Chrono Trigger

I’ve played Chrono Trigger a few times, but always stopped close to the end, this time I’m a little more determined to complete it. Also notable that I’m playing this after FF16 in an attempt to restore my faith in humanity – pretty much every section below could be prefixed with “Wow, I’m amazed at how much better this is compared to FF16”.

World

CT feels like going on an adventure – all the places, times, factions, and characters feel distinct. I always want to see what’s around the next corner.

Combat Gameplay

• Most fights are very simple, I appreciate the “fast-forward and just hit things until dead” auto-battle feature to get them out of the way ASAP.
• Once you get more than 3 characters, there are interesting decisions to be made about which characters to keep in your party at any given time
• Different characters have unique abilities
• Different combinations of characters have unique combo-abilities
• Some enemies are immune to physical attacks
• Some will counter magical attacks
• Some will attack anything (enemy or ally!) which moves
• Some have multiple parts, where destroying eg specific limbs will change the enemy’s moveset
• There are enemies with wooden weapons, and if you use fire the weapons will burn
• Attacks can have a single target, a line, an area, or come in a few other shapes, which mean “what move is best for this situation?” can depend on where the allies and enemies are standing
  • Unfortunately there’s no way to control where enemies or allies are standing
• Weapons and armour suffer from “they only have a single stat, which increases linearly through the game”
  • there is always one strictly best option at any time.
  • With armour you do get to decide which party member should wear the new shiny stuff and which should have hand-me-downs.
  • Accessories have unique perks

Non-combat gameplay

Exploration is fun; at a minimum there are small items and bits of lore all over the place. There are small but amusing mini-games all over the place.

You can adopt cats (make sure to keep a stock of cat food).

Characters

I liked almost all of them. When given the choice of which to have in my party, I was torn because they are all useful and fun.

Story

I laughed, I cried, I spoke to random NPCs to get more into the world.

Airship

Hell yeah.

Also: Air Dinosaurs.

Other

I ended up checking a walkthrough a few times because there was no indication of where to go next

The final act got quite grindy, the final dungeon being a long series of battles with very little of the interesting bits mentioned earlier D:

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2025-05-22 00:00:00 -0500