Chrono Trigger: Developing Character Through Time and Space
Characters are the currency of storytelling. An interesting story requires interesting characters, and to the same extent, interesting characters all but guarantee an interesting story. It’s why games are absolutely capable of telling a good story, despite arguments to the contrary. It also explains why Chrono Trigger still holds up as one of the more gripping RPGs ever made.
One of the easiest ways to determine the quality of a character’s writing is to try and describe the character without describing their appearance, gender, occupation, or powers and abilities. For example, and this works for just about every character in a Bioware game, take Leliana from Dragon Age: Origins. What can we say about her? She’s loyal, friendly, and caring, but she’s also wrestling with the betrayal of her closest friend and lover, a betrayal that nearly got her killed. She balances that pain with faith, and while she is forgiving as a result, she has it within her to be vengeful. She is an interesting character, and Bioware has made her into an actual woman, not just an archetype (bard, rogue, ranged damage dealer). As a result, her story, along with the rest of the cast of Dragon Age, will always be interesting, and I think time will look back on the epic fantasy as a classic.
A classic, even, like Chrono Trigger. The 1995 Japanese classic was developed by (what was then known as) Square, with Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, creators of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragonball series, respectively. The product of this “Dream Team” was an epic adventure that took players on a journey through time as they battled to prevent doomsday at the hands of a horrific monster known as Lavos. And while the game’s mechanics hold up astonishingly well, with its Active Time Battle combat and clever combo attack system, what truly shines to this day is its attention towards its character. Not only does Chrono Trigger implement a Western-style idea of changing the game based on the player’s decisions, but its characters, in particular but not limited to the player’s companions, are startling in their nuance.
(At this point I should make the caveat that I played the Nintendo DS re-release. This version cleaned up the translation quite a bit. Most egregious in the original Western SNES release was Frog’s perpensity for saying lines like, “We ask for your strength… Thee who fear’eth the night and stand ‘gainst the darkness.” The new version wisely chose to express Frog’s nobility through what he said, not how he said it. For example.)
A couple of examples will illustrate this point. The first example, for our purposes, takes place about midway through the game, when your party returns to the Middle Ages to discover that their kingdom is under attack by the evil Magus and his army of monsters. Here, you meet two brothers. One is the knight commander of the army, and the other is the army cook. In the span of about a dozen lines of dialogue, you learn that the knight commander resents his brother for not being a soldier, and the cook resents his brother for not respecting his very crucial role in the war. The cook decides to let his anger go, however, and lets you take food to the front lines. The act turns the knight commander around.
So let’s recap: we have the tension between duty and familial love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In twelve lines of dialogue, and no cut scenes. It is powerful stuff, all the better for being done on such a budget.
The rest of the game is like this, and the time travel theme allows for even more nuance. Through time, you encounter the characters of Masa and Mune, two spirits who form/inhabit the soul of the powerful Masamune sword. Meeting them as you do at different points in their seemingly endless lifespan, you watch their transformation from primal force, to playful childhood on the edge of adulthood responsibility, to a broken innocence (and not in that order). Or there is the touching moment when Robo elects to work on restoring a forest for nearly four centuries. For you, it takes no longer than a few button presses and a hop through time. But for him, it really was four centuries, and the insights it grants us into his character are stunning to consider. Not to mention the gripping window into time that Lucca is granted shortly afterwords.
The attention to detail in character and decision-making (the result of Lucca’s journey splits into two very different and critical possibilities) betray the game’s age and console of origin. The original held over ten different endings, and those endings themselves differed depending on decisions made during the game. Further, the final encounter with Magus, as expected, does not turn out as expected, and the decision to forgive him and allow him onto the team – or kill him – is astonishing as it has an impact on nearly half of the game. The decision to kill him, it should be noted, also goes differently depending on whether or not Frog is in the party. It is also worth mentioning that Magus does not become a good guy if he joins you. Though the player learns a bit about why Magus is quite so curmudgeonly before making his or her decision, Magus’ attitude towards the party does not altogether change. Allowing the player to understand a villain’s motivations is rare enough; having to deal with the villain remaining a villain, even after laying down his sword, is even more rare.
The final result is a tale that remains with you long after you’ve played it. Even a lackluster ending, particularly by Square [Enix] standards, cannot diminish the impact of the journey. It is a game in which even the silent protagonist betrays signs of character, and in which the world itself, its own life (and possible death) witnessed over the passage of millennia, has a story to tell. Can a more compelling argument for its timeless ability to move the player be made?
