
It isn't often that we review classic games, but Nick Fortugno's, experience inspired me to give Chrono Trigger a replay. I'm glad I did, because I was one of those cliche'd individuals that this game made an impression on, and on an adult replay I've gained a lot of perspective on mastery of craft. CT is perhaps the genre king of Japanese Role-playing Games (the queen was not so much a game as a moment: Celes' attempted suicide in Final Fantasy VI). It gains this title for three reasons: first it capture the supreme essence of jRPG aesthetics with Akira Toriyama's character designs combined with Square's then budding sense of interface polish, secondly its narrative made use of archtypes in a way that perhaps seems cliche at first (as Nick pointed out skeptically when starting the game) but then deepens to a psychodrama of cuasation that would make Carl Jung want to write an analysis, and three it took the trite grind of jRPG combat and made it interesting through a handful of simple variations that in combination yield distinct boss fights all the way to the Lavos Core.






















