The Greatest Series That Time Forgot

During the making of the two-part Final Fantasy VII retrospective, I started getting into the Chrono series again. Chrono Trigger for the SNES is on my shortlist for favorite JRPG of all time. Between its unforgettable soundtrack, immense and memorable world you could discover in six unique eras, and its fresh and addictive take on combat, I loved every minute of it.

Many themes and concepts from Trigger were borrowed in later Square games including FFVII. And so I decided to make a concise retrospective video covering the three games in the series, as well as it's elusive follow-up that never happened. I hope you all will enjoy this video currently scheduled for release this weekend (if I pull enough late nights of editing).

It's coming along nicely, I just cut the audio and picked out music for it, I can't wait to show it to you! Here is the script in full for my patrons only.

-------------------

 Not a waking hour out of every day goes by that we ignore time -- whether it’s going too slow, how we need more of it, or how we will organize it better to improve our future. It’s no mystery then that the manipulation and dilation of time has been such a popular theme in science fiction and fantasy. From ‘The Time Machine’ to ‘Interstellar’, we’ve been fascinated with the idea for over a century.

Chrono Trigger

Many video games have tackled this idea, but in 1995, SquareSoft’s Chrono Trigger likely offered the most compelling time travel in any game to date, it was not only tied into the narrative, but also into the gameplay itself from the ground up. Many characters, locations and items are inextricably tied to other eras in time. There are six vastly different versions of the world, and as you visit each of them you’ll see the geological, political and population shifts throughout the years, from the tribal beginnings of prehistoria, to the apocalyptic ruins of the far future. It’s very rare to see a world within a game which you can discover and interact with in such a vast timeline as in Chrono Trigger.

From averting a tragedy in the Middle Ages, then traveling back to present time to witness their family’s success; to replanting an entire forest and watching it grow through the centuries. Yes, these are only scripted quests pre-set to happen when triggered, but the beautiful and immersive way the game presents these happenings, it’s just so compelling.

From the charming 16-bit pixel art based on work by Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball fame), state-of-the-art combat design by Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yoshinori Kitase and other Final Fantasy veteran designers, and the mesmerizing soundtrack by legends Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda -- one of the greatest scores ever composed -- and is regularly covered and remixed to this very day. The game’s sheer brilliance rivaled its more popular sibling Final Fantasy in terms of quality in every aspect.

Trigger differentiates itself from other Japanese RPGs at the time through having a small roster of playable characters, and introduced the “Tech System”, which allowed for many different solo abilities, as well as Double and Triple Techs (abilities performed by two or three unique character combos). This incentivized party experimentation to discover the dozens and dozens of Techs and their effects.

Skipping random encounters and opting for on-screen monsters roaming around, Chrono Trigger discarded the notion that you had to keep the “battle” and “field” scenes separate. Specific to this game was the importance of character and enemy placement. Timing actions to line up enemies in a beam attack, or waiting until enemies cluster up before performing a radius-based attack was another layer to the standard JRPG fare and it was incredibly rewarding.

Overall, Chrono Trigger remains today one of the best examples out of a golden age of console role playing games in terms of game mechanics, charm, music and a memorable storyline. It’s a wonder, then, that we never got another game set in the same world to this day. Well, not exactly.

Radical Dreamers

1996 saw a spiritual follow-up to Chrono Trigger in the form of a Super Famicom (SNES) visual novel. Never released outside of Japan, Radical Dreamers is an obtuse, abstract game that follows Serge, Kid and Lynx and a heist for the Frozen Flame, and has minor nods to Chrono Trigger later in the story, and little to do with time travel.

The music was dark, atmospheric and memorable, and the graphics were full-screen works of pixel art which were stark, vignetted in black and haunting. Combined with text-based, choose-your-own-adventure-style gameplay, it was a sharp departure from the traditional RPG roots of the series. It was explained later that Radical Dreamers started out as its own, brand-new storyline and franchise, and only later began to tie its story into one of Chrono Trigger’s plots. Which makes a lot of sense on how disarrayed the series got from this point on.

You ever had a dream, with fantastic visions, colorful people and epic events and drama along the way, but when you tell your friends or family about it the next day, they don’t share the enthusiasm you had when you were living it? Ironically, that’s what Radical Dreamers feels like. Designer Masato Kato had a very personal vision of the story he formed in his mind, and he meticulously crafted it into what really amounts to more of an interactive storyboard than a game, even admitting personally that he felt the game wasn’t finished.

Chrono Cross

A true RPG sequel landed in 1999, called Chrono Cross. Acting as a retelling and expansion upon Radical Dreamers’ story, it was a drastic visual departure from the prior two games, eschewing the charming pixel art of Trigger, and the dark and moody atmosphere of Dreamers, the game takes on an entirely new world with a distinct tropical island aesthetic -- sunny skies, bright blue coastlines and nearly everything else. From the coral-esque land formations to seashell-like structures and cabana coastal villages. You can clearly see the artful work they put into each and every scene, with gorgeous use of color, contrast and lighting to create some truly enchanting environments that are still breathtaking today.

Mitsuda returned as composer, crafting a thoroughly enchanting score -- from the very first note into the game’s intro sequence, you knew you were in for something special. Mystical woodwinds, thunderous guitar riffs accented by astounding cello solos in some tracks, with gentle acoustical plucks and harps easing you into calmer moments in others. And who could forget the fantastic rock song concert you help inspire midway through the game? The audial atmosphere of Cross, like Trigger and Dreamers before it, is unsurpassed and unforgettable.

Writing dialogue for the immense cast of 45 playable characters led to the development of the innovative Accent System -- this allowed for the writing of a single, standard dialogue script which was then translated on the fly with each character’s accent and speech patterns. For example, the line “Hello, how are you?" could become, "Hey mate, how are ya?" if spoken by Kid.

The sheer volume of characters, plots and antagonists may have inspired the game’s weaker narrative and character design. With exceptions, many of the characters were bland or annoying, to say nothing of the convoluted plot -- like something out of a Hideo Kojima game. As compared to the simple but gripping drive of Trigger: Stop the end of the world in the future by going to the past and eliminating the parasite known as Lavos; Cross’s storyline features dimensional travel, body switching, a parallel universe filled with dragons, brainwashing, a devourer of time itself, a Dragon God, a fragment of Lavos with dimension-altering power, a cross-dimensional time research facility and a malevolent artificial intelligence which governs the destiny of the world. Pretty straightforward, right guys?

I can respect the sheer ambition they were going for in the game’s storyline, but I think they might have shot for perhaps too grand a scope for what they were willing to truly explore at a consumable pace. Many segments hold up progression with long stretches of exposition to keep the players somewhat genned in on what’s going on.

Despite the game’s amazing aesthetic and the curious deckbuilding-like mechanics of the battle system, I didn’t jive with the game’s tenuous connections to Chrono Trigger, virtually absent until a few references late into the game. Gone is any practical use of time travel, Guardia, or the iconic combat systems of the original game. Some aspects of Cross’s story were interesting though, such as the Dead Sea -- a place frozen in time. This location explored a fascinating concept, where the drive to change the past would be nullified by retroactively making that change, thus causing the original timeline to recur. A paradox that is insolvable.

If this game had been called something like “Dimension Cross”, with no illusion of a substantial connection to Trigger, I would have far fewer qualms with it. As many have said, Chrono Cross is a mediocre sequel, but a great game on its own merits.

Chrono Break

Despite landing better reviews and ratings than even the now classic Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Cross, though successful, sold less copies than its SNES predecessor, to say nothing of it’s contemporaries in the Final Fantasy series.

When a game like Chrono Cross has a similar budget to Final Fantasy VII or VIII for the same asking price, and ships about a 7th of the copies, that is a hard sell for a sequel to business owners.

Rumors of a follow-up to Trigger and Cross circulated for years. This reached a boiling point in 2001 when Square registered two trademarks that seemed impossible not to be the name of the anticipated sequel. Chrono Break (as in “destroy”) in the US, and Chrono Brake (as in “slow down”) in Japan. Maybe the proofreader was out that day and this was simply a typo, but it is curious as to which was to be the actual title, as they mean very different things.

Little information about “Break” exists: leaks, hints in interviews and early design concepts of questionable validity.

As Final Fantasy creator and former VP of Square, Hironobu Sakaguchi said ten years after he left the company, "We wanted to continue it as a series, but — and I think the statute of limitations has passed and expired, so I think I'm okay saying this — but we just didn't see eye-to-eye with management, and so I went and fought for it, and I officially lost the battle."

Though series writer and director Masato Kato had expressed interest in returning to the series, much of the “dream team” had left Square to work on their own projects like Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, Xenosaga and Xenoblade. Years later now, those trademarks have long expired, and hope faded that the beloved RPG series would return.

But in the last few years it seems today’s Square Enix has been more open minded on what we want to receive. Final Fantasy VII is getting a remake. We’re being asked what games we want to come back. Is the time ripe for a revival of the Chrono series in the future? Who can say, but if it does, it’s most likely it will be a brand new concept, title and development by a new team.

Every second that ticks by with no announcement of a follow-up to one of my favorite games ever made is a second too long. But perhaps with enough community demand and maybe a few more videos like this one, we can help make this series into a true trilogy, only time will tell.