Crono’s Ghost Is Haunting Your Phone

Chrono Trigger on the Super Nintendo is one of those games that imprinted itself so deep into my nervous system that I can still hear the overworld theme if I close my eyes. Young Crono, his improbable hair, his friends, a broken machine, and suddenly the entire timeline of the Earth is at stake—it sounds absurd summarized, but in execution it’s one of the most elegant, humane adventure games ever made. No other JRPG of that era wrapped time travel into something that felt genuinely earned. I’ve played it on four different platforms. I’ll play it on four more.

So when I heard that Masato Kato—who wrote much of Chrono Trigger’s scenario—and Yasunori Mitsuda, who composed its legendary soundtrack, had made a new game together, I paid attention. The result is Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space, a free-to-play mobile JRPG that wears its lineage openly: sympathetic young heroes, a plot that fractures across time, a battle system that rewards thinking over reflexes. A Kotaku writeup called it one of the few mobile JRPGs that doesn’t feel engineered to drain your wallet at every turn, which is either faint praise or the highest compliment the genre can receive right now.

At launch it was available in Japan, the US, Canada, South Korea, and parts of Southeast Asia—Europe had to wait. That wait turned out to be worth it. Mitsuda’s score alone, lush and unhurried the way only he can write, justifies the download. Whether the story reaches the heights of the work that made these two men famous is a different question. Nothing will. But as proof that the people who made Chrono Trigger are still out here thinking about time and loss and what it costs to save something—Another Eden is more than a nostalgia trip. It’s proof that the sensibility survived.