Chrono Trigger Happy

22 September 2026

Chrono Trigger is a great game but while playing it I can see the seams. This feels like a game where there just wants to be more time and room to let the beats hit and show the characters. The campfire scene is so good and I wish there was more stuff like that in here.

I got the "bad ending" to Lucca's vignette and was so irritated and upset by it that I went back and redid the entire scene after looking it up (I couldn't figure out that they literally wanted me to input it with the buttons). I connected with this moment and this character so completely: just like Lucca, I rewound time to fix that tragedy.

The whole party sitting around a campfire in the forest at night — Everyone is here, all at once, for once.

There's definitely room to add this stuff in. Chrono Trigger isn't an overstuffed ninety hour odyssey. It's brief and that's one of its strengths, it (mostly) doesn't waste your time. The characters exude personality, their silhouettes are so clear and crisp you can click with them very quickly.

It does a lot with that economy of time, but we can trade some of those instances where it runs overlong and instead get some more character beats. Give me more of these characters! Chrono Trigger is so trim that if we added a couple hours to the run time that time wouldn't feel bloated, I'd just feel like I got a more decadent and full meal.

And some of this additional characterization exists already! I wish the party was treated as more present. You can swap them out freely, which is a surprising and wonderful quality of life thing for a game of its time period (100% I expected to have to go back to the end of time every time I wanted to switch) but let's just treat them all as there.

There are so many cool character moments in the story but you only get to see how the current party reacts and I wanted to see more of that. I was dying for a fourth party member here just to be able to fit all my favorites in. Poor Frog riding the bench while Ayla and Robo soak up all the screen time.

Crono, Ayla and Robo walking through the prehistoric jungle — The Hat canonical party.

I get that is a "replay the game to see" thing and that made sense when it came out and this was someone's only game until next Christmas and so they were going to replay it to death, but I'm an adult. Realistically, forcing me to replay the entire game to get a few scraps of alternate dialogue is the actual bloat.

Also under the "my time is valuable" umbrella, Chrono Trigger could also point the player better, there were a number of instances where you just had to keep talking to everyone until the correct person gave you the next breadcrumb as to where to go. That's just wasted time that we could be doing something interesting with instead of letting me flounder.

Some of the fat we could trim is in the Tyranno Lair or the Black Omen, the end of which I was ready to have fewer encounters. They feel long out of a sense of obligation to build to something more grueling and epic as the game builds toward the climax, not out of a fun maximization way. I would have quit the Tyranno Lair if not for the ability to use save states to wind back before the pitfalls to avoid doing the same fights over and over. It's not cheating, it's a game about time travel. I'm method role playing.

Taking some additional breaks would give the game more of a cadence. The comparison is obvious due to the Toriyama connection, but Dragon Quest does this really well, settling into a nice rhythm of go to place, do thing, get a beat.

Overall, Chrono Trigger is an all timer, everyone knows this. It's one that largely holds up in the modern era and that in and of itself is a gigantic accomplishment. The showbiz saying is to always leave the audience wanting more and Chrono Trigger does that a bit too well.