Chrono Trigger/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• In Chrono Trigger, pretty much everything you do in the past has effects on the future (e.g. getting the Rainbow Shell leads to a new treasury being built in Guardia castle). When getting back from the Middle Ages for the first time, you get thrown in prison about immediately. This all makes sense: as far as the authorities can see, you did kidnap the princess. What I recently realized is that when rescuing the queen and chancellor in the past, he makes a single reference to the kingdom needing a better judicial system for such occasions. Exactly what happened to you. --Sandbylur
• The Masamune is actually the Ruby Knife, a weapon created by Melchior to destroy the Mammon Machine in 12,000 BC. The reason it is so effective against Magus is because, as royalty from the 12,000 BC magic kingdom fueled by that power, his magic must have likewise originally come from the Mammon Machine.
  • Moreso than just that. The Ruby Knife was made of Dreamstone, the same stuff used to create the Mammon Machine. The Mammon Machine siphons magic from Lavos, so it wouldn't be surprising that the Masamune can also siphon energy.
• Crono never ever died! He was just taken from the party so that the party in the future, both literally and storytelling-wise, could have him. All that got destroyed was a clone. You're not rewriting history by making a clone take the hit for Crono, you're keeping him alive, but letting your past selves believe he died! Maybe... If you believe it to be a Stable Time Loop.
  • Isn't this basically stated in-game?

Fridge Horror

• Chrono Trigger is a game built on Fridge Horror. It will take many playthroughs to actually see every little horrifying thing that happens.
  • First: Azala knew about Lavos and her words after her defeat imply that the ice age is a direct result of her defeat. In your fight with Azala, she displays telekinetic abilities. It's not a stretch that Azala had been in psychic contact with Lavos and was aware that he was watching Earth for a long time, deciding which of the two terran races he was going to use for his genetic manipulations and harvestings. Azala was hunting the humans because her race's survival depended on it.
  • Second: even Lavos is not immune from horrible things happening to him. Consider the first time you fight him in 12,000 BC. He is absurdly strong. Compare that to every other time you can fight him. Something happened to him to severely weaken him: He tried to incorporate Schala into himself as part of his DNA harvesting scheme. Schala destroyed Lavos from the inside out, leaving only a shell of the once invincible monster. What's even worse about Schala neutering Lavos is that even in his weakened state he was STILL able to destroy the world in 1999.
  • Third: Lavos, even in his weakened state, ran a Batman Gambit with Magus after Magus tried summoning him in 600 AD. Lavos sent Magus back to 12,000 BC, knowing that Magus would try to save Schala in the Ocean Palace. Magus would have succeeded, too, if Crono and Friends hadn't intervened. Magus was almost allowed to let the most destructive force in the world remain at full power.
    • Even worse, the Black Omen rising out of the ocean in 12,000 BC doesn't have any effect on future time periods (read: doesn't actually happen in the timeline), until after the shenanigans of Magus and possibly Crono's party... at which point it looms over the sky until at least the year one thousand. Given its status as a heavily-armed shrine to the world-ender run by a megalomaniac, that probably doesn't do much to alleviate the whole apocalypse problem.
  • Fourth: the only reason Crono and Friends were able to defeat Lavos in his weakened state is because Crono and Friends are the exact kind of creatures Lavos was trying to create from the very beginning. Crono and Friends are Lavos' masterpieces, human shaped eldritch abominations capable of punching out the Chrono universe's version of Cthulhu. You are the ideal specimen that the Lavos core was supposed to be. The only one in the party to whom this does no apply is Ayla, who serves as an example of how powerful a non-genetically modified human is and a further explanation for why humans were chosen. Even Robo is a powerful fighting force because of Lavos by proxy of humans.
• In Chrono Trigger, due to your stumbling around the time stream, Marle briefly vanishes from existence. When she returns after you Set Right What Once Went Wrong, she tells Crono that her absence was "awful" and she was "somewhere cold, dark... and lonely." In other words, she was aware even when Ret-Gone. Consider now all the additional alterations you make to history throughout the game, which you don't correct later, and how likely it is that you erased thousands or even millions of people from history (you made changes in the age of dinosaurs)! Millions doomed to an isolated limbo before they were even born...
  • The ending gotten if the party defeats Lavos before defeating Azala, although comedic in tone, may upgrade this to an entire intelligent species. It's the exact same Good Morning, Crono and Millenial Fair sequence from the beginning of the game, except everyone is now a Repitite. Essentially, if Lavos did not crash into the Earth, the Repitites would have won the war, and almost certainly slaughtered Ayla and her people, along with the rest of the human race.
    • Not an Inferred Holocaust... the holocaust was pretty much confirmed in Chrono Cross, almost the entirety of which is a Batman Gambit by the Reptites' gods to get Serge to return their people to power.
• Not sure why this isn't brought up, seems fairly obvious to this Troper. The clone that you get to replace Chrono with seems to be a doll, it is referred to as such in the SNES version. It is also called a clone. Because that's what it is a biological doll. When the doll is swapped with Crono and killed in his place, it puts on a very convincing display of dying painfully. No one cares. That clone was alive, it was created for the sole purpose of dying. It existed for but a few brief hours, an infant in the body of a teen, until you killed it to save Crono. You Bastard.
  • Oh my god, they killed Crono!
• In the Lost Sanctum, one kind of enemy you can fight are called Exiles. Exiles look like the normal, civilized, and anthropomorphic Reptites, so their minds work exactly the same way as humans. This means that the Reptites send members of their own kind to die in the wilderness.
  • It Gets Worse when you realize that the Reptites are green, and the Exiles are gray.