Overview
Chrono Trigger is a role-playing game developed and published by Square, released in 1995 on the Super Nintendo. It was designed by a team that notably brought together Hironobu Sakaguchi (Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest) and Akira Toriyama on character design. I played the PC version.
Story and world
It all starts at the Millennial Fair, where Crono meets a young girl, Marle. A demonstration of his friend Lucca's teleporter goes wrong and Marle vanishes into a time rift: Crono sets off to find her, and that is the starting point of a journey across several eras.
The story of this game is incredible. There is a great atmosphere across the various environments you travel through from one era to the next, and the game has several endings.
Gameplay
Its battle system is incredible for its time: no random encounters, enemies are visible and a fight only starts if you get close to them. Battles rely on the ATB (Active Time Battle) gauge and on techs, which characters can combine with each other.
Graphics and music
The graphics have aged pretty well in my opinion.
On the downside, the PC port is fairly lazy: you literally have to change Windows settings to get the numbers to display correctly (I no longer remember whether it was the language or the time zone that had to be adjusted, but I find it terrible for a big company like Square to ship ports like that).
Verdict
I discovered this game quite late. I was not expecting much and I was pleasantly surprised, to be completely honest. I thought the fact that it is an old game would put me off, but not at all.