Chrono Trigger

i fuggin fit u rite noa u lil bich let's get it on

They took the shitstain that was "turn based JRPG combat" and fixed it. Then nobody ever copied it for some fucked up reason, which is why Chrono Trigger is still considered the best ever made.

HA. That game sucks ass, the story is stupid, the gimmick "platforming" is shit, and it caters to fucking casual morons. Next you are going to tell me Earthdicks is good.

Agreeing with what other anons said, but I think it was mostly from the fact that you could really use everyone and you had to swap characters out for different sections. There were a bunch of hidden things in the game without being stupid like, play this flute on this one random square.
It made me really care about the characters in a way, like I was for sure worried even before the ending with Robo possibly being erased by going to a changed future.
I also liked the fact that I didnt feel like I had to constantly be grinding. I played Dragon Quest 1 recently and that is all you do in the game is grind, Chrono Trigger was good about if you fought everything you were fairly balanced for the current stage.

Smuganimegirl.png

The only thing Chrono Trigger has is the endings but most of them were mediocre and the tech system.

I like the Mario RPGs as much as the next guy, but you're a fucking retard.

the multiple endings is the only good part of that game
without it, it's just another forgettable shitty jrpg

This sounds really gay but in a lot of ways it was the closest you could get to an interactive anime that was also a game during the SNES era. The amount of art and animated assets within the game solidifed that for me, but what really made the game like no other was the pacing of the game. It sold you on the presentation and it still looks good today. The only tradeoff and probably what made it extremely accessible was that it wasn't a complex RPG even by JRPG standards. The characters were always hilariously broken and so by default this let the designers focus on other things, which they definitely did, like making the plot and execution of the scenes the focus. If you really think about it, Chrono Trigger succeeded in every single way that most developers today seek to perfect where the gameplay comes second and the presentation comes first. And even that isn't a detriment to the gameplay, it just isn't lousy. It rode that line so perfectly that back then I didn't even notice it. All I knew for sure is that I loved it way more than FFIII (VI).

It exceeded in an area that very few devs even think about: the pacing. From the get go it's just one high note after another after another, with little to no slowing down in between.

Another reason is that there is nothing useless or unnecessary about it, nothing that was put there "just because". Even the optional stuff contributes significantly to the overall game. Every individual aspect, while not that impressive on it's own, compliments all the other aspects so well it doesn't even matter. It's a perfect example of game where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.

TL;DR: It's lean and very well paced.

Many factors.

>Went off the rails compared to typical RPGs of the era. For example, the MC Crono can die and you can leave him dead for the rest of the story

It's been probably 20 years since I played it but I was taken back by the overall quality of the title. Everything from music to story was great. It was my favorite RPG for many years. I honestly hope they remaster it because I can't remember nearly a damn thing about it. Same for Xenogears. Yet for some reason I can remember nearly everything about Parasite Eve 1 and Saga Frontier 1.

It sucks getting old, but if you never threw out your classics, you'll get to play them all over again for the first time.

Speaking of broken…

DS translation is better than the SNES translation.

It really is astounding how many amazing worlds and characters are thrown at you throughout the game. So many of them are able to get you extremely immersed in the game in a way that other games are lucky to do once in the entire game. The music and graphics help a lot, of course.

Marle.

Best healer, especially paired with Frog. Also gets Haste.

Not significantly better. It's cutesy and fun and great and memorably but not on par with CT.

No grinding is huge.

CT's story is miles ahead of almost every game out there. I mean, they took the "an ancient evil" cliche and made it interesting.

Or you could go with Ayla + Frog, still get great healing and do a metric fuckton of dmg which doesn't involve on taking a few minutes to put up haste on everyone while healing.

The sequel was the better game

It basically did things right. There was little to no grinding. Enemies' position on the map, as well as your own in rare cases, mattered, although that concept didn't get nearly explored far enough. All the characters hard enough variety and uniqueness, and the tech system made combination mix matching better. Control scheme was "fluid" outside of combat instead of the grid based movements a lof of rpgs had. Story was pretty gewd, and seeing the effects of time travel was pretty fun. Again though, didn't get nearly explored.

I wished they did a true sequel that actually expanded on these things. Trigger was too short, and even though the multiple endings encouraged replays they didn't really make that big of a difference. You would think, with all the time looping, they would make a better effort to make it noticeable that your previous play through actually had an impact when the cycle started over again.

Sequel had better concepts for both plot and game mechanics, but it poorly executed all of them.
The "combo system" for attacks was nice, but the magic system was worthless. I get what they where trying to do with it, but unless you had a specific strategy maybe that was the point? you where always better off just hitting things blindly. Summons where the worse offender.

Decent to good characters going through decent to fucking cool settings. The time travel was done pretty neat as well. The 10,000 B.C. setting was fantastic and I loved it. Leaving robobro to plant trees for a bunch of years was cool. Gameplay was for people who wanted to play rpgs but didn't like turn based combat.

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I'm not sure if there's any merit to this, or if it's just fan wank, but this is a pretty in depth analysis of the game for those autistic enough to read through it: thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_CT_1.html

What are your recommendations instead then?

There's a funny paradox though in Chrono Trigger, where the robot thing decided to stay in the past to grow trees or something. Later in the game, he joined you again but if go back to the past with him in the party, the previous robot still there planting trees.

Another thing I like about Chrono Trigger that rarely done in games is that theres multiple ending and multiple way of dealing the final boss

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Like said, you can't push too much of those because the plotholes become too apparent, which was I guess the whole point of CC script. And while I agree that it was wobbly on some stuff (the wall of texts at Opassa beach before the final fight, and the whole "Xenogears disc 2" feeling on sub-chararacters arcs), it was extremely entertaining to see a writer lash out at his own work like this. I haven't explored a place as intense as the Dead Sea since then; I still shiver thinking about some of the sceneries or monsters.

That guy's essays are the absolute tits, though.

This thread covers a lot of it, but there's also the highly unusual story for a JRPG. It plays out more like a road trip then one big story building up to the end boss, who is almost an afterthought in terms of motivation, doubly so with time travel removing all sense of a ticking clock. This incredibly loose structure lets it explore the characters and world more then most in the genre and it just has fun with it.

FF6 did a similar thing, only it was traditional for first half of the game before going into the completely character driven post-apocalyptic second half.

Chrono Trigger is a good game but it is far from the best at anything.

Even on its own, its piss easy and many spells are absolutely useless.

I want to fuck Ayla.

Many people are also dumbasses that likewise overrate other mediocre RPGs to levels they don't really deserve, though honestly Chrono Trigger is a decent RPG it is not some pinnacle. It's incredibly easy, with a simple plot, and simple characters. Its main advantages are looking good, having a fun battle system, having multiple endings, and a unique setting.

New Game + is also a completely wasted feature on the game since it's so fucking easy on a brand new game that starting over with OP characters holds very little value. Why add such a feature without adding in incredibly tough optional bosses/areas? And no, fighting Lavos solo or early is not much of a challenge.

I agree, the locations were so great I wish we could have explored 1999 AD so that we could actually see what we were saving.

I tried to play it and was bored after 2 hours to death. It's as generic as you can get, except for shitty toriyama's faces.

kys

This. Modern JRPGs have a hard on for making you sit through hours of introduction story and tutorial fights before letting the player do anything. Even games people put on a pedastal, like Trails of Cold Steel, take WAY too long to get going. Chrono Trigger got to the point within the first hour, and there was no hand holding or long winded character drama.

Gonna vouch for here; I only played it when it came out on DS and loved it. It's definitely up there with FF6, which I first played on GBA

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Sometimes things are just well written and made to be memorable. Some games I have fond memories of aren't even that old. I'm in love with New Vegas, do you think I just have nostalgia for a 6 year old game, or could it be I genuinely enjoyed it?

Gonna vouch for here; I only played it when it came out on DS and loved it. It's definitely up there with FF6, which I first played on GBA.

Sometimes things are just well written and made to be memorable. Some games I have fond memories of aren't even that old. I'm in love with New Vegas, do you think I just have nostalgia for a 6 year old game, or could it be I genuinely enjoyed it?

Fun fighting shit, godtier music and an interesting setting.
Plus with all the endings and ways to fuck around with them you got plenty to do. I like it.

6 years is enough for nostalgia, you can be nostalgic about yesterday

So you people legitimately think it's impossible to just simply enjoy something?

In that case, wouldn't nostalgia just mean you liked something at all? Are you condemning fun? Sometimes I forget where I am

It had tried a lot of great things that should have become a common thing for the genre, but somehow didn't, or at least not until recently (e.g. fights happening right on the scene).

Well OBVIOUSLY adding a more diverse cast, did you notice all characters are CIS white people? Only a frog-kin and a robot-kin, are you kidding me?!
Every female character is sexualized, just look at Ayla, such fat shaming in this game.
Add voice acting in cutscenes, the plot is WAAY too complicated already to have to read it, and some QTEs to make more dinamic story telling.
Get rid of grinding, this is the game with the highest amount of grinding I've ever played!!! The other 3 had zero to little grinding. Even better, get rid of all minor enemies and make all bosses a QTE fight.
Get rid of those LAME 2d graphics it's 2016, lmao.
And last, make all alternative endings a DLC so you can choose from a menu with ending you want. How am I supposed to to know where To go to unlock every one of them? Japanese devs are so entitled.

I could see something like this as a legitimate post on neofag.

Terranigma easily rivals Chrono Trigger, although the PAL translation fucks it pretty bad.

Chrono Trigger's hardly even the best JRPG of the 90s. Wild Arms I, Suikoden II, Phantasy Star IV, Lufia II, and Terranigma were better.

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That's so last year, in the current year you need a "skip gameplay" button to enjoy all those professionally acted and choreographed cutscenes.

lol you first buddy.

And they are mistaken. I agree that Chrono Trigger is wonderful, but I must say

PANZER DRAGOON SAGA

is the peak of the genre. People ignore it because it's a rare game for a console that was a flop, but it's something truly special:

* It had a very distinct European inspiration – Jean Giraud's Arzach.

* It was developed by a team that had produced nothing but rail shooters, so the combat is very different from a traditional RPG. It's fast and intense, and there's almost no grinding, so you never get bored.

* The cast of characters is small, and there are few non-combat locations. You play as just one guy (and his flying mount), rather than a group. So you really get this feeling of isolation in a hostile world. Just like Arzach.

* The music is wonderful and eerie. youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1F7036D92F389DF3

* They squeezed some excellent graphics out of a machine that's notoriously tricky and underpowered at 3D.

It was obviously balanced towards having Chrono being a physical character with one strong, expensive magic attack. Thankfully, games back then let you mess with their own assumptions, unlike being the balance-focused borefests of today.

I prefer this one. It was always my favorite tune in CC.

This is blatant b8, right?
If you honestly had such a bad time with CT, I apologize.
I played (and finished) it for the first time about a month and a half ago or so, and its one of my favorite RPGs ever now. Though I did play the DS version.
How'd you get bored of it so quickly?

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The quads say it all.

ARE YOU MY NIGGA? YOU ARE MY FUCKING NIGGA, NIGGA.

PANZER DRAGOON SAGA IS THE FUCKING SHIT AND THE BEST JRPG OF ALL TIME. EVERYONE ELSE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE ARE FUCKING KIKES SUCKING ON SQUARE ENIX NIGGER FAGGOT JEW KIKE DICK.

SQUARE THESE DAYS IS OBVIOUSLY FUCKING SHIT NOW AND THEY WILL NEVER MAKE GOOD GAMES AGAIN. FUCK, I WISH SEGA NEVER LOST THE SOURCE CODE TO THIS GAME

HOLY FUCK YOU ARE MY WAIFU. IF YOU ARE A TRAP YOU ARE MY TRAP WAIFU AND I WILL STROKE YOUR FEMININE DICK, HOLY FUCK. YOU SHOULD BE MY WAIFU WHO FUCKING HATES NIGGERS AND JEWS.

I LOVE YOU FAM

FUCK

Publishers don't care about making good games anymore, they care about making gimmick meme games and annually released rehashes. Because that's what sells. If a developer actually tries to make a masterpiece today they get fired and have their games turned into pachinko.

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Because of a few reasons.
Game is almost on rails, you can pretty much walk through the game and never once be under leveled as all the fights that you'll ever need to be the correct level are mandatory on the way.
But you can still go other places early, sometimes to be locked out by something but the option is still there which is what people like.

This means there's a constant pace throughout the game and not a slog, you're always getting higher EXP yields and leveling moderately fast while also getting AP/TP I forgot what it's called that's giving you better and better skills and then combo skills that add that extra little bit onto the combat.

The story is also constantly moving, there's nothing like "hey the meteor is coming, this is the perfect time to get a golden Chocobo" you get out bed, go past, save a queen, discover the end of the world, learn magic from a being beyond time, meet the legendary hero and fight the demon king along side him and this all happens one after another pretty fast when compared to other RPG's.

The only time the game ever opens up to let you do other stuff that in the story finishes arks that characters had or seals the deal in timelines to keep them safe, you never even have to do them, it's all optional content that offers added things to do which adds for those who are still interested in the game (with the PS1 version adding more and the DS version adding even more after that)

TL:DR
Never a need to grind, constant movement of the plot and a fast progression in stats to keep what skills you're using interesting, combat that never moves to another screen making the combat look more interesting.

he probably couldn't beat yakra