This page contains numerous spoilers for Chrono Cross, which are not labeled as such outside of the spoiler markers, so read carefully from this point forward if you don't want to have Chrono Cross spoiled. Please try to mark any spoilers involving Chrono Cross if you hide a spoiler from that game.
Chrono Trigger is an RPG for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System; it was developed by Squaresoft in conjunction with several members of then-rival Enix and released in 1995, and is their best-known SNES game that isn't a part of the Final Fantasy brand.
The game tells the story of Crono, a Silent protagonist who meets a girl named Marle at his hometown's Millennial Fair, a festival thrown to celebrate the dawn of the year 1000 AD. When a teleportation device made by Crono's best friend, Lucca, goes out of control and sends Marle four hundred years into the past, Crono jumps in after her, kicking off an epic adventure throughout time that will span millions of years and events to prevent a long-dormant Eldritch Abomination from causing The End of the World as We Know It.
Chrono Trigger was the last hurrah for the golden age of epic JRPGs on the SNES, and the crown jewel in a hit series of Square games that included Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and several others that no one bothered to release outside Japan. The game features art and character designs by Dragon Ball mangaka Akira Toriyama and music by Yasunori Mitsuda, Nobuo Uematsu, and Noriko Matsueda. Also unique is the battle system, which combined the Active Time Battle system of Final Fantasy VI with position-based special moves known as Techs, often requiring the player to wait and time their attacks accordingly to maximize damage output.
Square followed up Chrono Trigger with two sequels. The first, Radical Dreamers for the Satellaview, didn't originally see the light of day outside of Japan like the Satellaview add-on itself, though a translated ROM is available online. The second, Chrono Cross for the PlayStation, incorporates parts of Radical Dreamers. An HD remaster of Chrono Cross for Nintendo Switch, Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One was released on April 7 2022, including the previously unreleased-in-English Radical Dreamers. Chrono Trigger itself has a PS1 port that adds a number of brief anime cutscenes and a few plot modifications to get it in sync with the then-still-in-development Chrono Cross. Square Enix published a long-awaited Updated Re-release in late 2008 for the Nintendo DS; this re-release retained the good parts of the PS1 port, re-translated the script to overcome the hurdles of both censorship and memory limitations present in the mid-1990s, and threw in some bonus dungeons and a new ending for good measure.note Since then, it has seen releases on Apple's iOS platform in 2011, Android in 2012, and Steam in 2018.
The planned third game, Chrono Break, was cancelled, but plot elements from it were later used in Final Fantasy Dimensions II.
This has nothing to do with the series about a nun and a demon despite said series having a name that falls into the same naming convention as the games.
Chrono Trigger contains examples of:
- Good morning, Crono, your sentence is being carried out today.
