I wanna hold hands with somebody

Chrono Triggercompleted

I dislike how old school jrpgs expect you to have all the time in the world to just talk to everyone until you happen to talk to the right person to advance the plot.

Other than that standard old school game lack of handholding I'm really enjoying it right now.

I do wish it was easier to look through all the techs, it's a lot of scrolling through.

I have been playing through a lot of this game. It's pretty fun. I might be playing it too quickly to properly digest all of the reasons why I like it. I've been trying to be more mindful and not write as many notes during.

Some gripes. I really think that the UI is a little bit in my way. Having the stuff on the second screen is better than having it on the main screen. I tried classic settings because I felt like I couldn't pay attention to what was happening on the screen because I was trying to pick my character's stuff at the same time. I was just missing stuff that was going on there so I thought classic would help me do both. It's so cramped.

The dinosaur dungeon takes too long and there are just too many fucking fights. This thing literally broke me until I realized that I could save scum because what would happen is you fall through the floor and then you have to refight the things that you just fought. It's like, why? It's like, oh I can just reload the save state before I do all the button pressing and then I won't fall through the floor.

This has killed every other game for me today though. I did feel a pang to play a little bit of Metroid Dread but I was like, let's just keep grinding on this.

Thoughts about characters? Well I like most of them. They all have their own charm and I think that's partially just because there are fewer of them. (I'm gonna keep comparing this to Final Fantasy VI just because they're both super great SNES JRPGs and VI is the one I played recently and bounced off hard.) But part of the issue that I had with Six is that there are so many party members that I'm supposed to care about and then they just keep going in and out of the party. It's just hard to build an attachment and I find that very frustrating about JRPGs.

For the most part people stay. You get to keep at least your core three: Chrono, Marle, and Lucca. Then Robo stays as soon as you get him too. Alya and Frog dip in and out but it doesn't feel like forever between it. I do really wish you could play with the fourth party member although I wouldn't be able to juggle the ATB effectively at that point.

Maybe I should try the wait mode or a slower game speed but that seems also worse in it's own way (making combats take longer).

One thing I do love about these older games is that you can finish them a lot faster, as we've seen with the Metroids and this game. I am finishing games more quickly than I can write post-mortems about it though.