Chrono Trigger
Released in 1995, Chrono Trigger was a memorable game for me; although I played it on an emulator. For me to remember characters from so long ago is very unusual, so I thought I'd give it another go now that it's on Steam. On the whole, I can recommend playing it (if you like JRPGs, which normally I don't). It's got some great bits, and it's got some annoying downsides. You play as a random guy who meets a princess, falls through a time portal and finds himself having to save the world from a giant fire tortoise by messing in different time periods. This version has a "speed up combat" mode which is what let me play it for so long (I would have played Sea of Stars for longer if that had it).
Pros
- Characters are memorable. Even 20 years later I remembered what I had called my team members the first time I played the game
- The artwork of the characters is really nice. Environments are basic though (but probably normal for a SNES game)
- Characters learn new spells over time, and can combo with each other
- You get magic spells... for a completely arbitrary reason. Pretty much just a few hours into the game, someone goes "Oh hey, also you can learn magic! Here you go!"
- This version contains an auto battle option that speeds up combat. That's great, because the combat is a lot less interesting than I remember and I definitely would have dropped it a lot earlier if I had to grind all the battles manually
- The UI has been improved from the original. It still feels clunky, but it's a lot better than the original, without feeling immersion breaking.
- Nice music
- Interesting places to visit
- I imagine the time travelling was probably fairly innovative at the time
Cons
- The “High Resolution” graphics option seems to be some kind of joke. It’s literally just a blur filter that looks awful. Thankfully the original option looks crisp and really nice.
- As with all games of this era, there’s no quest log or journal to tell you where to go next, so if you forget where to go (or can't work it out) you either have to look up a walkthrough or spend hours walking in circles
- There's a fair bit of backtracking, which is tedious at the beginning where you have to walk everywhere and fight your way through some caves again
- Any “?” object like a save point or vent, often doesn’t respond to interaction in this Steam port. Depending on context, you have to mash the button many times to get it to do anything
- Apart from bosses, normal enemy combat is no challenge and gets old really quickly
- Towards the end of the game, it suddenly opens up and goes "Now you can fly anywhere in the world, in any time period. Here are some vague clues of where you could go". At that point I lost interest and dropped it, because I found myself having to Google where to go all the time. It was actually better when the game was on rails and had a single story thread to follow.