Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 175: Chrono Trigger

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey travel back (and forward) in time with Kat Bailey and Chris Kohler to revisit one of the greatest RPGs of all time: Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest mash-up Chrono Trigger.

Hey folks, it's Bob from Retronauts, and I'm here to let you know that Jeremy and I will once again be at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this year in Portland, Oregon. It's happening this Sunday, October 19th to 21st, and on the 21st, that's a Sunday, at 3.30, we'll be doing a panel on full motion video games. This will be our sixth year in a row at the show, and we really hope to see you there. And if you're a fan of Talking Simpsons, I'll also be doing two live shows with my pal, Henry Gilbert, in Portland that weekend. On Saturday, October 20th, we'll be doing two live shows at Kelly's Olympian in Portland, Oregon, and that'll be happening at 426 Southwest Washington Street. We'll be covering the greatest hits of the Simpsons Halloween episodes with a 2 o'clock show and a 5 o'clock show, and our 5 o'clock show will have, as a special guest, Bill Oakley, former Simpsons writer and showrunner.

Tickets are going fast, so if you want to attend either of the Talking Simpsons live shows, go to tiny URL.com slash Talking Simpsons. Halloween. That's tiny URL.com slash Talking Simpsons Halloween. Once again, you can see us Sunday, October 21st at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo at 3.30 p.m. And you can see Talking Simpsons live on Saturday, October 20th at 2 o'clock p.m. and 5 o'clock p.m. And again, go to tinyurl.com slash Talking Simpsons Halloween to get tickets. That's three big live shows. And I can't wait to see you folks there in Portland. This week in Retronauts,

Krono, Krono, wake up, Krono. I want to welcome to this latest, extravagant episode of Retronauts. I am your host at this time, Jeremy Parrish, and with me in this room, this small room, smaller than the epic. We have a motley rabble of people. Actually, it's the same rabble of people. This is a continuation, sort of, a side story, to the deep dive final fantasy episodes we've been doing. So we brought the crew back. Crew introduce yourselves.

Hey, it's Bob Mackie, and I got to say, wake me up before you, Krono. I had to do, Jeremy. I'm sorry. I'm fine with that. That's your modus operandi these days. Every episode. Watch for it, people. Hey, it's Chris Kohler, features editor at Kotaku, and Something Something Chrono Trigger Reference. Nice. That was a good one.

That was very ready player, one of you. And timed about work, Kat Bailey. Okay, well. I feel like we all forgot our names in the first two minutes of this podcast already. You're going to cut those awkward silences, right? We are Magus cast into the void of time. We've developed amnesia. We can't remember anything.

This podcast is going to be a journey of discovery as we all discover Chrono Trigger for the first time again and decide if it's a good game or not. Actually, I don't think that's going to be the case. But yes, we are talking about Chrono Trigger this week. Like I said, we've been doing deep dive episodes on the Final Fantasy games, except the ones that aren't worth it. And we've also been kind of taking side excursions

into Final Fantasy tangential games, such as the Final Fantasy legend, aka Saga, and the Mana games, Secret of Mana, aka Sagan Densetsu. So here we are now. And this is both. This is all of those. This is everything. I kind of feel like to properly have built up to this episode. We should have done a bunch of Dragon Quest Deep Dives, but those will come later. This is Krono Trigger, and it is the beloved yet bastard child of Final Fantasy.

It is all the cool people who made Final Fantasy games. You almost had a time paradox there. Did I? Yeah, because you almost said that it was the beloved bastard child of Chrono Trigger. Well, I mean, you know. I went back in time and became its own father. Thematically appropriate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, good.

Yeah, how come they didn't explore that plot line? You never meet Krono's dad. There's a lot of questions here now that you mention it. You got to play Crimson Echoes. It's the canonical sequel. All right, yes, yes. Masato Kato himself has come forth to say, yes, Crimson Echoes. had to kill it because it was too good.

No. Oh, okay. All right. Anyway, yeah, so Chrono Trigger is very much the, like I said, the bastard offspring, but beloved of Final Fantasy. And in some people's opinion, it is the greatest role-playing game of all time. I don't know if we necessarily hold that opinion, but I do think it is a tremendous game.

It is a masterpiece of design, and it perfectly marries everything that I love about Dragon Quest and everything that I love about Final Fantasy, and it just, like, cuts out all the parts of those games that I don't like. So it's an efficient, lean, fun, enjoyable, complex, interesting game. Speaking, Jeremy, of taking a trip to the past, I took the liberty before coming in here today to re-listen to a classic retronauts from 2007 in which we talked about Chrono Trigger. How much Chrono Cross sucks, except I didn't, but... You vaguely mentioned it, yes.

So we actually already discussed Corona Trigger on Retronauts. Low, those many years ago, that was you, who introduced yourself as host of the episode Pro Tempore, because you had not yet really fully taken the mantle of Retronauts host at that point, weirdly enough. What, how does that work? Scott Sharkey. Oh, okay. It was you versus Sharkey. And Sharkey was there.

Okay. Was it versus each other? I was there. Well, I think you were working together. I was there. That's not versus, though. That's like collaboration. Sorry, you were collaborating.

Well, either way, it was not quite set that you were Mr. Retronauts yet, interestingly enough. I kept trying to voice this off on other people for years. I finally gave up. Finally, yeah, I finally had to split it with Bob here. Andrew Fister. Oh, yeah. Andrew Skip Fister was on that show. And preview's intern, Alice Leang.

Wow. Was on that show. Alice was with one up back in 2007? 2007. Yep, yep. And she was like a little tiny kid. Yeah, and I was reminded of this because you just said they took out all the parts, and that's exactly what Scott Sharky said. They made a list of everything I fucking hate about RPGs and said, we're not going to do that.

Okay. Yeah. So that's like the saltier version of what I just said. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. The Sharkier version. You're right, for Sharky. Shark and salt. It's very close in the dictionary.

What a Krono Trigger. What a great game. Do you guys like Kroner Trigger? Are we wrapping up? Yeah, I think that was a great episode. I feel like we really set our piece. No, I'm asking, like, what do you guys feel? Well, where do you put it on the scale of RPG greatness? Well, I discovered it last year for the first time.

Oh, my God! So coming to it more than 20 years late, did it hold up? Well, I wanted, I mean, obviously I knew about it when it originally came out, but I couldn't afford it by the time I had a Super Nintendo. It was a very expensive game. Yes, it was quite expensive and quite rare. Yes. And so I just never had a chance to play it. I actively avoided the PlayStation version. And then I got... That was very wise of you.

I got the DS version. And I started to play it, but I never got that deep into it until finally for Acts of the Blood God, my RPG podcast. I decided, I'm going to do it. I'm going to finally friggin beat Chrono Trigger. And I was really legitimately blown away by how tight the design was, how likable all of the characters were. And most importantly, maybe how smart it was because I think that I have a thing with fiction, which is I think time travel tends to ruin everything because it just introduces too many possibilities. The story will get tied up and knots and everything. And Chrono Trigger mostly avoids that trap while also having a lot of fun with it. They really maximize the concept of traveling back and forth through time. And they have a legitimately kind of terrifying boss from beyond time. space is very lovecrafty and what they did. Yeah, it's basically like Shethulu the Porcupine.

Chitulu the Hedgehog. How about that? I mean, this thing comes from beyond space and time and just sees Earth as something to procreate on. It's a snack and a, what is it? A singles bar with a nice restaurant. So that's pretty much Earth to Lavos. He's a tick.

He's an outer space tick that just feeds off the planet. He's nigh invulnerable. There's a little skinny alien guy inside. like just like all of us. Right, right. Yeah, what you made me think of something and then I forgot what I thought of. But yeah, Corona Trigger, oh yeah, it was as somebody, as a retronauts fan was just telling me at GDC this week, when I mentioned the game, he said, all killer, no filler. And I think that is an excellent description.

And Bob, where do you weigh in? I was super hyped for this game because I read like every game magazine. I didn't buy it because it was $90, but I rented it a ton. And this is the first, this is like my. entering to true loserdom where I, this game was the first time I blew off social obligations to play a video game. Yay. So really marked a turning point in my life.

Mom, dad, if you're listening, please forgive me. I actually lost a job over this game. Oh, my. Wow. Not lost a job. Okay, so it was like a summer job. And it was drawing to the end of the summer. I was about to start up the next semester of college.

And Chrono Trigger came out like two weeks before the semester started. So, you know, I had like two weeks left, and I basically just stopped going to work those last two weeks without actually giving any notice. And I ran into someone like a week later and he said, are you coming back? And I said, I don't think so. So I probably lost, you know, like five or six hundred dollars just to play this game. I was celebrating the Feast of Lavos. Do not discriminate against my religion, sir. I never put that job on my resume when I was looking for employment.

Well, yeah. So I blew off social engagements to play this game. game and I never I never I read it over and over I never actually bought it but when I was a teenager in high school in the late 90s and like emulation was getting really good for Super Nintendo that's when I played them over and over and over again getting every ending and stuff like that yeah yeah this is one of like the two games that I always used to test emulators to see how they were coming along super NES emulators it was this in Castlevania 4 I would always play through the first level of Castlevania 4 and I would always do the opening to see like how much

faster and closer to actual speed, the fireworks and the balloons and the intro came. So, like, that opening scene, you know, as it's setting the stage before you actually see Krono, like, in my mind, that still has this, like, quarter speed sound where, and so, you know, of, like, for fireworks, it's like, buch-d-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Everything dragging and slow. This is going to sound like your great-grandmother-time. talking about watching the Great Train Robbery for the first time. But I remember one of the first SNES emulators, maybe the first SNES emulators to actually be, actually play sound effects and music.

They, before the release, they had like a wave on their website. Like, this is the emulator playing the beginning of Chrono Trigger. And I downloaded that wave. I was like, yes, the future is here. Because they didn't always have sound emulation in the very early days of that stuff. Well, that's, I mean, that's kind of where we are back in 2007, the first time Retronauts covered Grono Trigger is that, that the DS remake was not out.

It was not on virtual console and you either were stuck buying a very expensive cartridge and putting in a Super Nintendo or emulating it, but emulators were not at that time, you know, perfect. Right.

So the last time we spoke about this, it was a... Yeah, we didn't have stuff like BSness and things like that. No, you didn't. And so it was a, it was... We were talking like theoretically about if you were to play

Chrono Trigger today, what would you do? Because it was really difficult to play it in that perfect form. And now you can just download it for 15 bucks and play a really crappy version on Steam. Right.

Or you can get the DS cartridge. Which is still cheap. Well, so it's going back up again because Square Enix's online store used to have tons and tons of them and they'd have put them on sale and you could buy them for $10 during their spring sales for DS. They're gone now and now they're starting to creep back up. But that is. Oh, mine is a precious baby that will never leave my home.

Yes. So that's the one that I played for this episode because I was actually, you know, for the Final Fantasy episodes, I had played through the games before I came in. For this one, I was like, well, I'm not going to be as fresh on Chrono Trigger. Well, I'll pop in the DS but I mess around with it a little bit. Oh, I couldn't stop. I'm like, almost, I know I'm going to get all the endings now. You know what I mean?

It's just too damn good. But I put it on the DS, and that is the definitive version. That's the one. The cool thing about that version is if you bought it in Japan, you could turn it over to the English localization, which is exactly what I did. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. That was not aware of that. That was really nice.

So I have the Japanese version of Chrono Trigger for the DS. but it's in English. All right. So for this episode, this is going to be another of the weirdly beloved gimmick episodes of Retronauts. So Chrono Trigger is broken. It's a time travel game. It's broken into multiple periods of time, various epics or, you know, temporal spots on the map. And so we are going to travel nonlinearly through time, according to your selections.

There's 65 million years BC, that is the prehistory. There's 12,000 BC, which is antiquity, AD 600, which is medieval times, AD1,000, which is now, here and now. AD1999, the day of ruin, and 80,200, the future. So which of these amazing time periods shall we begin to discuss this episode of Retronauts? Do we start at the beginning with boring prehistory, or do we leap ahead to see what the future is like? I'm super boring, and so I would love to start with prehistory. All right. Prehistory is, in fact, the prehistory of the video game.

Right. It is, and actually you made all the notes here, so this is your section, Chris. Take it away. Okay, so keep putting song was born in 1940. Hang on a second. We got to do the sound effect thing. Oh, yeah. Okay, now we've traveled back into 65 million years' years' PC.

If you heard that sound and you saw, you know, there's like a purple tube that you're traveling through eventually we'll get the epic and we don't have to do that so it was back in like the early early part of the super

Famicom era that former you know bitter rivals Hironobu Sakaguchi Yuji Hori and then of course Akira Toriyama all kind of ended up apparently they all went on some trip together or went to some conference in America or something like that

and just happened to spend a lot of time hanging out and talking. Yeah, they were doing research for future graphics or something to that effect. There you go. I feel like they probably weren't actually rivals. Oh, yeah, probably not. That doesn't really seem to be their personalities. I think it was friendly rivalry kind of thing.

Sorry. So I, yeah, they were definitely like. By 1991, those two series had kind of grown up in parallel and both were kind of jockeying for top of the pops in Japan. Well, Final Fantasy was still the scrappy underdog, basically. It was, but this was post-Final Fantasy 4, so... Yeah, but 4 was not the explosion and popularity of Final Fantasy. Was it not?

Five was. Huh? Yep. I forget how weird things were over there versus here. Very weird. But, yeah, anyway, I mean, it was sort of the... It was definitely not... It was no longer nipping at Dragon Quest's heels.

There was some mutual respect going on. But importantly, I mean, as we all know, Horiugi and Toriyama were both freelancers. I mean, they both owned their own companies. They could work with whoever they wanted to. And so, this is when they all decide, well, we could actually do a project at Square. So they all start talking. They come up with a concept called Maru Island.

And they wanted to do it for the impending release of the Super Famicom, Super Nintendo CD-ROM unit, which Nintendo and Sony at that time were saying, oh, this is absolutely definitely going to happen and everything. And it's totally going to come out. I mean, as long as we're going with a time travel theme and, I mean, obviously, Chrono Trigger is about branching timelines and everything. Imagine if that thing could actually come out, how different things would be? Because how many games were in development for that thing from Square alone that ultimately got killed or changed dramatically? I mean, Secret of Mono is a good one.

Chrono Trigger is a good one. Well, so here's the funny thing. So the CD-ROM drive gets pushed back. And they basically decide. And so, you know, what's interesting is we have all these interviews that we have. we can read now, a lot of stuff on schmupplations, where we can talk about all of this stuff. But they decided, well, we don't want to work with Toriyama, because that's going to be a

big project. We want to work with Toriyama on the CD-ROM. And so when the CD-ROM got pushed back, they took apparently, like, some of the concepts that they had been doing, and then turned that into secret of mana. I've always felt like there was some kind of spiritual connection between those two games, Mana and Chrono Trigger, even, like, even something as minor as what the female lead character is wearing, like that, that sort of Poulat's outfit that Marley has and that, that Purim wears. Yeah, and even that Randy sort of kind of looks like Chrono, too.

I was going to say that. I think that they said that they threw out all the work that they had done with Toriyama, including all of Toriyama's contributions, but one wonders, were the characters that ended up in Secret of Mana derivations of the original work that Toriyama had done. Yeah, some of the goofier monsters definitely look like Toriyama-ish stuff. Yeah, like the little game.

I was going to say the eggplant wizards. Yeah. They're little guys who, like, they're like tomatoes and eggplants and they fly around a little platform, raising zombies at you. Yeah. Like, those are very Toriyama-ish. There were also rumors for a long time

that Secret of Mana was supposed to have multiple endings and that ultimately ended up going to Chrono Trigger. And I actually, when the Secret of Mata remake was being made, I asked one of the original producers. I was like, is that true? And they're like, no, we always intended it to have one ending. So I find that kind of interesting. Was the remake producer actually on the Mata team?

Yeah, he actually worked on the original Mata. And if you look back at the interviews at the time, even like Ted Walsy at Square was like, oh, yes, Secret of Mata was going to be our first CD-ROM game. And then we had to cut stuff out of it and like drastically cut down the story. So even SIPA. Yeah, there was a Nintendo Power interview where he said you can see, or maybe it was EGM. but he was like, yeah, you can see if you really look to where we cut out huge chunks of the game.

I don't think you have to look particularly hard in some of the dungeons. No, and the thing is, it's, I really wonder if, because you look at the stuff that's in secret of mana, and one wonders if we are looking at things that, areas that maybe used to exist in different time periods that had to be very quickly strung together into one time period. Which is why you have like the desert where there's these weird glowing stars crashed on the ground.

Yeah. Or than like a subway train buried beneath the ruins. The problem is if you talk to me about what did I do 25 years ago, I'm like, I'm going to be able to piece together a little bit of a picture for you, but it's not going to be perfect. And the more interviews that are done with these guys, well, hey, what was this whole secret of monochrono trigger CD, not CD thing? They're all going to have a different story because it just, memory just works that way. Yeah, and you've contaminated the purity of their memories by even mentioning it. Yeah, but either way. definitely the Secret of Mana, all that kind of stuff, like the genesis of the Chrono Trigger

project. And it's important to remember, like, we, when I look back on the Super Nintendo era, it's like such a huge chunk of my life. Like, I started it when I was 10 and then I finished it when I was, like, 16 years old. But, like, that's really not a very long period of time, like creatively. So the Toriyama stuff for Secret of Mata fell apart. And then they kind of jumped right into Chrono Trigger. And they, and as we mentioned on, I think, the Final Fantasy Six podcast,

Development of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger started at the same time with different teams. And originally, Sakaguchi was not on the Chrono Trigger team, like in a real, real hands-on kind of dirty way because he was doing six. Final Fantasy 6 finishes up. And after that point, they looked at the Krono Trigger project. And remember, at this point, games took one year to develop. Yeah, so this is, right. Remember, Final Fantasy 6 launched in Japan in February. February or April. I think February or April. I think February.

Yeah. Early 94. And the game, Chrono Trigger came out in March 95. Right. So there's like a year in there. Yeah. So Chrono Trigger, actual like development apparently took two years. And apparently that first year was a lot of talking. It was a lot of talking and chatting and, you know. Yeah, they were breaking up at the media. Sakaguchi was like, we don't usually do it this way, but because we had brought in Hori san, like we were just having lots and lots and lots of conversations about what the game was going to be. And then basically they had a whole lot of newbies on Final Fantasy 6 because a lot of the major Final Fantasy guys like Nomura, you know, and, you know, Mitsuda, who, you know, had worked on Final Fantasy 5 and was now composing the soundtrack, like Kitase, all the majors were on Chrono Trigger because that was the big one. And then after Final Fantasy 6, everybody was all hands on deck for Chrono Trigger.

And we know that from, I think, Matt Leone's Final Fantasy 7 thing because it's like, well, that's why Final Fantasy 7 took a while. Yeah, that's the oral history of Final Fantasy 7 on Polygon, which is also coming out as a book. Yes. Is a massive endeavor. It's like an all-day reading project, but read it. It's great. Yep. And so that's why, and that's point number one, why Chrono Trigger is a Final Fantasy.

Yeah, it's interesting that you say that there was a lot of, you know, time with Hori spent just kind of conversing and kicking around ideas because I feel like he was increasingly moving to that model of game design with Dragon Quest. You know, in the early years, Dragon Quest games were pretty much every year up through five. And then after five, there was a pretty significant gap from like 1992 to, I want to say 95 for Dragon Quest 6. And then, of course, Dragon Quest 7 didn't make it out for like another four years. And, you know, each game has taken longer and longer to put together. And I feel like he just, you know, takes more time to kick around ideas and, you know, come up with something worth saying and worth doing. So it's interesting that his sort of newly adopted philosophy already was starting to show up in the Chrono Trigger development process. Yeah, and Dragon Quest 6 and 7 were very much like less successful versions of some of the ideas in Chrono Trigger.

Yeah, really. I mean, you have traveling between worlds and kind of like a fragmented existence and sort of echoing ideas and bringing the back. I mean, Dragon Quest 7 really does have like that time travel element. to it, so, yeah. I just finished that came back. It's actually been like half a year since you finished it. I know. I just, it's such a burden that feels like.

I felt a wave of nausea coming up when I said I, Dragon Quest 7. I'm like, no, no, Bob, it's over. You don't have to go back. So remember, by the way, that I said that Chrono Trigger was originally, again, intended for the CD-ROM. And then during the development, then it became extremely clear that the CD-ROM was not pushed back. It was canceled and it was not happening.

So they switched originally to a 24 megabit cartridge. That was how big Final Fantasy 6 was. And that was pretty big. It wasn't as big as super, you know, Famicom games got, but it was big-ish. And then in the last half year, the last quarter of the development time, basically, they came to them and said, hey, you guys can do 32 meg. And they ended up using that, and that is a ton of extra memory. And they didn't add much to the design of the game. They used it for more music and more.

So all the beautiful graphic scenes, the trial, Magus' Castle, all the things that are like, you know, not just constructed out of little blocks, you know, that are just like these beautiful painted kind of scenes. That's all just all the extra memory they had. Yeah, some of those scenes are as close as you can get on Super Famicom, Super EniS, to like a CD-style animation cutscene. You know, something like out of Sega CD,

Cosmic Fantasy or Lunar or something. One of the things I find particularly interesting is, I think even though Xenogiers came out on the PlayStation, I think Mitsuda composed like three times a number of tracks for Kronotrigger. Yeah, well, he, I mean, famously, he put himself in the hospital doing it, right? It was his first soundtrack. He worked himself to the bone doing it and gave himself terrible stomach ulcers, which put him in the hospital. But there was a story that I read that fortunately, so I only just learned. this recently. There was

a tradition at Square, and I don't know when it started, of when the game was done, when the game was done, the traditional the game is, the rat party basically was the whole team all got together and they watched the ending to the game. And they were doing this on Final Fantasy 5, and they definitely

did this for Chrono Trigger because Mitsuda talks about he was able to leave the hospital and go back to work and sit with everybody and watch the ending sequence to the game. He said he cried. And he cried. Yeah. But that was a thing that they did.

All right. So that wraps up the prehistory of Chrono Trigger. Now, Bob, why don't you pick the next time period? Do we go to 12,000 BC, 680, 80,000, 1999, or 2300? Wait, wait, wait, by the way. You can actually watch. It is on YouTube, the press conference that they had with Hori and Sakaguchi. announcing Chrono Trigger

and they run prototype footage of the game on the screen behind them it is totally different and yeah you should check it out I thought you're going to talk about the anime which I want to talk about Can we choose a thousand?

Is that an option? 1,000? Okay, that's the game and its mechanics. I do want to say in all my times of playing games all the games I've ever played this Chrono Trigger and two other games

have the best use of or only successful I feel use of time travel as a mechanic. It's this, it's Ghost Trick, and Day of the Tenticle. They're the most mechanically sound uses of time travel as a mechanic. It's very redundant, but I believe in what I just said. Okay.

All right, so the year one of the experience of playing the game and it's the present day, it's like the experience of playing the game. the basic premise of Chrono Trigger is that time travel is fun. Yeah. It's not like burdensome. It's not disastrous. There's no one creating horrible time paradoxes.

It's about something bad happened or is going to happen in the future. And there's these kids who have access to the ability to travel through time. And they're like, let's keep the future from going wrong. Let's make everything good. So it's like, let's the Scooby-Doo version of time travel. It's playing by the Back to the Future rule set. I think they were heavily inspired by that movie. Grandfather Paradox.

Yeah, I mean, the only place you actually see, you know, like, oh, my God, we can destroy ourselves with the past is the very beginning. And then that never really comes up again. They're just like, yeah, we fixed it. It's cool. Everything's great. I was going to say that Marl is the most enthusiastic about time travel out of everybody, and she's the one who disappears and experiences the cold icy grasp of death. But she's still like, this is awesome. It's not existing.

It's even more different. So originally Marl, that character Marl was actually going to get written out of the story at that point and then they would meet in another timeline a different Marl from a different timeline and then she would join the party

for the rest of the game and when it basically So after Final Fantasy 6, Sakaguchi then came in and saw that plot point and was like, that's dark. So that's a hoary plot point. Yeah. Or maybe, and that's probably Masato Cato.

We'll talk about the staff later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I found interesting was, well, first of all, it's not our world. It's a fictional world, so they get to have a lot of fun with it. So it's a world where the timeline, like history, you know, the calendar is broken up into B.C. and AD, even though there's no actual mention of religion. There's no event. Yeah. Like, what happens at zero?

I don't know. Yeah. Is there, is there like a Jesus there, or did they just say, like, this seems like a good place to switch. Yeah, true. That is funny because it's like, oh, it's the millennial fare. Ah, but the millennium of what? Like, what is the, what was the inciting event here? Someone answer that. We need a ROM hack that says Common Era and before Common Era.

But they do have a Y2K bug, though. Maybe you can travel back to zero and meet their equivalent of Chrono Jesus. Yeah. This wasn't the only game that, like, made a big deal out of 1999. Castlevania also made a big deal out of 1999. Well, you know, there was the whole idea of the Nostradamus prophecy and the world was going to end. Like summer 1999 was going to be terrible. I just, that white shark quote is something from an album by the orb from like 1996, 97.

And there's also a track on there that has like this guy ranting about how the world is going to end in 1999. So it was very much on the, like everyone's forebrain. And then the Y2 thing came along and that sort of supplanted the Nostradamus thing because it was like, oh, here's something that could actually go wrong. Yeah, it was a year that had a lot of power, I feel like, in the collective consciousness in the early 90s. So I think that we were thinking about millennium, the millennium, we were thinking about 1999, et cetera. So it only made sense.

And it had great power for Prince. Interestingly, I've always liked the fact that the game Crystallis, the end day is not 1999, it's 1997. They got a head start on the end of the world. The magical future of 1997. The pan video game timeline, like their shit falls apart. part first. There's also, I mean, there is just that, you know, that ever-present sense in Japanese cultural product of the apocalypse, right? Yeah. It's almost like a country that suffers the

psychological scars of having faced the deadliest weapons known to man. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Getting back to the whole time travel thing, I really love how far they take the whole concept. I mean, just the idea of being able to do a new game plus and then being able to take on Lavos at any point in the actual game and then when you fight, where you fight Lobos changes history. I find that fascinating. You said the magic words. We should tell all

of the kids that everybody talks about New Game Plus. This was not the first game where you could start a new game with all your stuff again. But this was the first game to use New Game Plus. And it made sense within the fiction too. Importantly, the phrase New

Game Plus comes specifically from Chrono Trigger. But there was one of things was with frog, like the Masamune would go away because you weren't able to get into much later so you need to bring the brave sword with you and things like that. It's pronounced Massimune. Oh, I'm sorry. I think just Mazmin.

No, that's kind of curry, never mind. It's actually Grand Lion or whatever. Grand Leone. Yeah. Like Matt Leone. Yes, they're brothers. So, yeah, the crap, what were you guys talking about? You were talking about mechanics?

Mechanic. New Game Plus. New Game Plus. Yeah, that's one of the fun things is that the story-specific elements of the game can't be carried forward into a new game plus. So, yeah, you do end up with like one or two characters who if you don't plan ahead will, like, have to fight with the dinky stuff.

But they'll still be at like level 80. So it's not like anything's going to even begin to scratchy. They'll be fine. Yeah. They're okay. But, yeah, so the game is broken into six or seven time periods. And eventually you gain the ability to travel freely between them anytime you want, but initially you're very limited to where you can travel through these gates that appear at specific places in the world.

And there's no real explanation of why these gates appear. There's like some mention of like maybe there's some sort of mystic being that wants us to be in these places at the right time, but they never really explore that because that would be antithetical to chronotriggers spirit. Like let's not get too philosophical. Let's just go save the future. The more you start thinking about the time stuff, the worse it gets because you start to realize, well, it's also like, okay, I just took this time gate to 600 AD. Okay, and now I just interacted with the king and queen.

Okay, great. Now I took a time gate somewhere else. Now I took the same time gate back to 600 AD. I should go in and they should be like, who are you? Because I'm traveling to the same time, right? Oh, no, now this time gate is taking me there plus five days. Also taking into account the stuff I did the last time I went there. It's like they travel in a little bubble of time that advances the same in every era.

Right. If something doesn't make sense, just tell yourself speckio did it. Yeah. That would explain why all the cave people in 65 billion BC speak English. They're not, it's the time, so Robo says at some point in the game, yes, I feel like something is guiding us or something wants us to see these things. So they're not just traveling through time. They're sort of being led on a string. to certain places.

And so that's why when you go to 600 AD, it's 600 AD in the approximate time during that year that you need to be there at that moment to accomplish the thing you need to accomplish. What did you guys think of the different time periods in general? Because I know that one of the reasons I had a hard time getting through Chrono Trigger in the first place was because I always ran out of momentum whenever I hit $2,300. What? That's the best place.

I find it so grim. It is grim. It is grim. Yeah. But there's a lot of interesting things happening there. Speed bike race? Yeah, you race against a guy who is a vehicle. But if there's one location in a video game that I hate fighting in, it's sewers,

and you spend a lot of time in sewers. There are a lot of sewers. But there's a frog. There's two frogs, but they're not frog frog frog. They're other frogs. I think the grim future is actually one of the most interesting parts because, I mean, humanity's almost gone. They can't eat.

They're still alive, but they're always hungry. I like that it's not linear. It's like you have caveman times, you know, even though it's like way too long ago. You know what I mean? It's like 65. Some other world. A million years in the past. Like, okay, slow down.

I mean, this is a world where humans hang out with dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're a lizard people. I like that what happens is you go from 65 bazillion BC and then you go to 12,000 BC and it's the most advanced civilization in the entire continuity. Then they fuck it all up and then you go back to medieval time. It's a great surprise to get over there because you've seen the little news kind of around in 2300. And then you show up in zeal for the first time and you're like, what that? heck is going on here.

Who is this guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I mean, I like that it's not strictly like caveman to future and that there's ups and downs throughout it. And that, that, to me, shows a level of thought that I think is really important. Well, I think that's really smart because in real life history, too, I mean, there were points in human history where people looked back on antiquity and said, how the heck did they do that?

Right, sure, sure. Yeah, so, I mean. And it was alien astronauts, which is what you fight at the end of life. And there you go. Yeah. Yeah, so the, oh, you were going to say. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, the sewers thing reminded me about the fact that Chrono Trigger, while it is pretty linear, oddly enough, you know, being a time jumping thing, it's fairly linear.

But I found out in this play-through that you actually can, it does give you the opportunity to, like, monkey around if you want to, certainly the beginning of the game. So, the beginning of the game, and this I thought was great. So the beginning of the game, you wake up in your house, you get out, and then it's like, oh, you should go to the millennial fair. And that's what you would typically do. But I was like, no, I'm going to go to the forest and kill monsters until I'm level five. So I start doing that. I start learning techs. I start, you know, I get a whole bunch of money.

Why do I want to go up here? Why don't I go down this bridge? You go down the bridge. This is a really interesting thing. You can take the boat. You can go down the bridge. But then the bridge, people are all walking to the fair. Like, it keeps trying to storyline move you to the fair.

But it's like, why don't I go down the bridge? Oh, there's another town down here. Oh, this guy is selling stuff that's kind of expensive. Well, it's not that expensive. Why don't I just go, you know, get some money and I can buy it all. So I made the joke, like, by the time I bumped in tomorrow of the millennial fair, she's like, oh, do you want to walk around the fair? I'm like, here, I bought you this brand new boat before I met you.

So you can buy her a powerful weapon after you're sucked into the pad, before you're sucked into the past. Yeah, and I'm just like, let's go to the woods and build up your levels for a while. It takes some pretty confident game design, though, to let you just kind of do that, right? Yeah, and so it, but it gives you that thing. And so then, now that I'm super powerful, when I got to 23, whatever, 800 AD, they're like, don't go in the sewers. You'll get your ass kicked. And I'm like, no, I won't.

So I went into the sewers. I'm going to mess with those frogs. And I got the rage ring, which gives Krono, or I put it on Krono, gives them a 50% chance of counter attacking anything if you equip them on it. Now I've got that on me way before the game. But the thing is, it lets you do it if you want to. And that's sort of the hallmarks of that Japanese RPG experience of just giving you, like, not total. It's not the Witcher, but it's enough freedom to make you feel like, ooh, I did something cool. Which is funny because people tend to associate JRP's with linearity for the most part.

Yeah, I actually take all that stuff in Chrono Trigger for granted because I always mess around with it. Like, once I realized you can, you know, walk down to the town of Porre and you can then take the boat back up to Gardia, even though you don't really need to. It's just like, oh, this is neat. I don't know why I'm doing this, but it's fun. And, yeah, going into the sewers way too early and doing those little events with the frogs and, like, kicking the stuff into the water so monsters come out. Like, yeah, it's just, you know, I, that's one of the reasons I don't think 2,300 is quite as grim as you say, because, yeah, it is grim, but you have levity in situations like this optional dungeon that you can go through. The sewers you don't even really have to do until much later in the game, but you can, and it's fun to mess around with it. But why don't we talk about what the actual game is, like the actual game is, like the story?

We've talked about time travel, but we haven't really explained what happens. So you wake up as a kid named Krono and go to the millennial fair, which is a celebration of your kingdom's 1,000th year of peace or whatever, or a thousand years since it was established. I guess that's what the calendar is based on. I don't know why it's 80, but anyway, so while you're there, you meet a girl who you bump into, you're forced to bump into her. There's no way to escape it.

And she's like, oh, hey, my pendant, I dropped it. So you help her find it, and then you hang around with her at the fair level, little bit. And then you go see your friend's weird machine that she created because she's a crazy tinker like her dad. And your friend jumps onto the machine and is like, I want to try it out. So they activate the machine. And all of a sudden, the girl that you've just met vanishes, except for her pendant still there. And everyone's like, my goodness, what happened? Didn't she see the fly? Never go inside the telepod. Exactly. So you realize that she's vanished into the machine and has something to do with a pendant and you volunteer to go save her.

and the brave music starts up and you jump on the platform and wake up on a forest clearing 400 years in the past and everything kind of unfolds from there and you start to travel through these different time periods and eventually you travel into the future and discover whoa 900 years from now a thousand years from now 999 years from now that's it the world is going to be destroyed by some creature that like bursts out of the ground and nukes everything and all that's left is ruins and there's no food and all people can do is get into this thing that keeps them alive, but they're still hungry. Their tummy's growl. It's very sad. And if you want, you can jump at that point straight to the cataclysm. Yep. Yeah.

And yeah, so the girl that you met at the fair turns out to be the princess of Guardia Kingdom. And she's like, we can't let this happen. I will not abide this. Let's save the world. So then you start digging around with time and you end up saving the world. It's great. One thing I always really liked about the different time periods is that each one has its own arc. even though you don't necessarily play through them each in a certain order.

Like you'll go down to prehistory and then you'll go back to a different part and then you'll go back to prehistory and you'll finish that part up. And each one has its own distinctive story that is told in multiple different parts. Some of the arcs kind of intermingle with each other. Like early in the game you go back into AD 600 or 600 and you defeat the monster that's like trying to take over the kingdom in secret by aligning with the what are they called the mystics. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Catholic. Right. They're just Catholics.

They pretended to be nuns. So again, there is some sort of religion here. Anyway, so you beat this monster Yacra 600 in the year 600. And then much, much later in the game, it turns out that the chancellor of the kingdom in the year 1000 has actually been taken over

by Yacra the 14th or whatever, the 13th, who's all these generations, you know, his family has been brooding over what you did to him. So he finally takes revenge on you or attempts to a thousand years later. But this is like way late in the game. And it's the sudden reference back to, oh, I remember that part. We were mentioning back to the future. There's a Biff moment where Ozzy the 7th,

Ozzie the 7th, where he is a kind of a rich guy, very powerful. and then if you complete the side quest, Ozzie the 7th will go and become a janitor at the end. Hmm. I don't remember that. Ozzy the 7th. Yes. Okay.

Yeah, so you do get a lot of, you mentioned Ozzy, you do get a lot of these like very Akira Toriyama characters. And in Japan, they're even named after food, just like Toriyama always names as characters after food. There's mayonnaise, soy sauce, and vinegar. Vinegar, yes. But in the U.S., they renamed them for. musicians, so there's Ozzy, Flea, and Slash.

Yep. Which I think is a fine localization trades. Absolutely. They're tone deaf, evil fiends. A lot of the scenes that I think happened later on in the game, especially the ones that delve into one character or another, apparently were added very late in the process, probably after they had upgraded the cartridge size.

But then also it was like, they were like, we really need to flesh these characters out a little bit more and really do as much as we can. and they really crunched and added them very quickly. So apparently, I guess that story with Luca, you know, when she goes back in time alone and you can, you either see her mom get crippled in one of her dad's crazy machines or you save her mom, depending on how you do. Apparently, I would guess that that is one of the ones that was added very late in the process. But they said, like, at that point, we all knew the ins and outs of the game so well that it was, you know, it was really time, we had a lot of time pressure. But we were able to do it because we were just all so familiar with the story, the characters, how the game worked.

We were able to just put it together really quickly. So, and they kind of just said, like, that's the secret sauce, is the stuff you do right at the end can make a game incredibly memorable. Yeah, and there's all, oh, Bobby. I think they really think they were emboldened by developing Final Fantasy 6 beforehand, both with how loose the leash is and also where it's like, at a certain point, they're like, you can beat the game, but you can also wrap up all these character stories if you want. It's very much like the last half of Final Faisi 6. Yeah, yep, that's right. Chrono Trigger is actually the one time I ever called the Nintendo helpline. Because when you talk to Gaspar and the end of time,

and he's like, everyone you know is in trouble or has known someone who's in trouble. So travel through time and help them. And I thought I had done all the side quests, but I was like, he's still saying this. So there must be another one. What about Shala? No, he was saying somebody close to you needs help. Because I'm going to close to you.

Yeah, that's it. Find that person fast. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, okay, I've got to solve this. And I called the helpline and spent like 10 minutes on the line, which was pretty expensive. And the people were like, hey, we don't know. So that was useless.

Do we know what the, it was a mistranslation. Okay. Do we know what the original line was? It was basically like, if you talk to your friends, they will tell you things that you can do to help. Yeah. It's basically like, you can help people if you talk to them as opposed to like, it's desperate. Go, go now. So like when you go to that room with your party member standing around,

you can, like, talk to them when they're not in your party and tell you what to do. That's what it is. Yeah, okay. But it was just, it was translated in such a way that it seemed like there was one last thing you had to do. Right. That got a lot of people. So another fun thing about the time travel element has to do with Marley's Pent or Marles Pendant, which is, it turns out as a fragment of like the red stone that powers zeal like the Mystic Kingdom in the year 12,000 BC. and it has properties that kind of like mess with time travel and everything. That's why she falls through the portal, et cetera.

But it does play into the game mechanics because there are these weird chests you can find. And initially you can't unlock them, but once you get her pendant, then you can unlock them. But some of these chests exist in multiple time periods. And if you wait in the present day to open it, go back in time, you can touch the pendant but not open the chest. Touch the pendant to the chest, but not open it. And it causes, yeah, there's like a resonance. And then you go back into a future period and whatever was inside that chest is upgraded into something better.

Then you can go back in the past again and just totally piss off the temporal guardians and take the cheap item also. But yeah, it's just like a fun little side effect that you might not think, oh, I should, you know, I should be patient. But if you kind of experiment with the play mechanics, then you get that.

Speaking of play mechanics, the last thing I want to talk about in terms of the game mechanics is the battle system, which is amazing. It is called the Act of Time Battle 2.0 system. And that says right here, like, this is Final Fantasy,

but it's better, and it is, actually. What do you think of the people who say it's too simple? They're wrong. The simplicity of the battle system is actually a big part of what makes it work.

So you have three characteristics, characters at time, there is some limited positioning that plays into combat. You can't control where your characters go or where enemies go. But, you know, as you take actions, they'll kind of move around the screen. And a lot of the abilities you have, because this takes place in sort of like a real-time setup rather than just people lining up on opposite sides of the screen, the different abilities you have play out different ways. Like some of them, you know, there's like an area of effect. Some of them move in a line. Some of them hit everything on the screen. Some of them only move in a like a fixed line, like a horizontal line across the screen. You need to know like

how do these powers work. Okay. So each character has available to them a maximum of eight techniques. That's all they can learn. They learn eight techs each. But the genius of it is that every pair of characters in the game has combination techniques where they can team up. And almost every character in the game has triple text where they can team up with two other people on their team. There's two characters, I guess, one, no, two characters, Robo and Megas that don't have innate triple text. Or no, actually, Magus, I think, is the only one that doesn't have innate triple text. You have to get a rock or whatever. You have to get a special ability. And then there's a couple of other rocks you can get to

enable some hidden triple text. But basically from these abilities, this ability to combine your character's actions emerges a great deal of complexity and strategy. Like, each character has an elemental affinity, and that kind of affects the sort of abilities they use. You know, a water-based character is going to have healing skills, and there's more than one water character. Do you want two people with water skills in your party? That seems like overkill, but those two characters, Marl and Frog, have some really good combo techniques. Like, there's a design there to say, hey, maybe you actually do want to go heavy on the water-based characters. That's okay.

I do like Slurp Kiss. Yeah. Slurp Kiss is good. Like, basically, that will save your entire party from the brink of death. I think the only way possibly, oh, no, I think that I think maybe, I think that Frog has heel, which can restore a little bit of HP to everybody. But beyond a couple of, like, lower power techniques, the way you heal your whole party is you have to use double text. Actually, Robo has a really powerful. Oh, yeah, heel beam.

Oh, okay. Which is one of the reasons I always used Aela and Crono and Robo because I could just. So you double down on non-magical elements altogether. They're both shadow. I mean, I could, Krono could do a ton of damage by himself. Ayla could do a ton of damage by herself. And then Robo could just sit and be pure support.

And that, because I found that triple techs, they were good, but they didn't do enough damage to offset the fact that you were taking up all three of your characters. And especially toward the end of the game, a lot of the bosses get very fast and very powerful.

And if you're not, like, healing yourself a lot, then you could end up very quickly falling behind and ultimately die. Yeah, and there are a lot of nuances to some of the boss battles, like the Golem battle that you fight on the wing of the Blackbird in 12,000. Like, that battle, if you don't know what you're supposed to do there, can just completely wipe you out.

If you do know what you're supposed to do, and I can't remember off the top of my head, it's actually pretty simple, but it's kind of like this sort of sideways thinking to the game design. Like, I don't think you can just lay on the damage. You have to be much more defensive. Yeah, and so for the first fight against Ozzy, you don't attack Ozzy. You actually move the cursor and there's switches on the wall behind them and you target those and attack them.

But that comes in to play in the final battle where you don't attack the obvious thing. You're attacking the thing next to the boss that seems harmless. That's one of my all-time favorite boss battles, by the way, because it was something that can only really be done in front of triggers. Ozzie, because you're chasing him through the castle and he's running around. He's trying to escape. And one of the reasons, one of the cool things about Chrono Trigger is that other games had characters on the map. But Chrono Trigger would just seamlessly switch over. So the Aussie.

The battle would take place in the map screen. Yes, exactly. So from a gameplay perspective, the Aussie encounter made total sense as you were chasing him around. There wasn't that kind of break when you would be going into a battle screen. And then the coup de gras when you just make them fall through the pit was just, I mean, that was very Dragon Quest, and it was hilarious. And that's how you ultimately dispatch him. Like, you just send him into the pit again.

Like, you never actually, like, fully murder him. You just drop him into the pit, and Majis is just like, what an idiot, and you walk away. Right. And at some point, a kitten falls. Yes. There's lots of cats in this game. There are a lot of cats in this game. They came up with, you know, the sprite for the cat, I guess, in Krono's house at the beginning.

It's this pet. You can talk to it and goes, meow. But then throughout the game, it's completely pointless. But you can go do these games at the carnival and get cat food. And the more cat food you get, the more cats will come and live in Krono's house. And there's a few other places that, like in 12,000, the kid who grows up to be Magus has a kitten named Alphador. And you know that Magus is this kid because Alphador recognizes him when you travel to the refugee camp after Zeal has crashed to the ground. Right, right.

So I love the fact that there's like this, you know, basically one cat sprite that they keep repurposing for interesting little effects. And then, you know, there is like the comedy part where you, like, I think Ozzy tries to attack you and a kitten falls out of the ceiling and walks off instead. It doesn't make any sense, but it's fun. I think the, what really makes the battle system sing ultimately is that every boss battle feels a little like a puzzle. I mean, when you're fighting Masamoon or Masamune or Masamune or whatever, the fact that they'll be. charging up, man, it's very classical Final Fantasy where you're interrupting them with Kronos attacks, for example. Or there's another guy, I forget what his name is, he's like the giga something, and he

has the two hands, and you have to take out the two hands real fast, because he's going to hit you so gosh darn hard. And there are so many battles that I went into where I got immediate, they just wiped the floor with me immediately, and I was like, okay, what do I do? What am I supposed to do? Yeah. It's possible to over-level yourself and not have to worry about it at all. And in fact, it seems like a lot of people do that.

That's the whole point of new game plus, actually. Right, right. You can go up to level what star is the ultimate level. It's 99. You can get up to 99, and then your skill attributes will max out with the star. And that's not always 99. Like, some characters have a higher threshold for certain stats than others. Yeah, but when you see the two stars, yeah.

It's like, okay, well, I can stop grinding for this character. When you're doing your initial playthrough, you're like, oh, man, this is actually fairly difficult, and I'm having to really think about the strategy. And then later on, it's like, oh, you've played the full game. Just have some fun. Yeah, mess around with the story. have a good time. Yeah, and that's the point of New Game Plus is to basically breeze through the story

and find different places where you can leap into the day of Lavos and initiate the final battle and see, like, at this point in the story, what happens if I travel forward in time and end everything? Yeah. And you get strange outcomes like everyone becomes a reptite, the doomed reptilian race that is supplanted when Lavos crashes to the earth. Moral becomes a frog. Some of them are unrelated, like, let's have Marl and Luca comment on all the men in the game.

And that's the only way you ever get to see Frog in his human form is Glenn in the present day is one of those endings, like where everyone's like, who is that? Oh, that was Glenn. He's hot. That's one thing I thought was cool about this game. Going into it, I assume like, oh, yeah. And then, you know, at the end of the game, Frog will turn back into a human and he'll have happy ending. But it doesn't happen, you know. Not unless you kill Megas, I think.

Yeah, you have to defeat Megas. Yeah, I guess I never did that. And also, I thought, you know, if you defeat Magus at first, which is what I did the first time I played, that Frog would turn back to a human right away, but he didn't. He stays a frog over until the end of the game, yeah. So. But you don't want to kill Magus because he's really powerful and cool to have in your party. He's Vigida. He's actually one of the dark elves from Record of Lodos Wars. Oh, that too.

If they mated. I don't want to pass by too quickly the, you know, the fact that the battles take place in the same screen as the dungeon. And that there are no random battles. No random battles, right. So basically... I mean, there are event battles. Yeah, okay, so those aren't random. They're not random.

Nothing is random. Everything is fully 100% scripted. And in fact, you notice as you play through the game, when you come, if you're moving through a dungeon one way, one certain battle where the group of enemies might start up, but if you're going back through the dungeon in another way, it might be a different battle and a different group of enemies. It depends on how you approach it. Let's be really clear.

Doing that meant that the development. of this game that literally every battle that you fight in that game, the level of development time and care that it took was like building an event scene in the game. Like it just, it exponentially increases the amount of development. But it also gave them more control over the player experience because they knew roughly how many battles you would have fought. You can walk past some. You can go back and repeat others. But for the most part, they knew like you were going to fight about this many battles and you would get to this area at about this level so we can tune the game to be this. difficult.

And it really makes the the dungeons sing in a lot of respects. Every one of them feels really different and really interesting. Well, they smash their heads against the wall

having to come up with different interesting ways to get the player into a battle. And so there's all kinds of funny stuff that happens. Yeah, there's like the freelancer birds

that'll throw rocks at you. Yep. And, yeah. Or like this, the sewer is really good too. Like, it's a big, like, a bunch of little comedy scent pieces

of you making too much noise and alerting There's another cat down there. Yeah. If you talk to the cat, it meows and the fishmen come out. Yeah, where the monsters are hanging out and kicking a ball around. The ball also turns out to be a monster. Like, yeah, like that was one of the first, you know, things in the game.

Yeah, and you have... It's insane. You have, like, optional battles that you can try to fight, like the little rock guys that live on those chains holding zeal, like tethering zeal to the ground. Yep. If you can beat those guys, you get a ton of, I think, ability points to beef up your skills, but they vanish. Like, they run off. They're really hard to hit. They're kind of like the metal slimes, except they're not a random encounter.

They're a fixed encounter, but you only get to take them on once. One of the things I found interesting was that apparently when this game was in playtesting, it was really hard, like, to the point that playtesters were basically like, this is cruel and unusual punishment. So they had to spend a lot of time, like, tweaking and tuning the battle system because it was just that tough. Interesting. And I think a lot of people would say that at the end of the day,

Chrono Trigger isn't that hard. It feels like it's kind of just right. Yeah, the difficulty is just right. I mean, that's part of the appeal. Again, like, people who think the combat system is too simplistic, they kind of don't get it. Like, the idea is that it's supposed to be a very accessible RPG, and that's the genius of it. I mean, that was one of the reasons they invented the end of time in the first place was because they needed to give people hints because they're like, what the heck do we do next? Like, it was all the way around.

But I think that that feedback ultimately led to the RPG we know in love today. Yeah. And, you know, if you really want to test your metal, The second time you go through the game, you can try to fight Lavos in the Undersea Palace, which is supposed to be an unwinnable battle. But if you stick it out, you can win. And it's not really worth it. It's really, really difficult to do. You get into the developers from.

But, yeah, that's one way into the developer room. Is that when you beat Lavos with just Marl in your party at the very beginning? Oh, yeah. You can also fight Lavos with just Marl and Krono. But the other way to do it is to fight them in the – fight him it in the Ocean Palace. You can't beat – you can't possibly beat Lavos the first time you play through the game. But on the Game Plus, it is possible, but it's tuned to be way, way harder than the final battle of the game. I guess because Lavos is in its prime or something.

I don't know. But if you do win, then, yeah, you get like a special ending. Anyway, so yeah, there's a lot of appeal to the game. A lot of reason to play it. Thank you. Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service. Watch more than 100 TV channels and thousands of movies on demand, all completely free. Pluto TV never asks for a credit card you don't even need to sign up to watch free.

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each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. All right, so we have been through two periods of time, the prehist of time.

and the present day, but there's still four eras for us to explore. And those are BC, or 12,000 BC, 80,600, 80, 1990, and 80, 2300. Why don't you pick one? I choose 8600. Let's talk about Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Uh, yes. Medieval. What Chrono Trigger takes from Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest?

Dragon Quest being more medieval than Final Fantasy. My favorite era in Chrono Trigger, by the way. Okay. So, yes, because Chrono Trigger represents a collaboration between, among other people, Yuji Hori and Hironobu Sakaguchi, and, of course, to Kiratoriyama, you basically have the two biggest RPG franchises in Japan at the time coming together into one big RPG franchises.

PG extravaganza that, I don't know, like crossovers are fraught with peril. When you have two sort of like lead creative visionaries, sometimes they don't go so well. You have conflicting ideas. You have incompatible ambitions. That didn't happen with this one, though. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were definitely going in different directions by that time. I mean, yeah, Dragon Quest 6 had classes, if I recall correctly. Dragon Quest 3 did.

Yeah, it was fairly big. But Final Fantasy 6 went in a, I would say, a fairly different direction from Dragon Quest 6. There were very different games, different visions of how to do with things. So to combine those two elements was pretty interesting. Yeah, Dragon Quest 6 wouldn't be out until after Chrono Trigger, if I'm not mistaken. Was it 96? That might have been that, yeah. I think it was late 95. I can't remember exactly.

It was pretty late, relatively speaking. It took a while for that one to come together. But I really feel like the, you know, looking at when the games began development, like Final Fantasy 5 and Dragon Quest 5 were probably, and Final Fantasy 6 were the ones that were probably most germane to the creation of Chrono Trigger. And, you know, you really see those two games in here. I mean, Final Fantasy had sort of made its mark as the big sweeping, dramatic, cinematic, epic RPG. I mean, the intro to Final Fantasy 6 is really where you see the Final Fantasy team sort of laying down its intentions and saying, like, look at this opening. It's like a movie. There's robots walking into the snow and there's a credits roll.

It tells you who made this game. That's pretty great. Dragon Quest was much humbler. It was more, how would you describe Dragon Quest? I would describe it as a heroic fairy tale, but with some, like, dark elements, lots of. of good vignettes that make you kind of sit back and go, huh, but at the end of the day, I mean, it's a hero going out and defeating the evil villain. It's like a buy-the-book very, definitely very like, I mean, kid-friendly from a Japanese

manga perspective, like if you could put it in a, you know, Shonen manga for middle school kids, it was okay in Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest 5 would have fit right in and like Shonen Jump. Yeah, and it was the, you know, that was the art style. That was where it came from, and that was where it lived. It was that sort of manga-style cartoon medieval fantasy. Final Fantasy was older. It was sadder.

It was grimmer. It was darker. And it was, I mean, it was humorous sometimes, but it was also unorthodox. Dragon Quest 5 had some really dark moments, let's be honest. The main character spends, like, the first 20 years of his life or something in slavery. Yeah. Well, you know. I want to talk about Toriyama if that's cool.

Yeah, I was just going to say, like, you really see. So if you look at the original Final Fantasy, it's like a medieval RPG, but then you go to this castle in the sky where there's like a nuclear-powered machine stomping the corridors. And it's clear like this is the ruins of some futuristic advanced civilization. And that's something that carried through all the way through all the Final Fantasy games or nearly all of them. And to the point where you started to see that sort of futuristic design in Final Fantasy 6 when you have the city of Vector, which is like a steampunk. sprawling metropolis. Dragon Quest never really had that. But, yeah, Toriyama really blended fantasy and futurism, sci-fi, and stuff like Dragon Ball,

which is like the journey to the West, but also there's like machines that pop out of capsules. So, yeah, like run with that. Yeah, so nobody in America knew who Toriyama was or gave a shit about him. But in Japan, 1995... He made the game about the girl who had sandwiches, right? Yes, the famous sandwich game. But in 1995, the Dragon Ball manga, I don't know the exact month or week or whatever, but 1995 was when the Dragon Ball manga ended.

And 1996 is when the anime adaptation ended. Like, this was like, I think it was not just Toriyama's presence that helped this, but I think it was this pivotal point in his career where people were like, well, what will he do next? No one knew he would not do another hugely serialized manga again, but they were just like probably hungry for the next thing because the end of Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball was huge. And the ending was very big, too.

So, like, I feel like this was a very interesting moment in Toriama's. his career. Drawing manga is for chumps. It is true. It is a grueling. I'm famous. Yes. It is a grueling, thankless task.

The great mangaka are always in tremendous conflict with their editors and publishers who are like, hurry, hurry, hurry. We've got a weekly schedule to meet. And they're like, I'm burning out. I recommend. And also, they take on like many, many, many different jobs and they're doing all kinds of stuff and they're getting sequestered in hotel rooms and working all through the night. and they die when they're 50 years old.

I don't blame him. Actually, I recommend the manga Bakuman or Bakuman. It's an autobiographical manga about becoming mangaka. And it's very interesting. But it shows you like, hey, never pirate manga. These people are killing themselves and they don't make any money unless they get like an anime. And that's only if. I have bought every English language adaptation of stuff like Battle Angel Alita.

So I feel like I'm doing my part to help the struggling mangaka. That guy's fine. So, of course, I mean, yeah, the fact that that. Toriyama, you know, kind of designed the visual look of everything and designed, you know, did the character designs and things like that. I mean, obviously, that does give this game that very Dragon Quest feel because he is the one who did that for Dragon Quest. But it's also important, let's not overstate Mr. Toriyama's contributions here. He, there are a couple of anecdotes that he gave everybody some concept art that he had drawn. And the design, the actual people, you know, in the trenches doing tons of work on this game were like, oh,

So it really helped, you know, because one piece of concept art would be so detailed and rich and imaginative that it really laid down what the game was for us. On the other hand, you have the anecdote where they said, he gave us all the character designs, but he only drew them from the front. And to draw what they looked like from the back, we just had to guess. I'm not like personally crediting Toriyama for you know like the genius of Kronotrigger but like his look really does inform, you know, the game. Yeah. And I feel like it's distinct from Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest. Like it's him working in a different mode. Oh, like a character like Ozzie though, like could have been pulled straight out of Dragon Quest.

Sure. There's a few of those. Well, actually, you know. The main cast, and you look at most of the monsters and you're like, those are a little weirder. than Dragon Quest. So the game doesn't explicitly take any pokes at Final Fantasy, but as I was replaying at this time, I realized that, so the Frog story, right, is that Frog is supposed to have the Masamune, which is how you pronounce it, by the way.

I'm just joking around, of course, at everybody, every kid who had it called the Massimune. So the Frog is supposed to have the Masamunei and the Heroes badge, which actually boosts the critical hit rate of the Masamunei, but everybody's talking about this hero that's going to save them all, and it turns out to be this kid from the village who picked up the hero's badge. And we're like, well, he's got the hero's badge, must be the hero. And then when you

find this kid, as he's running away from battle, he's this little, squat little kid with a big old shield that he's carrying, right? And then, you know, he gives you back the hero's badge and everything, everybody's like, oh my God, I can't believe we thought this kid was the legendary hero. And just in case you

don't get the point, when you meet this kid, when you go to his house. He's standing in his house holding his big, ridiculous shield in front of his little body, and he's marching in place. He constantly marches in place, which is an explicit reference that any Japanese player of this game would have got at that time to the hero of the first Dragon Quest game who doesn't walk when he walks, he just marches in place all the time. Yeah. And so Tata, that kid from Chrono Trigger, is supposed to be a joke about the traditional Dragon Quest Hero Kid.

About Loto, basically. That's a good joke. I got to say. Fair self-referential. Yeah. So kind of getting into the bigger picture and just I guess to wrap this section up, I feel like Final Fantasy is very much about large stories, about massive stakes, about, you know, people coming together to deal with this epic world-threatening crisis.

Dragon Quest is about the people who come together to deal with this massive epic crisis, and the people who are affected by the evil rising in the world. It's really about the lives of the characters and about the lives of the NPCs that you mean. Around this time, I feel like you go from Dragon Quest 5 to 6, and 5 is very much about, like, what is the place of this character who is not the legendary hero, but plays a key part in his lineage,

and what does he have to suffer in order to live his life and get to the point where he is able to take part in the hero's journey, even if he's not the hero himself. Six is the first of the Dragon Quest games that really gets into the idea of vignettes where each town you go to, each village you go to, each land you go to, is

a self-contained story arc that is much more like explicit and evolved than anything you encountered in Final Fantasy. Like you go to a town in Final Fantasy and it's just like the way point where you get your armor and then go out into the next dungeon to

move along to the town beyond that. Whereas in Dragon Quest, it's really about, like, you come to a town and there's a problem and you have to deal with that problem and you really have to stop and, you know, help the lives of the people you encounter. And, yeah, like, I feel, I feel like Croner Trigger does a good job of balancing that. I mean, there are epic world ending stakes. I mean, here is a thing that's going to come out of the ground and nuke the planet and leave everyone basically struggling for life for hundreds of years afterwards. the planet will be dead. But at the same time, so much of the story is about those little individual quests where you have frog, you know, recovering his courage and becoming the hero that he knows he ought to be.

Or about, you know, even the side quest that you can do at the end of the game, like the part where Robo is the only one who can go back in time and labor endlessly for hundreds of years to make sure that, you know, this, this dead area of land becomes a forest that thrives into the future. So it's really about both the big and the small stakes, and I feel like it balances those things a lot better, honestly, than any Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy game. If you want, I think, to see the Final Fantasy DNA side-by-side

with the Dragon Quest DNA. 8600 is very Dragon Quest with the Fiend Lords Army, the huge Magus's Castle and that everything, the encounter with Ozzy is very humorous and cute. But then if you go to Zeal, that's very Final Fantasy. It's very futuristic. It reminds me a little bit of, for example, Esther in Final Fantasy 8. It's fairly common, I would say, to go to a high fantasy, high futuristic city.

And then, of course, it's all about folly, right? I mean, they're trying to draw all of the energy possibly from Lavos. Yeah, I mean, it's basically like the plot of Final Fantasy 5 condensed into a single time period. They found a way to exploit some sort of inexplicable magical power source. And ooh, what happens when we overuse that? Oh, it's actually really bad. The way they're treating Lavos, for example, in trying to draw power, it's very much kind of like the Esper's where the Empire is trying to take advantage of those, taking advantage of these massive godlike powers that you don't really understand and maybe you shouldn't do that. Yeah, Dragon Quest,

in the ones that I've played through, you don't really see a lot of stories about people making catastrophic decisions. It's more along the lines of, like, yeah, there's actually this thing that's super duper evil and it hates everyone. And, you know, Dragon Quest 4, you have Pizarro, who is, or Sorrow or whatever his name is, who is sort of driven by the mistreatment of the person he loves at the hands of people who make a bad decision and basically drive him to become evil. But that's really, that's kind of an exception to the rule. Usually it's like, yeah, this incredibly malignant being wants to destroy all humanity. Let's go stop them. And, yeah, Chrono Trigger has both.

So that's what makes it so good. All right. So the next time period, that's what's left. There's 12,000 BC and 80, 1990, and 80, 2300. I guess it's my turn to pick. So let's go to 801999, the day of ruin, which is also listener mail. So, we get the letters in the mail. We're going to read them to you now.

So from Nick Colucci, Chrone Trigger is recognized as the masterpiece it is because it succeeds on two fronts. in every area of technical execution from its timeless soundtrack to the distinctive cartoonish Toriyama styling of its sprite work to its intuitive battle system, it stands on equal footing with the greatest of its age. But within that sturdy framework,

it also pursued innovations that were years ahead of their time. Take, for example, the way the battle system took place on the field map with no transitions with the very same character sprites you walked around as, or how the game's handling of time travel made for fun and inventive side quests that set players to exploring the different eras. This is a game without any real fat on it. Every part of it feels merited a complete expression to which nothing need to be added and from which nothing could be removed.

That's a pretty strong claim. Do you guys agree? I think so. I mean, I don't think anything seems superfluous in the game. I would say that it's not bad, but the quest to power up the Masa Muni is dragged a little bit. I feel like that's where the story grinds to a halt a tiny bit as they're trying to do all that stuff. because then it really picks up again when you're fighting Magus

and it feels like it doesn't stop from that point I guess the only thing I could do without now in the year 2018 is that race against Johnny which is like here's your gimmick Emoat 7 shit for this game and like even like two years later I was like enough of this that could have been cut that was pretty bad

and it never comes back it's a total non sequitur it's really weird you get to kill him in Chrono Cross oh you do? Oh okay that's well that's good so from 2049 I only like to write in when I feel very strongly with capital letters about the topic

and I loved Chrono Trigger so much as a kid that the first CDs I ever bought were the soundtrack which in mid-90s America could only be had at anime cons and cost me more than the game did. And it was probably bootleg. Probably. Chrono Trigger is the Back to the Future of Games, a universally beloved classic made by an obscenely talented group of people that turned a pretty dark and unsettling sci-fi drama into a fun and exciting story for both kids and adults with a cool time machine that flies. From Kevin Boyer, Queen Zeal is one of my favorite villains in any game.

Her odd relationship with Lavos, the brutal way she treats her people and even children, make for a very interesting character. And he credits the Sprite. He says, I love the Sprite working character art, which are some of Toriyama's best. But I think that was a Masato Kato character, wasn't it? I don't know. But, I mean, Toriyama is not responsible for the sprite work itself. No, he's not doing sprite work. Andrew Lennon says, being from Australia, the first time I got to play Chrono Trigger was on the DS.

Unfortunately, I played it immediately after finishing Dragon Quest 5 and found it didn't compare. Maybe I was burned out on JRP's at the time, but it didn't grab me the way DQ5 did. DQ5 made me care about the characters in a way that Kronotrigger couldn't. I also rate Radiant Historia as the better time travel RPG. Fighting words, where do you guys stand on that? I'm leaving the show. I hate Radiant Historia. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, listener.

You're allowed to like things. It's fine. I think Dragon Quest 5 and Chrono Trigger are two amazing RPGs that have really good flavors. I think Dragon Quest 5 does some really cool things, but it's maybe more straightforward, where I think I give marks to Chrono Trigger for its ambition, and just in the way that it so masterfully handles the different time periods, the time traveling, the new game plus and everything. I never played the Radiant Historia remake for 3DS.

Maybe it's better, but I played like 20 hours of the original DS game. I swear to God, I think I encountered like five different arrangements of enemies in the 20 hours. The remake definitely adds a lot. Okay, yeah. It felt like they just ran out of money or something. What, Radiant Historian History? Yeah. Yeah, play the remake because you can turn combat encounters basically off,

and it becomes a visual novel, and it's actually really good that way. Yeah. That's how I reviewed it, the remake, and it's a fantastic visual novel with some RPG-ish elements to it. Okay, maybe I will. Of course, everybody immediately compared Radiant Historia to Chrono Trigger as soon as it was announced. It was like, time travel. Chrono Trigger. We'll talk about that later.

Juan Gatoris says Chrono Trigger is an excellent game and a classic, although slightly overrated, in the sense that there are more refined JRP's. I challenge you to name one. What could be more refined than Chrono Trigger? Ooh. I would have preferred it over Final Fantasy 6

in the Super Eniast Classic Edition. I believe it's better than most Final Fantasies, although not on the level of the best dragon quests. Maybe... Chrono Trigger was like the one, if you were to point out, one game, just one game that, like, should have been on the

Super NES Classic Edition, but wasn't, like, Chrono Trigger is that one game. Like, it's not a PIFTRIG. You know, it's not... Oh, outch. No, they couldn't have dropped Secret Amana. It's too popular. Everybody loves Super Mario. I know, I know that they would never have

dropped it because Mario, but I really wish they had Chrono Trigger instead of Super Mario RPG. Yeah. Yeah. It's a better game. Dexter Morrill says, unfortunately, I missed the Super NES bus but opted for it, and opted for a Genesis as a kid. I've since repented for

one sin by committing another. Emulation. Dumb, don't know. After Final Fantasy 7 opened my eyes to the beauty of the JARPG genre, like it did for so many others, I went digging through a Nintendo's amazing library of romps, I mean games. Chrono Trigger blew me away with its visuals,

story, and unique battle system, and it's hard to deny its status as one of the greatest of all time. Let's see. Being ashamed of emulating a game is like being ashamed of watching Star Wars, not on the original film strip. Yeah. Don't worry about it.

The FBI has been notified, though. So bury those ROMs. Aaron Bassow says, I think the main problem people have with Chrono Trigger is that it's relatively simple. And I can understand that, even compared to Final Fantasy 6 from the same time, it's shorter with fewer characters and fewer abilities. However, I don't necessarily see problems with that. For someone like me, it was easier to jump into than a modern Final Fantasy. And either way, not every game needs to be long and complex. As much as I like parts of Kronocross, it's proof of that.

That doesn't mean Kronotrigger doesn't have flaws, like a lack of difficulty in the latter chapters. But those are flaws of most Squarespaceoft games from this era. Let's do two more. Here is one from someone named Infernal Bandicoot. Ooh. Oh, no, his name's Electric Bugaloo. He's got two aliases. Yeah, that's complicated.

Oh, and he's the sequel to it. I was a bit too young to experience Chronotrigger's original release on Super NES, so I got into it pretty late. I had known about it Simi-S sequel Chronocross for quite a while, and because of it, it had piqued my interest in the Super NES original. I didn't have the money to buy a used Super NES cartridge at the time, so I had to settle for a copy of the Final Fantasy Chronicles on PS1. I know the low times were long and well, not so good,

but it was the closest I could experience to the game back then. For a while, I got stuck at the end of time, not knowing what to do to move the plot forward, so eventually I had to resort to walkthroughs and long plays to move forward. For the first few hours I put into it, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey of Krono and his friends. I hope that I can make some more time for Krono Shigger so I can see where the rabbit hole goes,

and hopefully try not to destroy the world in the process. Well, sorry, if you've played Kroner Cross, you know you don't have a choice. and finally let's end with this letter from Ted Buffa Chrono Trigger was the masterpiece of the JRP before I even understood what a JRP was the story of Cecil and his friends first captured my adolescent imagination he's talking about Final Fantasy 4

but it was Chrono Trigger that solidified my love of the genre as a 34-year-old looking back on his adolescent self I can recall picking up the cardboard box and plastic cartridge from the local indie game store sold purely on the square name and the promise of another Final Fantasy I became enraptured with the warmth of the characters the incredible soundtrack and the simple

yet perfectly compact time travel story. Over the last 23 years, I've revisited Chrone Trigger many times and many different versions and it remains one of my favorite games as evergreen as Super Mario World and a link to the past. In the intervening years, I played most of the Final Fantasy games headed by Sakaguchi, as well as a few dragon quests.

Chrone Trigger still stands as the pinnacle of both aesthetics without the downfalls of either. Its impact looms across games of every genre, and Square Inix itself seems unable to shake its impact for good or bad. I will, I imagine, continue to fire up some version of Krono tricker for every couple of years for the rest of my life. And each time I do, the sound of that ticking clock followed by the quiet, rising intro of the game's main theme, will call me back to my adolescence and the experiences that shaped me during that time. And I will sit in silent awe, like Krono himself. I recall Square had some sort of bad PR after the DS release came out, and they were like,

You didn't buy enough of it, so you were bad. No, well, it was people asking for, like, well, when are you going to make a third chrono game? And Square's response was, if you wanted a third chrono game, we would have bought more copies of the DSRA. You failed us, consumer. You failed us. You didn't buy a 12-year-old game for 40 bucks. What's wrong with you? That clearly signals that interest in a new game.

All right. Oh, wait. I put away my notes, but we're not done yet. No. You thought you were because of your mail. We still have two time periods. It's all right. We've got...

You know what? We have the epoch now, so now we can jump on it and zip really quickly between time periods. So do we go to 2,300 or do we go to 12,000 BC? 12,000 BC. Yeah. All right. So this one's simple. So this one's simple. We haven't talked completely about the development.

staff and what they brought to the game. Obviously, we've talked about Sakaguchi and Hori. We've talked about it, Toriyama. But that's pretty much it. But there are a lot of... But everybody else was on it, too. Like, it's every... It's the dream team. Literally, I would dream of having these people together again. So Yuji Hori, of course, the lead designer, and continues to be the main producer and designer of Dragon Quest, or scenario designer, I guess. Hironobusakuchi, the original director of Final Fantasy, who left the company about 15 years ago and now runs Mistwalker and makes Final Fantasy-ish games. She's 15 years ago. Wow.

Yep. And to Kiratoryama, the manga creator who designed Dragon Quest characters and wrote and drew Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump and some other fun things. But there's also Masato Kato. He was the scenario writer. he would go on to write mini-games in the Krono-trigger vein, such as Xenogiers, which also plays around with the idea of this godlike force that comes from space and has a horrible, abusive relationship with humanity. He wrote the scenario for Krono-Krosse. He's written a bunch of the Zeno Saga games. Has any?

Or is it the Zeno games? He's like... No, I think he moved. Oh, crap. I think he moved away from that, but I thought he did Battenkaitos. Oh, Battenkaitos, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, so he's worked with Monolith.

He, one of the things I found interesting about Cato is that he wasn't entirely on board with the whole time travel idea. Really? Yeah, he thought it was going to be too messy that he wanted something more straightforward. That he just didn't think that it would be able to do it justice in video game form. So they had to get him on board the time travel range. Honestly, this is, Chrono Trigger is a time travel game with no time travel. Right. Like, there is, they don't ever, the only times they ever, like, look at time travel is literally where it's just like, Robo is like, I'll stay here and then you jump forward, you pick them up in the future.

Like, they actually don't, except for that one moral thing where they sort of briefly touch on it. They never actually get into any plot elements whatsoever that really dig into time travel storytelling at all. That's where you start to ruin everything. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So they just skip over it. And it's like, this game, this game. could be the same game without time travel. Here's an example of how time travel can ruin everything.

Star Trek. Here's another example. In Harry Potter, they introduced a time turner in book three. And from that point on, every stupid fan theory involved that stupid time turner to the point that J.K. Rowling finally said, you know what? And she destroyed all of them in book five. And the second that you go down that rabbit hole, you're getting away from telling an interesting story and just kind of getting up your own ass on possibilities.

Well, knowing that Cato was not on board with this explains a lot about Cronocross, which is basically like everything that happened in Crono Trigger was a bad idea and everyone's dying because of it. So it kind of makes sense. Also interesting about Matsato Cato is he started out as an illustrator and drew all the cutscenes for the Ninja Guiden games. Ah, right.

And he did a lot of character designs. Like, if you look at development docs for Crono Trigger, he actually did a lot of the original character designs here. I don't know if that was in collaboration with Toriyama or what, but a lot of the characters, he had like these really super Baroque versions that would not, they don't read very well. Yeah. Yeah.

He had that kind of like 80s, you know, Demon City Shinjuku style, like very kind of gritty, angular, extremely detailed, elaborate anime style from OAVs of the previous decade. When I was writing Power Up, like a lot of this information, was not really available. Like, it wasn't really easy to just jump in and see what the credits for any given game was. And so I spent a decent amount of time in that book talking about Ninja Guidance movie scenes and how impactful they were and how brilliant they were to this development of the sort of cinematic Japanese video game. They still look good to this day.

Had no idea at that time. I learned later that they were made by Cato, who would later go on to do Chrono Trigger, which I also talked about in the book. You know what I mean? Like, that connection is, I know. I know. You know, it's one of those things. But, yeah, he was Runmaru in the Ine-S Ninja Guideon credits.

Yep. How about that? Let's see. Who else is there? There's Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobu Uematsu, the composers. Most of it was Mitsu, but he got sick, and so Uematsu had to, like, step in and finish things up. Yes. But it's a great score.

It doesn't have the sort of, like, Celtic style that Mitsu would go on to it down. No, it's more jazz. Yeah. Especially in the spin-off album, break of time. Which, when that was mentioned on the 2007 retronauts, there was immediately a burst of cross-talk from everybody. And you can hear, like, half of everybody's like, I loved it. And then half of everybody's like, I hated it. I loved it.

I loved it, too. And in fact, but if you actually want something that's a little bit more, like, a little bit less experimental. So now we have, I forget what it's actually called, but it's the Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Arrange album that Mitsuda finally, finally, finally did, kept saying he was going to do it for a decade, finally put it out. Krono Cross and Trigger songs, all with new arrangements, and it is amazing. Playing Krono Trigger last year, or was it last year, yeah. Playing Krono Trigger last year, I was really... Maybe it was next year. I was really struck by how good that soundtrack is, and I know that's kind of a trite observation,

but stuff like the Ocean Palace just has so many complex and interesting late motifs going on and everything. And I remember reading that Mitsuda said that he was actually unsatisfied with soundtracks around that time period. And so he really wanted to just step up his game with Chrono Trigger. And he paid the price for it with his home. Well, not only that, but like

this was, I guess he saw this as his big break because... It was his big break. Previously, he had been doing kind of boring stuff. He didn't particularly like doing the work in Sucki Gucci said, well, you know, maybe compose a soundtrack and maybe you'll get your break. No, well, he basically, he was doing sound effects. He did

sound effects for Final Fantasy 5. So actually, when you start up Final Fantasy 5 and hear the dragon going, that's Mitsuda. And he was working on that. And then, like, Sakaguchi came over and was like, oh, my God, that's so good. But then he was like, I'm, if I don't get the chance to compose soundtracks, I'm going to quit. And they were like, okay, you can do the soundtrack for this.

And then he burned himself out. They almost killed himself. And then he quit anyways. And Hui Matsu came in and, well, finish things up. Yeah, so basically it was only, Mitsuda did not feel like he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish until after Xeno Gears. because once he finished Xenogers, he had composed the entire soundtrack to a game by himself. He did the entire arranged album, you know, by himself.

And, you know, by the way, I mean, off topic, but Xenogers' crate is like one of the best video game albums of all time. And after that, he said that's when he finally felt like he had accomplished what he had set out to accomplish. Which one is better, in your opinion? Chrono Trigger or Zeno Gears soundtrack-wise? That's, I mean, that's really tough. I mean, Zenogears has a much smaller track arrangement, and thus, like, there are moments where the soundtrack is a little bit off because they just don't have enough tracks. But the ones that are there are so good. The answer is Krono Cross.

Yeah, yeah, true. Well, Krono Trigger has really good, strong, solid pieces. But then Xenogiers, I feel, is such a thematically consistent soundtrack that you could really tell, again, it's all one. person. It wasn't stopped in the middle. The light motif, you know, is still very, you know, kind of still there running throughout a lot of the different pieces. So, yeah, I'm going to say, like, from a, you know, technical, you know, constructed standpoint, Xeno Gears is better. They're so, all of those soundtracks in different ways were very good. Yeah, of course. All right. Well, we don't have time to talk about Akihiko, Matsui, Yoshinori, and Takashi Tokita,

but they all did stuff for Chrono Trick. Yeah. They're great. I love them. Yeah, it was every, it was the whole. So here's the thing. I think we just keep kind of glancing at this as we're going through this podcast. But my real big takeaway from Chrono Trigger or where I would put it in terms of history is it is the ultimate expression of the 16-bit sprite-based Japanese role-playing game. And quite frankly, it is like the ultimate expression of like the Super Famicom, you know, zeitgeist in general, considering that RPGs were so powerful on that system. It was the masterpiece of that medium and of that format. Because, again, just the work that they were doing to put every single battle into the dungeon screens and to hand detail all of that.

And the fact that it was a 32 megabyte cartridge, all the, it was everything that they knew about creating video games. And it was one video game with a dream team of people all working on it together, creating this one incredible. amazing thing. And as soon as they were done making this game, they expended all the knowledge that they had about making 16-bit sprite-based role-playing games, and this is the big one, that as soon as they were done with that,

all of that got thrown into the garbage can because they decided to completely reinvent it and reinvent the wheel to create Final Fantasy 7, which just changes everything. It just changed everything about the way that you make these games because, again, it was no longer chip tunes. It was just, you know, MP3 sitting on a CD. Like, you know,

polygons, camera angles camera angles were just so important, you know, now. And also, you can't make Chrono Trigger again. You can't go back because there is no going back in time. And yet it's... Because you had

all of the best creators in the world working for two years on a 16-bit sprite-based chip-tune RPG. And they were at the peak of their powers too. This will never happen again. You cannot get the 50 best video game creators in the world and pay them all to make a 2D Sprite-based RPG anymore.

Maybe like an indie game collaboration of some sort. But it would really have to be so many people just killing themselves for the possibility of not making any money. You know, it's just like it's, and even the people who do Sprite-based RPGs, they never equal the scope of that. that you because yeah and yet even though we can never make this game again we can never go home again as it were

this game holds up so spectacularly well and I just was continually struck by how modern it felt how smart it was and I didn't have to make any excuses about this game I felt like it stood up with a lot of the best of what we were going to have today because it is the ultimate expression in that medium I think I just heard Tokyo RPG factory shut down

all right so let's travel forward one of the major oh sorry we gotta go we gotta go yeah we gotta wrap this up we gotta wrap this up So let's travel forward in time to talk about this game's legacy, you know, both in terms of its impact and how it holds up and also other games that really, really want to be Kronotrigger. Oh. Bob, you said Tokyo RPG Factory.

Yeah. And it's true. How does shadow madness fit into this game? It does not. It's Final Fans. That's Final Fantasy 7, right, Bob. Well, the problem with, I mean, the major problem with I am Setsuna besides all the other things that are wrong with it is Chrono Trigger is not perspectival. You can't recreate

Chrono Trigger or any 2D game in a 3D world because Chrono you can see from his head to his feet at all times which means that the characters can be expressive but if you try to create something that looks like Chrono Trigger and I am Setsuna you're just looking at the tops of buildings and the tops of everyone's heads and when you shrink everything down polygonal characters you don't get that same beauty and expressiveness

and as soon as you commit yourself to doing that I think you've already lost I wouldn't say that's the biggest problem with those games Well, it's a cynic joke It means like a small thing to represent the hall I also think that the second that you start comparing yourself to Chrono Trigger you've already lost Because not only can you not match the technical mastery of it

You can't manage the memories that everybody has of it And let's be honest, Chrono Trigger is one of the most beautiful games ever made And when you're playing Forgive me these Tokyo RPG factory games They're not very attractive I won't forgive you, Kat We're enemies for life now

I don't know. Lost sphere is okay in parts, but... But they're getting off on the wrong foot. They're trying to recreate the sensation of playing one of these 16-bit 2D RPGs, but make it in polygons. And it's like, as soon as you try to do that, you're just... They put too much into the games. That's the problem. They look at Chronotrigger and they're like, oh, what a great game. We want to give people that experience again.

But then they cram all these systems and elements into it that are all underbaked and all underutilized. Like, the Lost Sphere has so much going for it. has like this world creation system and it has a like a gear system like a mechanic you know has a crafting system multiple forging systems you you control robots but there's no point to it it's like it's like six RPGs worth of of mechanics yeah for a game that you can finish in 20 hours yeah okay guys sure why not yeah it just they they really miss the point but that's that is square trying to recapture its glory Other people have tried to capture Chrono Trigger's glory.

Let's travel back in time to Black Sigil for DS. Do you guys remember that one? I do. That was developed. Yeah. I really wanted to like that one. It was not good. Boy, but yeah, like the design.

There were so many bad design decisions. I remember the battle system not being great. And frankly, I haven't thought about Black Sigil in so many years at this point. It's very forgettable. Yeah. It meant well, but like the balancing in dungeons, you didn't have any way to easily, like, acquire healing items or restore your health. So every one of them became, like, this tiresome grind.

There were very few save points. It's not in, like, a Dark Souls, you know, good challenge kind of way, but just in a, like, I don't have the resources I need to play this, and it's not fun. And, like, I don't want to get into combat. I can't enjoy anything I'm doing because I don't have the tools that I need. I feel like you got crucified for giving it a bad review. I didn't even review it. I wrote about it to my blog.

I was like, this is okay, but there's a lot of problems. And then the guy who developed it apparently got really mad at me. Oh, man. It even uses the Chrono Trigger fonts, like Chicago or whatever the hell it is. Yep, yeah, yeah. Before that, you had Ion Storm with Anachronachronachs, which I've never played, but apparently it's pretty good. It's like a first-person shooter RPG kind of thing before Deos X.

But it's very heavily influenced by Chrono Trigger, so it has a lot of time travel in it. But because that was a PC-only game and I was a Mac-only kid, I didn't. not get to play it. Has anyone played it? Are you thinking of subteracore or anachronachs? No, anachronachs. Okay, because I think of subteracore when I think of Chrono Trigger do hikis. Well, like, the time travel mechanic, I know it was inspired by Chrono Trigger. I guess, yeah, Sipteracor was also them saying,

Chrono Trigger's cool. Japanese RPG's supposed to be easy. Yeah. The whole point of these games is that you are supposed to come home after 12 hours of work and three hours of drinking at the bar with other salary men. and come home and hop the game in and press A and make like an hour's worth of progress in the game before you pass out. That's the whole point. Well, Square has followed up on Chrono Trigger in a few ways, and we'll do a full episode on Chrono Cross to revisit that.

There was also Radical Dreamers, which was kind of Chrono Cross, but kind of not. Yep. And then they keep reissuing the game, and those usually don't work out so well. Someone mentioned the PlayStation port, which had atrocious loading times because it was like, it was like emulated on a PlayStation disc. It was a Super NES game, emulated on a PlayStation disc, and there was some weird decision made with the development of it where instead of, like, running the American ROM,

it was running the Japanese ROM, and there was, like, some sort of injection of the English language script. So every time it had to load, it would, like, do this injection thing. I played it, this, like, was the first RPG I ever played all the way through in Japanese. Learned a lot about elemental kanji in the process. Nice. But I was like, yeah, okay, this game had a little bit of slowdown, but it was okay.

It was nice to revisit Chrono Trigger, because at the time, no one knew that was going to come to the U.S. It went for like two years before it was localized. And then, you know, it came to the U.S. and people were complaining about it. I was like, is it really that bad? And it was years later that I played it and realized, oh, wow, this American version is so much worse than the Japanese release. It was terrible. It was terrible. It was terrible.

Another absolutely terrible PlayStation collection. Luckily, Square NX would never do that again. They would never release a subpar version of a... Certainly not Chrono Trigger on Steam. I'm surprised that's surprised anybody because if you've been following their PC releases, like every, like, 16 big game has been the shitty mobile version or some interpretation of it.

Now, there has been an argument online. People are like, it's not the mobile version. It's a different version. It's still bad. It's still a bad version of the game. It still has like... Like, it looks like badly adapted touchscreen UI. Just like all these clashing fonts and it's just every...

At least adventures of mana, they like, it some new graphics, whereas... Yeah. I think like they tried a little bit... I think what people really wanted out of that Steam version was a big screen version of the DS game with the new script and everything. Yeah. And the new content that you can play on, like, your TV, and instead they got a bad mobile version. That was a huge disappointment and, frankly, a real disservice to one of the best games ever made.

Yeah. Right. But the DS version is worth calling out because it is very good. It is the definitive version of Kronotrigger. That's something you can't often say about remit. You can rarely say that about remakes. Much better script. They really fixed frog.

Yeah, I mean, they didn't radically rewrite the script. They just kind of updated it. So it still had the warmth of Ted Woolsey's a localization, but expanded it a bit and made it a bit more, I don't know, a little cleaner, a little more detailed. But it plays really well. It sounds perfect. There's no slowdown. There are no glitches that I. I know of.

It's rock solid. There's some extra new content. The new content is garbage, but you don't have to play it. It's really redundant and repetitive and pointless. There's like these lizard caves or reptite caves. You can like do fetch quests in. It's really pointless. But it's there.

And it does at least give a place for the lost cut music track singing mountain a place to appear officially in the game. Yeah. So like a lost Yasunori Mitsuda. 16-bit game, or music piece, found a home. Yep. But, yeah, you can ignore all the bonus stuff. And then it also has the cutscenes that they added to the PlayStation game. They did add a little bit to kind of connected to Chrono Cross, giving you like, I guess

there's an ending, I'm trying to remember, an ending where you see Dalton, the goofy guy you beat up on the Blackbird in 12,000, AD, 12. B.C. 12,000, yeah. He, like, turns out to become the evil mastermind who kills all the characters in Crono Cross or something. So it's kind of pointless, but, you know, even with all that stuff, if you don't like it, the core game in the DS version is perfect.

Yep, yep. And if you just want the Super Nintendo version, they did eventually, although it did not seem like they would at the time, they did eventually release it on virtual console. Yeah, too bad it was only Wii virtual console, and you can't buy it anymore. Yep, pretty much. Yeah, well, where.

But as of today, as of this recording day, it's like led the final day. And by anything anymore, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think it's still available until Tuesday. You can still buy points until Tuesday. I think it's down. Yeah, I think it's actually down now. I thought it was March 27th.

It is March, I think it was today. March 25th right now. Yeah. In any case, I have it on my Wii U, so I can never get rid of it. Right, right, right. And you can never take it back to your Wii. Nope. Fuck it.

It's dead. I can't turn that thing on anymore. All right. So that wraps it up for Corona Tricker. Thanks everyone for coming in and traveling through time into the past to discuss this great RPG. Thanks everyone who wrote in whether we had time to read your letters or not. And thanks cool people at Square Soft back a long time ago who made this game for us to dote on. And I do have one last thing from the end of the 2007 episode of Retronauts.

When we talked about Chrono Trigger, we were still doing virtual selection in which back when virtual console seemed like a thing that Nintendo would support for a long time. Yeah, we picked out a game we wanted to see come back. And so just for fun, I actually wrote down what those games were so I can share them with you. Jeremy, this is 2007, by the way. Jeremy, you really wanted Bionic Commando for the N.S. Never happened. Never happened. There's some kind of weird issue there.

It's never going to happen. Ben Judd won't tell me what it is. Hitler's people won't approve it. What's that? Hitler's people want to prove it. They do have all the power now. They're notoriously. They're notoriously litigious, yeah.

Andrew Fister wanted a rad racer Never happened. Never happened. Never happened. Sharky for some reason used this segment to plug I want to be the guy, which had just come out. I guess one of his forum people had created it. Yeah. I think, isn't it the same guy, Kayan, who is working on, oh crap, I can't remember the name. It's a very, very overt Castlevania, classic Castlevania homage. I believe so,

yeah. Of course, when he did this, you know, want to be the guy in 2007 doing a retro-styled new video game was really weird. Yeah, it was crazy. And now it's literally every game that comes out. I wanted Secret of Mana on virtual console.

We got it. And we all, yeah, well, I mean, this was at that time when Square, if you asked them, like, will you ever put your games on virtual console? The response you got was, was, like, asking the guy on the street corner who he's yelling at. It was about that connected to, like, reality. Yeah, they were like, well, how

How do kids know how to use credit cards? I remember that one. Yes. Kids don't know how to use credit cards. You know, we would have to go find the source code for those games. You didn't have to find the source code for the games. All that kind of amazing stuff. And then a couple of years later, they were like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, you don't have to do that.

In fact, it's literally just pressing a button and we get free money. Yep. Yeah. And then what about Alice? Alice, we determined. Alice had a hard time with this question. Because she was too young to remember old games. she was too young for anything that she had played at the time.

I think Alice is like literally my age. I don't know why you guys think she's like 12 years old. Because she seems so young. Yeah. Even now she seems like a little kid. And then we all said and then Sharkey said that at some point we'd be doing a retrospective episode of retronauts and we'd all look back and laugh at how young Alice was at that time. I did that episode.

And we just did. So there we go. How about that? Yep. All right. Well, anyway, that has been a weird trip down memory lane. So thanks again, everyone. As usual, I'm Jeremy Parrish.

You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and at Retronauts.com. Retronauts itself is on the internet for you to download and listen to weekly. You can go to Retronauts.com or iTunes or whatever. You can also go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for $3 per month, you get all seven or eight episodes that we publish in a month for free. Well, no, it's not free because it's $3. But you get them a week early in a higher bit rate, so they sound nice, and without ads, so they don't have any interruptions that will annoy you. So that's great.

You should consider doing that. That's patreon.com slash retronauts. Kat, what about you? I'm on Twitter at the underscore catbot. Please consider checking out my day job, which is usgamer.net. We have all of the video game news and reviews and such. And I also host a podcast called Acts of the Blood God, which is our RPG podcast. I think I might have plugged it already.

where we talk about the reviews of the latest RPGs. I mean, we tend to take a little bit of a JRP bent, but we also, we love other RPGs as well. I was talking about Bard's Tale not too long ago. And we also do Let's Play, as with the most recent one, as of this recording being Cosmic Star Heroin. So come check us out,

subscribe on iTunes, and all that good stuff. I am Chris Kohler. You should buy my book about Final Fantasy Five. The book is titled Final Fantasy Five. Fritz from Bossified books. How about that? If you enjoyed this podcast, you should buy it. And Bob.

Oh, me. Hey, everybody. It's Bob Mackie. I do a lot of stuff in the podcast zone. I do retronauts, of course. But what I mainly live off of is the Talking Simpsons Network. And we do two major free podcasts on that network. That is Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons every Wednesday.

And our new podcast, What a Cartoon. Every week, we look at a different cartoon from a different series with the Talking Simpsons treatment. But if you go to our podcast, our Patreon at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons at the $5 level, a steal, if you ask me. You can get Talking Simpsons a week ahead of time with no ads. What a cartoon a week ahead of time with no ads. And also all of our Patreon exclusive content, including Talking Critic and Talking Futurama, those are exactly what they sound like.

And also all of our interviews that we do, all of our specials, Henry and I are super, super busy, and podcasting is our life now. We're so happy to do it. And so if you like hearing me talk about old stuff, you have, there's no shortage of that anywhere on the internet. All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll be back next Monday. with another big podcast, and on some Friday, maybe this Friday, maybe next Friday, with a tiny podcast.

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Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect and a man, police say acted as his lookout

have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.