do (though the Epoch even does lol), and moreover because nothing in Chrono Trigger would ever be that cryptically hidden: one of the many things I have always admired the game for is how every sidequest, every secret, everything in the entire game is plainly findable for anyone who is simply talking to everyone and paying attention to all the information they are given, and it is all amazingly clear and lucid how it all works, given that there is not a whiff of a modern 'quest tracker' or anything like that. It is shocking how few games, especially RPGs, Japanese or Western, truly live up to this design paradigm, and instead force to player to consult external sources to find many secrets or even figure out how mechanics work fully. Thank you, it is always beautiful to witness someone encounter this game for the first time. It says a lot that you were able to recognize it for what it is so quickly, given your going into it aware of its reputation and seeing it as an older "classic", many of which can be difficult for people who never played them when they were new to truly appreciate.
The gameplay is fairly simple. It's brilliant though, the way double and triple techs are implemented makes the gameplay have depth while being easy to comprehend.
Nothing is overly complicated. It's executed to near perfection
I too noticed that plenty of characters had alternate names that were the right length to fit as the names the player gave the character, and had wondered if something was connected to that, and definitely on my second go around gave them all those names (Nadia, Glenn, R66-Y(?), and Janus) to see if anything happened. And of course I didn't get Robo's alternate name formatted correct, so I had to wait to try that for the third time....
No, it's simple; the video itself ironically proved that, as there is no real "depth", since only one theme was given; will to live and fight. Which is fine, I love the game, but how is that NOT simple?
I had a couple of courses on philosophy of mind and essiantially believe in determinism. But determinism doesn't work for everyday life. So, as you quoted Dostoevsky, I both believe and don't believe in free will. Great video, btw :3
Buddha said: "Life is suffering". We cannot avoid it, we must accept it and despite all pain and evil in the world still believe in goodness and love. In that meaning we willed nirvana/heaven into existence only through our own choice...
just started playing chrono trigger and i love to read sartre and Camus, so thank you so much for this video. love your channel by the way!!!!
I find the video to have been quite a marvel to listen to! Never considered Chrono Trigger to be involved with existensialism but...I do admit that it always felt like the game had some messages that weren't obvious at first glance. You certainly have given me quite a bit to think about!
Just one small oddity: IS what Glenn was doing pacifism? I personally don't think so. Pacifism indicates someone who is strictly against violence, but it doesn't necessarily mean that such a person is lacking in self-assertion or will.
Here's my take, and apologies if it's too similar to what you say in the video:
I wager what can best describe Glenn's problems is that he was too PASSIVE. He initially could not will himself to do more than stand by and let what will happen, happen. You could say...that he had a tendency to not resist whatever came his way...until it resulted in the death of his best friend, which you mentioned discussed in the video. Only then did he start going through the arduous task of attempting to resist the urge to just stand by and do nothing when the time comes. Ironic that he managed to gather the will to try this when it is so much harder when compared to before. I mean...can you imagine how differently things would have gone if he spoke up to Cyrus before on his doubts relating to trying to fight Magus at that point? Maybe Cyrus wouldn't have listened...or maybe he would. But I wager is the fact that Glenn will never know for sure that could have contributed to his guilt for the following decade of his life.
And...that's it. That's my take. A bit wordy for a random youtube comment, I know. Apologies for that!
Wish Ozzie's relationship with Magus had been just as relevant as Cyrus and Glenn's to emphasize the duality between both pairs which itself could be seeing as parallel to the duality between the Planet and Lavos.
I don't think younger people quite understand how much of an A-team worked on this game. It's a one and only. The memories of renting this game from the video store and me and my friends debating if the world will end in 1999 lol.
Also your review wasn't the original Chrono Trigger
As someone with Bipolar I mania, Zeal is like mania. You find an unnaturally powerful source of energy within and keep tapping into it, living in a dreamworld until you take it too far and the whole thing collapses.
The great part about Chrono Trigger's story - and perhaps, of all time travel stories - is the idea of humanity's struggle against "fate." It is easy to just accept reality and fatalistically go through the motions until we die - and indeed, most people do this. They are the few who choose not to do so - who see what is wrong with their world, and opt to take action to affect real change - who not only make it into the history books, but who quite literally MAKE history, who manufacture new outcomes and alter the very course of "fate" itself.
That at least a few of us could be such people.
Or die trying, and end up remembered as traitors and villains. Effort can get you into the history books, success gets you favoured by them.
Without effort, there is no success. Magus failed. If he hadn't tried, nobody would have cared about him to mourn his loss.
Ff6 and chrono trigger are the two greatest rpgs I've ever played so far and chrono triggers gameplay is some of the best aswell but it's story is just so great on so many levels
Spot on. I think that I will never play those 2 games in my life again because the nostalgia overload would take me to the other side faster.
What's yout take on Breath of Fire 4 and Grandia 2?
@@SianaGearz I haven't played them yet but I still have a huge catalog of rpgs to play so i'll definitely add those aswell
I agree they are both great stories, and they share a lot of similarities since well they used a lot of the engine from FF6, and sound effects are the same between both.
@@zombiemachinery4868 You have to have the courage to revisit your childhood though.
I didn’t click on this video expecting to be uplifted in my current circumstances, yet that’s exactly what happened. Thank you.
This was an interesting video. Magus's story was to be expanded upon in the sequel, by a specific character. Unfortunately, the sequel was not well received, but I am excited for your delve into the series.
Magus, has such a tragic story though he lost everything due to Lavos, and he just swore revenge plus Ozzie, Flea, and everyone under his vampire cape thought he made Lavos, with dark magic, but in reality he was just merely summoning Lavos, to try, and get a chance to clash with him, and save the world, and all timelines from this heartless being, plus the DS versions added ending where Magus, still couldn’t stop Lavos, and he even failed his sister, by letting her be taken by despair, and so It’s why i sympathize with Magus, because back when i just heard glimpses of Chrono Trigger, i just thought he was evil, but actually it’s his mom that is.
According to the secret ending on the DS and the events of Cross Magus erased his memories in order to become "Guile" who's search of "enigma" could be interpreted as a symbolical search for his lost memories and the fate of his long lost sister.
@@javiervasquez625 that's shitty
Thank you for this amazing video. It really uplifts me and both the analysis and remembering one of my favorite games/stories ever.
Bruh, dreamstone was their before Lavos landed. It's how Melichoir repaired the Masamune. Lavos doesn't land until after you defeat Azala.
Pieces could have broken off of Lavos and landed before he did.
I’ve been following your channel for a good while now, and all of your media choices are just perfect. keep up the amazing work!
It is so amazing to see you experience this series and get your thoughts on it. Chrono Trigger is as close to perfect as a game can be. Based upon your thesis here I think you will be very pleased with the narrative direction Cross takes.
I'd say that's arguable. Just because Cross brings up certain ideas, doesn't necessarily mean it handles them well. I see the storytelling of Cross to be a complete betrayal of everything Trigger was about, and I mean that in a larger sense than the literal bad things it does to the characters. It is also a betrayal of the clean, straighforward beauty of Chrono Trigger, opting for a very convoluted mode of storytelling.
@@jedgrahek1426 Cross was never meant to exist. The only reason why Masato Kato wrote the story was because Square was bothering him with the idea of a sequel and the rushed development of Radical Dreamers meant he didn't have the time required to fully adress Schala's fate after the Fall of Zeal happened. This lead to Kato to backtrack with his original conclusion of Trigger's storyline in order to make a brand new fullfledged storyline that would be on the same level as Trigger.
Dude your video made me cry. You name so many of the games I love the most including this one. Great analysis and great presentation. Excellent!
Not sure I've you've covered Final Fantasy 8 yet, but I really want to hear your take on it, since it clearly had ambition, but the execution was messy. I feel like the Time Compression stuff towards the end was going somewhere interesting, even if it was confusing.
I wanna time compress Chris Chan.
me thinking through the video, well, have to comment for him to play chrono cross. Then I see 22:45 :)
Glad to know your "top existentialist games", played them all :) ( but didn't finish ff9, broken last disc )
So Terranigma has been called "Europe's Chrono Trigger" and I think there's a really interesting comparison between the stories. In Terranigma you face an imbalance of "Light Side" and "Dark Side," both are faces of the Earth, basically like a God and Devil of equal measure (except when they're not). I believe Chrono Trigger is a science fiction retelling of that story in which the Earth (light side) is fighting against Lavos (dark side). He is embedded within the center of the planet. The beginning of human civilization sees Lavos arrive from the sky and enter the Earth below, while the end of civilization sees him emerge having taken his share of the planet and leave; both light side and dark side are gone at the end of the world, and over time all of existence fades away. This is why a finished game cycles back on itself again and again, and why no matter when or how you fight Lavos it will be the same battle at the moment of separation, Lavos's awakening. Perhaps the reason the Light Side is so well hidden is because its powers are similar to Lavos; maybe both have the power to interact with Dreamstone and to create time portals.
The theme of the game is, as pointed out here and by many comments, uncanny hope in the face of absolute destruction. But what makes that threat of destruction so overwhelming isn't a giant space flea, it's the end result of a process of nature that shaped humanity and the whole world. Humans are as much of Lavos as they are of Earth. Is Lavos ever destroyed? What happens if he is? Maybe that's where destiny goes off the rails.
Should we ever get "Chrono Break" as a followup to Cross's ambiguous openended ending i imagine we'll get some major explanation as to who and what Lavos is and wether it's existence has a far larger and complex purpose than beyond simple "balance" between life and death.
I think that because you played this game so much later, you didn't even know that originally, it was a spoiler that Magus was a playable character at all. Me and my friends assumed he was the bad guy, because he's an evil wizard and you spend so much time fighting him. There's even a point in the middle of teh game where you can kill him and his whole character is gone. It blew us all away back then that there was a way to get one of the bad guys to join our party, and only if we did certain things the right way. That was ground-breaking 30 years ago.
Also, would have loved a little more time spent on how ground-breaking the music was. Again, if you weren't a kid in the 90s maybe it's hard to understand just how different Chronotrigger's music was from every othr game at the time. It was a revelation. The beauty of the music was what made me first realize video games could truly have artistic value (unlike what my parents said.)
"The Entity" who opened the gates is the guy you see in the cut scene when you lose the game in certain situations.
Great video though. I played this as a kid, glad to see younger generations are getting into it.
Now I can't wait for your Chrono Cross video. I also now I have an extra reason to replay it! I never did finish it back in the day.
There are a couple newer games I think might work for your channel. Bug Fables, an old school Paper Mario inspired RPG. Like Chrono Trigger it hides a lot of it's interesting story in side quests, but it puts a lot of effort into world building. GRIS, a puzzle platformer telling a story without dialogue.
Chrono trigger is one of the only games that the music combined with the story in the emotional parts makes me shed a tear. brilliant