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Chrono Trigger (SNES)

Chrono Trigger Super Nintendo
Genre: Role-Playing (RPG)
Perspective: Top-down
Art: Anime / Manga
Gameplay: Japanese-style RPG (JRPG)
Setting: Fantasy, Sci-Fi / Futuristic
Turn-based: Turn-based
Published by: Square Soft
Developed by: Square Co.
Released: 1995
Platforms: Super Nintendo (SNES), Nintendo DS (NDS)

The development of the game was led by a group of three famous game designers, named Square Co. «Dream Team». The team included: the creator of the game series Final Fantasy, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the game series Dragon Quest Yuji Horia and manga Akira Toriyama, who also participated in the creation of almost all games of the Dragon Quest series as a character designer. The producer of the game was Kazuhiko Aoki. Most of the script was written by Masato Kato; A significant part of the musical accompaniment was created by Yasunori Mitsuda, but due to illness he transferred the right to finish this work to the composer Nobuo Uematsu, the more famous musical accompaniment to the games of the Final Fantasy series.Chrono Trigger thanks to a brilliant non-linear plot, careful study of characters and the world, beautiful music and remarkable for those times graphics is rightfully considered one of the best games of the console. The game was highly appreciated by game criticism. Sales of the original version of the Chrono Trigger reached 2.36 million copies in Japan and 290,000 beyond, the remake game sales for the Nintendo DS console exceeded 0.9 million copies worldwide.

Gameplay

Gameplay Chrono Trigger is traditional for Japanese role-playing games with the exception of some innovations. The player controls a detachment of heroes, exploring the 2D fictional world of the game, consisting of different locations - forests, cities, caves, in which interacts with different characters, receives or gives away various objects, solves puzzles, participates in battles with opponents. The main task of the player, necessary for the passage of the game, is to perform a chain of related quests. Unlike most Western computer role-playing games, the player is extremely limited in the exploration of the world to the very end of the plot until the very end of the game; The number of quests, not directly subordinate to the plot, is minimal. The plot is given in the framework of dialogues and short scenes on the game engine. In the versions for PlayStation and Nintendo DS, some key points are also illustrated by drawing animated clips that duplicate the scenes on the engine. The protagonist Chrono, despite the importance of his role in the story, utters only one phrase in one of the endings, in other cases, his lines are only implied.The player-controlled group of characters travels along a common "world map" - a highly scalable landscape, which is a planar surface on a flat rectangle in plan view. When approaching the "world map" to the entrance to the location and pressing the action button, a transition is made, for example, to a forest or a castle, where the scale of the environment already corresponds to the proportions of the characters. It is characteristic that there are no city-locations, as it often happens in Japanese role-playing games, in Chrono Trigger - on the map of the world, houses or tents are immediately shown where you can go from the "world map". For each of the epochs in which the characters fall, there is a map of the world with their locations - their differences illustrate the change in the geography of the planet over time, for example, removing continents from each other.Throughout the game, the heroes have to participate in a variety of battles with various opponents - for example, forest-inhabiting wild animals, robots guarding the laboratory, etc.

Periodically executed quests lead the player to battles with particularly powerful opponents - bosses, it is impossible to avoid such battles. The innovation in Chrono Trigger is the approach to the organization of fights. If in most Japanese role-playing games of the 1990s, the principle of "random encounters" was decisive, when opponents were not shown during the movement around the location, and the very fact of whether there would be a battle at each subsequent step of the player-controlled character movement was determined by a random number generator, Then in Chrono Trigger all the opponents, as a rule, are already in the area, and the battle can only lead to an accidental or deliberate collision with them. Thus, in most locations, you can avoid all encounters with opponents, except for plot. During the battle, the action is not transferred to a separate screen, the battle takes place on the same map. This approach already met earlier in the games Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy Adventure, but on JRPG with a pseudo-stepping system of battles it was distributed for the first time.Actually, the Chrono Trigger combat system is a slightly modified Active Time Battle system developed by Hiroyuki Ito for Final Fantasy IV. In the Chrono Trigger, it is called "Active Time Battle 2.0". Each battle participant has a filling timeline scale; When it reaches a maximum, the player-controlled character can perform one action - attack the opponent, apply magic or special ability on it (they are combined by the general menu of techniques), use the object, try to leave the battle.

Performing an action results in zeroing the scale and filling it from the beginning. All actions are performed by the player through a special menu. Some techniques involve two or even all three characters; These "double" and "triple" techniques are a combination of conventional character techniques (although they have their own, separate animation) and cause increased damage.Each character has two sets of points - HP (Points of Life) and MP (Points of Magic). The first determine the "health" of the character and decrease the enemy's attacks; When they reach zero, the character falls unconscious. If all three active characters are unconscious, it is believed that the player is defeated; He can continue the game since the last save. Points of magic determine the possibility of using magic and techniques, which are spent; If they reach zero, the use of magic and techniques is impossible. Both sets of points can be restored to the maximum with special items.Based on the results of the battle won, the player receives experience points, points techniques (spent on acquiring techniques), and, possibly, money and various items - medicines, weapons, equipment items, barter items, etc. Items can also be found scattered across Location chests and buy in stores. With the accumulation of experience characters get levels, as they recruit their characteristics grow. The gain of the characteristics is automatic, and it's different for each character in accordance with its image, but the player can adjust this gain using special items - tablets, each of which produces an additional gain of one corresponding characteristic.

The game includes several optional mini-games. The most significant of these are jet bike races in 2300 AD. E. This game was published separately from Chrono Trigger. Most of the other mini-games are focused on the Millennium Fair (English Millenial Fair); You can play most of them at the very beginning of the game. Winning the games at the Fair is rewarded with Silver Points, which can be exchanged for money or for access to another three mini-games in the Tent of Horrors Horror Tent. For the victory in the Shatra of Horrors, the player is rewarded with various kinds of bonuses - kittens who settle in the main hero's house, musical dolls and "copies" of the game characters. In addition, some mini-games (for example, robot control in 2300 CE) are inscribed directly in the passage.A unique feature of the gameplay Chrono Trigger are time travel. The player can navigate through the seven time epochs of the history of the game world, where he performs various quests, interacts with other characters and participates in battles. Time travel is carried out through portals called "time gates", and using a time machine called Epoch. The plot of the game forces the player to constantly use the opportunities of time travel to change the world history - the actions performed in the same time period, lead to different consequences in all subsequent. The game has thirteen quite different endings; Which of them will the player receive depends on how and when he will win the battle with the final boss during the game. In the version for Nintendo DS, an additional, fourteenth ending was added. An important feature of the Chrono Trigger is the optional New Game + - the ability to start over again after the game with all the same levels, characteristics, abilities and characters accumulated during the game (except for money and key items for the plot). A similar concept was used by Square Co. And in other subsequent projects, such as Vagrant Story, Chrono Cross, Parasite Eve and Final Fantasy X.

Characters

In the Chrono Trigger seven game characters belonging to different time periods. Three of them - Chrono, Marl and Lucca - came from the "present" - 1000 AD. E. On the internal chronology of the game, others - either from the past or from the future.

Crono, Yap. is a teenager living with his mother; Despite his young age, he is a good fighter, desperately brave and reckless, unable to leave a friend in trouble.
Marle, yap. - Princess, daughter of the King - the ruler of the country Guard, in which all three live; She is greatly burdened by her high position and escapes from the castle, posing as an ordinary resident of the Guards.
Lucca is a young, inventive creature obsessed with technical creativity, whose failed teleportation installation opens the first portal in time.

As time travels, new companions join the heroes:
Frog is a valiant and gallant knight from the Middle Ages (600 AD), turned magician Magus into an anthropoid frog, but not lost the ability to hold a sword in his hands.
Robo is a robot trying to find human feelings from a far future (2300 AD).
Ayla - a warrior girl from the Stone Age, who protects her people from dinosaurs.
And the magician himself and the demon-lord Magus - turned out to be, in fact, the same traveler in time. Unlike the previous characters, which are added to the plot of the plot, Magus can be killed, or simply do not meet with him.

Simultaneously, the player controls not more than three characters; Replacements in the active troika can be made through a special menu at any time of the game, except for fights. Unlike many Japanese role-playing games, in Chrono Trigger this restriction is explained: the "time saving theorem" when traveling through the Gate of too many travelers sends them to the point with the least "resistance" of space-time - The End of Time. Therefore, at the same time, no more than three people can travel in time. At the same time, it is worth remembering that the experience from the battles is received by everyone in the team, and not only the allocated three, but the tech points are received only by the characters who took part in the battle.

World of Games

The action of the Chrono Trigger unfolds in a world reminiscent of the Earth, and passes through the seven time epochs of its existence - from the earliest times (the Stone Age) to the indefinitely distant (End of Time). In addition, there is a timeless location - Black Omen. The games Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross, which take place in areas of the same world (Regionnoe and El Nido), not shown in the original Chrono Trigger, imply that the planet is larger than it was shown in the Chrono Trigger. The game uses its own internal chronology - the so-called "Guardia Timeline" (English Guardia Timeline), reminiscent of the historical chronology of Scaliger adopted in our world by the count of B.C. And A.D. The game begins in 1000 AD. E.The ideology of time travel in Chrono Trigger does not recognize temporary paradoxes - any activity of a time traveler leads to a change in history, and only the memories of the traveler remain the only evidence of the existence of the previous time line. Therefore, the plot of the game is built around the attempts of the heroes to "fix" the history of their world in every possible way; Although they make a lot of side "corrections", their main goal remains "breaking" from the history of the most tragic of its time - the destruction in 1999 n. E. Almost all living things on the planet by a monstrous, almost omnipotent being called Lavos.The Stone Age (65,000,000 BC) - at this time, according to Chrono Trigger, the first people are forced to coexist with dinosaurs, including sensible and aggressive Reptites. The continents did not split at that time, representing a single whole - Pangea. Reptiles live in several fortified fortresses, in particular, Reptite Lair and located in the mouth of the volcano Tyrano Lair. The people whom the Reptiles call "monkeys" are divided into two tribes: led by Ayla and the openly living tribe of Ioka in the plain and the Laruba tribe hiding in the primitive jungles. The tribe of Laruba has learned to tame pterodactyls and fly on them.