Nobody’s Made a Better One

Twenty-three years on the clock, and the honest answer is still the same: nobody has made a better JRPG than Chrono Trigger. Not for lack of trying. The genre has produced remarkable things since 1995—whole studios have spent entire careers in pursuit of something comparable—but the original keeps holding. A kid named Crono, a princess, a robot, a frog, and the end of time as both destination and starting point. It sounds like a pitch document written by someone who had never played a video game. It plays like it was designed by people who understood games better than anyone alive.

They were, by any standard, exactly that. The project was handed to what Square called a dream team: Hironobu Sakaguchi, who built Final Fantasy; Yuji Horii, who created Dragon Quest; and Akira Toriyama, who drew Dragon Ball. Three people who had separately defined Japanese role-playing games collaborating on one project. The result was a time-travel RPG with no random encounters, a multi-ending structure years ahead of its time, and characters who managed to feel genuinely human within the constraints of 16-bit pixel art.

I keep it alongside Secret of Mana, Earthbound, and Terranigma in my private canon of SNES RPGs that changed what I thought games could do. These aren’t nostalgia objects. They’re benchmarks. Everything else gets measured against them, and most things don’t measure up.

There have been ports—PlayStation, Nintendo DS, iPhone—each with its own compromises. The purist position is correct: an original cartridge, the US version, a CRT. The pixel art was made for scan lines and a quality of soft blur that no flat screen faithfully reproduces. But Chrono Trigger is now on PC, available on Steam for around fifteen euros. An imperfect delivery mechanism for an irreplaceable game. I’ve made worse compromises.