CoN 25th Anniversary: 1997-2022
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Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger

No! NO WAY! I refuse to believe it!!

This… this can't be the way the world ends…

Crono… there's only one thing we can do!

We must change history!

Introduced by  Tiddles
Site Developer

Believe it or not, Square has actually produced a few games that don’t fall underneath the Final Fantasy banner. You’d be forgiven for not realising as much, since many of them are one-offs that sink into relative obscurity fairly quickly, and there are certainly fewer fansites dedicated to them across the Web than to their principal cash cow.

Chrono Trigger is incontestably the best known of these games, and with good reason. It builds on the basic Final Fantasy mostly-turn-based battle formula by giving you the ability to combine attacks between your teammates, which makes for interesting party selection, and shows most enemies on screen before battling them, allowing you to skip fights entirely in many cases — no more tedious, unbidden random battles here. Wandering the world has a new twist, too — while it’s technically a spoiler if you’ve played for less than three minutes, you probably guessed from the name that there’s time travel involved here, your command over which only increases as the game continues.

Like its contemporaries Final Fantasy VI and Seiken Densetsu 3, Chrono Trigger takes another stab at the non-linearity Square often seems to eschew, this time by providing a multitude of optional quests to take on late in the game. I should point out, though, that technically, rather a lot of the game is "optional", in the sense that you can choose to fight the final boss before you’ve even discovered all the different eras you can travel to. Taking on this challenge at various points in the game will yield a number of alternative endings to amuse and entertain you, but unless you’re a masochist or an extreme power-leveller, most of these are likely to be out of your reach with the abilities of your party early in the game. Luckily for you, Square thought to include a “New Game Plus” feature that allows you to start a new game with (almost) all your accumulated treasure and power from a previously completed game.

Coupled with a typically entertaining plot from Square (if not more so than usual) this turns out to be a tremendous amount of fun. We should also mention that this is also one of Square’s shorter games, but combined with the multiple endings and New Game Plus as mentioned above, this does lead to an increase in replayability. You might also recognise some elements that may have inspired later Final Fantasies — we’re down to three characters in the party, and of course, we’re all familiar with the concept of spiky-haired heroes and white-maned pseudo-villains.

CoN has a bit of a history with this game, too. After playing it in 2001, I was surprised to find few websites dedicated to the game, and set out to produce my own. That never went anywhere, but parts of it are finally recycled in this CoN guide. Hey, maybe we’ll show you the original site’s psychedelic background some day. Or maybe we won’t. In any case, while there are now a multitude of guides for Chrono Trigger throughout the Web, we hope this guide will provide anything you need for your expedition through time, whether it’s on the newfangled DS version, the typically slow-loading PSX version, or a good old SNES cartridge.

If you enjoyed Chrono Trigger, you may want to look for its sequel, Chrono Cross. This was only released on the PlayStation and is probably fairly difficult to find now, and we should warn you that it certainly wasn’t to the taste of everyone who played the original.

Chrono Trigger Release Dates
snes
SNES
Japan 11 March 1995Usa 27 September 1995
psx
PSX
Japan 2 November 1999Usa 29 June 2001
nds
NDS
Japan 20 November 2008Usa 24 November 2008
Europe 6 February 2009
wii
WII
Japan 26 April 2011Usa 16 May 2011
Europe 20 May 2011
psn
PSN
Japan 28 September 2011Usa 4 October 2011
ios
IOS
Global 9 December 2011
and
AND
Japan 22 December 2011Usa 29 October 2012
Europe 29 October 2012Australia 29 October 2012
Chrono Trigger Fanart Spotlight
United States
CoN on Amazon.com: Chrono Trigger Items
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chrono triggerChrono Trigger
Nintendo DS
$19.99
chrono triggerChrono Trigger Cover
Final Fantasy Chronicles: Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy IV
PlayStation
$16.99
Final Fantasy Chronicles: Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy IV Cover
Chrono Trigger [Japan Import]
PlayStation
$91.05
Chrono Trigger [Japan Import] Cover
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Section Credits

Lead Developer and Editor
Rangers51
Written by
Neal
footbigmike
Rangers51
Tiddles
laszlow
Sabin
Dragon_Fire
Gabe
Olly
Additional Development
Tiddles
Data Management
Rangers51
footbigmike
Additional Data Collection and Verification
footbigmike
MeHael
Olly
Tiddles
Del_S
Dragon_Fire
Gabe
Video
footbigmike
Rangers51
Tiddles
Game Graphics and Screenshots
Rangers51
Neal
Tiddles
Front Page Image
Rangers51
Caves of Narshe: Chrono Trigger
Version 6
©1997–2024 Josh Alvies (Rangers51)

All fanfiction and fanart (including original artwork in forum avatars) is property of the original authors. Some graphics property of Square Enix.