Wednesday, November 15, 2006

The Black Wind Howls
Recently I finished the Final Fantasy Chronicles version of Chrono Trigger. Dirty little secret here: I'd never actually finished Chrono Trigger before. I got close once, but then I quit for reasons I can't even remember now. There was another time I got pretty far into the game... close to the end of the Ocean Palace, actually; however, I completely forgot how to beat the Golem Twins, and so I got frustrated and decided to spite the game by refusing to finish it. I left FF Chronicles to stew in its own shame and I have to say that it was fairly repentant when I began playing it again.

Of course, the little thing has a bit of a temper, so I still had to put up with an assload of slowdown. I think of all the Square games that were ported from the SNES to the PlayStation, Chrono Trigger suffered the worst. FFVI had some terrible slowdown, but man, Chrono Trigger's worst moments trump that pretty easily. And the load times... don't get me started on those. If I didn't know better, at times I would've sworn that the game had frozen; hell, I actually did think that at a couple of points!

It is worth putting up with though. I really like Chrono Trigger's battle system - it's simple but fun. Figuring out which two people will combine best for double techs and which character works best as a healer/single attacker in your party makes for good times. I mostly had Crono and Frog use Spire until Crono finally got Luminaire... then everyone was basically on his or her own lol. Crono, Frog and Magus were my final party. I think that this will be the only time I ever use Magus; you can get every other ending without recruiting him, I think.

I enjoy Chrono Trigger's story quite a bit as well. I'm a total sucker for time travel stories, so it drew me in right away. Also appreciated is that the characters are not unbearably somber; they're actually excited to be traveling through time to new worlds and saving their future, as well they should be. They would be a hell of a lot less endearing were they to treat this adventure with the utmost seriousness... well, they kind of do later on in the game, but it's a slow progression to that point rather than, "Hmm, let's stand around and be mopey and depressed and completely unlikable. That will solve things!"

Most of the characters' stories fun too. Not amazingly developed, but enough to make them interesting: Magus and Frog's tales of revenge, Lucca's reasons for delving so heavily into science, Robo's murky past and future, etc. The only character I don't really care for at all is Marle. She just annoys me throughout the game, and she never really became all that useful to me in battles either. At least Crono makes up for his silence by beating the crap out of everyone.

I've still got to get the other endings though. Don't know when I'll have time for that... I've got a couple of big projects to work on, along with the requisite studying and whatnot for my other classes. Not to mention the Wii launch. I'll probably have to wait until Winter Break to have an opportunity to play through Chrono Trigger some more lol.
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