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By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold I’m not going to call myself an RPG freak, because that would be entirely untrue. I’m an RPG addict, and RPG maniac, an RPG...for lack of a better word....geek. Now don’t get me wrong, I love other kinds of games, but RPGs are home to the best story lines and character development. And this is why, my friends, Chrono Trigger is the greatest game of all time. The truth of the matter is that Chrono Trigger, any way you look at it, excels in every possible category, from the story line to the battles to Jennifer Love Hewitt (hey, Peter Hassett is obsessed with Sarah Michelle Gellar, so why can't I have an obsession, too?). Chrono Trigger was the brainchild of the RPG veterans at Square and the talented artist Akira Toriyama. In conjunction with a group of programmers and graphic designers, Square set out to make something great, something that people would remember for years to come. Even though there very little hype surrounding its launch, RPG fans like myself were waiting for Chrono Trigger's American release with bated breath. If you read my Blitz column (WARNING: shameless self-plug) about the guy dying because he was obsessed with Blitz, multiply the obsession by ten, put Chrono Trigger in the place of Blitz, and take out the part about the guy dying, and you have a fraction of what happened with me and that game. This game is total perfection. Looking back at individual special moments, when Cyrus dies, or when Robo gets beat down by the other robots, or when you first take part in the trial (with the awesome music playing), you just can’t convey your feelings in words. There aren't as many memorable individual moments in Chrono Trigger as there are in some other RPGs, but that's the whole joy of it. The whole thing was great from beginning to end. It never stopped being great. The graphics don't seem particularly amazing now, but they are still the best graphics ever seen in a Super Nintendo RPG. The detail and personality in the environments surpass any other Square game ever released, even Final Fantasy 7's much-hyped pre-rendered environments. FF7's environments felt cold and unwelcoming, whereas in Chrono Trigger, you always feel like you have a place in the game, and you are welcomed into the time periods like moths to a flame. You knew where you were in the dungeons just by the graphics and how different they are from all other dungeons in the game (or in any area in that same dungeon, for that matter). All in all, Chrono Trigger has some of the best graphics ever, not in terms of technological prowess, but in terms of personality. Now, before I say anything about the music, I have to say Yosunori Mitsuda is a God. He is the greatest video game music composer of all time. Period. And this is only based on what, two games? Mitsuda wrote the sountrack for Chrono Trigger AND Xenogears, which I thought had the best music in any 1998 game. The pure emotion in the themes conveys thoughts to you that may not be present in the graphics or the dialogue. For example, when you fight Spekkio at the End of Time, the bouncy music suggests that he isn’t just a crazy freak who teaches you magic, but he's also a funny little man who just wants some company. Without the music, the battle with Spekkio would have been a weird, awkward scene. A lot of other events in Chrono Trigger wouldn’t have worked if the music wasn’t there to enforce the mood, and Yosunori Mitsuda deserves full credit for that. What else is there to say? If you don’t have a solid story line, an indescribable mood, awesome characters, and mass amounts of sheer quality throughout, then you don’t have a game even in the same hemisphere as Chrono Trigger, and in my opinion it has yet be surpassed by any other game. So RPG makers, take notes. This is how it should, and hopefully will be done in the future. In the meantime, I’m counting the days until Chrono Trigger 2 is released, which is really hard to do because there's no release date...
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