Chrono Trigger innovated the concept of a "New Game +" in which, after completing the story and seeing the credits roll, you could choose to restart the adventure with your powered-up, experience-pumped characters intact. And the fact that there are more than three characters to choose from, while you can only use three at a time, helps fuel the game's third key point of appeal – replayability. The interplay between the game's half-dozen or so different playable characters is wonderfully satisfying, as each one is developed with a distinctive personality and individual sidequests that reinforce who they are and really get you to like them. Put the two of them together, though, and Marle can freeze Crono's sword mid-air so that his strike hits with the impact of an icy glacier – or Crono can spin his blade in circles while Marle casts a healing spell, to disperse the curative aura over every ally in the battle.
Crono's a skilled swordsman who can leap and slash up enemies alone, for instance, while Marle's more magically gifted with the innate element of Water. Selecting Tech lets you unleash more damaging assaults, magic spells and support maneuvers with individual heroes, but you can also combine more than one characters' moves together to create even more powerful combos. But the third option – "Tech" – is where it gets interesting. Every character has a basic Attack command, and can use Items too. What's more, the battle mechanics present an incredible variety of opportunities for teamwork. There's no visual cut-away to some separate battlefield screen like in so many other RPGs – here, you see a baddie and you attack it right there. You control a party of up to three heroes at a time, fighting foes right where you encounter them in the environment. The battle system is second, as it was, and still is, wonderfully unique. That alone would have made Chrono Trigger a hit – but time travel was just the first of its many special qualities. Other games of the SNES era began to explore the idea of alternate worlds or parallel dimensions, but here in Chrono Trigger you see the entire existence of a planet play out from the dawn of mankind all the way to beyond the apocalypse. The time-traveling concept set Chrono Trigger apart from other RPGs, as its many different eras of time are expertly interwoven and your actions in the past accurately influence the future. He boldly jumps in after her, setting in motion a story that has you following his adventures back in time to the past, forward in time to the distant future and every other point in-between – as what begins as a rescue mission for one young girl escalates into a battle for the fate of the planet. A wide-eyed, wild-haired boy living in the year 1000 A.D., he becomes thrust into a quest to save the world when a mysterious portal in time opens up and swallows his friend Marle. Crono is the name of our silent protagonist in Chrono Trigger. The first, appropriately enough, is time travel. And though it would be easy to write pages upon pages to explain its appeal, I'll attempt just three key points to sum up what makes it so timeless. Its creation is the stuff of legend, as it was developed by a dream team of the most talented RPG makers of the 16-bit era, all coming together to work on this one epic project. A universally cherished role-playing game, it was originally released for the Super Nintendo in 1995. Chrono Trigger is one of the best video games ever made. And now, with Chrono Trigger, it feels like the journey's come to an end. It's been an interesting journey, with some of us reliving bits and pieces of our childhoods and others discovering these titles for the very first time.
In that time, we've seen the re-release of nearly four hundred different retro titles – some masterpieces, some duds and lots of in-between, average "classics" of yesteryear drawn from the back catalogs of the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 and several other old-school consoles. It's been over four and a half years since the Wii's Virtual Console first went live.
It feels like we've come to the end of an era. Chrono Trigger was originally released for Super Famicom (Super NES) on March 11, 1995.