Chrono Trigger Still Blows Me Away 30 Years Later

I remember seeing it in an enclosed plastic end cap at toys 'r' us. It was $80, so I assumed it wasn't for a kid like me. Marketing at the time did not do a good job with it in the US.

One might say our memory of this era is.. pollyannish - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-QFRdHv61s

Around 2014 when I was doing full-time business development I got a Playstation Vita and became a real JPRG addict and GameFAQs was my wingman.

By 2020 or so it had been displaced by video walkthroughs on YouTube and today I would not expect a new game to have a good walkthrough (almost bought Visions of Mana on sale last weekend, turns out it has a text walkthrough but it isn't comprehensive like the old ones.)

Generally I don't like video walkthroughs, I mean who wants to scroll to the right point in 40 hours worth of videos for a 40 hour game? (There was one case in Megadimension Neptunia VII where I just couldn't figure out how to get through a certain world, turned out there was a place where it was possible to make a jump but it wasn't obvious to me that it was possible and the video made it clear.)

I somewhat miss those days of endless time I could dump into gaming. Nowadays if I’m stuck for 5-10min I google because my playtime is limited and I don’t want to spend it looking for the wrong thing or headed in the wrong direction.

I had a very similar experience with Castlevania's Symphony of the Night. Bought it when it came out, but quickly got one of the bad endings and that really soured me on the experience. Was years later when I found that I had literally missed over half of the game.

First time playing chrono trigger I was playing on an emulator, exclusively using a single save state. Went into the early lavos area, saved, got my ass beat. Discovered I couldn't go out again, save bricked :( took years until I gave the game another go

I bombed early on in links awakening and sat it down for years. When the first Pokémon came out I did the wildest things. So glad my mom would let me buy gaming magazines.

But you formed a memory and a story around that experience, practiced the skill, and stretched your mind trying to achieve a goal.

I don't know if you're making the point that a search at the time would have been a better or worse experience. Either way it shows that internet search has come at a cost. I don't know if it's actually best for us to further optimize and streamline it.

We have to remember this was a time where text was still kind of expensive, so making the story more than barely coherent required losing enemy variety and such. The advantages of the switch to CD-ROM wasn't really the pre-rendered cutscenes, but the fact that there were no practical limitations to how much text you want to use. Every bit of text also lead to harder localization, which was still a part of the industry in its infancy.

So from where I stand, the coherence of Chrono Trigger is already kind of a miracle, given cart sizes

I agree completely, playing it now feels very primitive. But at the time, even into the 2000s, it was a revelation.

You know what I've always wanted for remakes? When it has something tangible to improve the game with

People like the FF7 remake but it's in a wildly different frame than the original game, whereas I maybe would've liked to see some of the glitches fixed and more to the point the translation

FF6 should also fix the glitches, but the GBA version has a worse translation (arguably more correct but more boring) and worse music

There's room for a sequel to CT or to finish the trilogy. CC left a lot of unanswered questions.

> I still hold out hope that Square-Enix will either remake this

My dream is for a remake using the octopath engine, with a few new goodies. I don't think it needs the full FF7 remake treatment.

frameskip plus attack macros in the future on the conveyors!