< Chrono Trigger

Chrono Trigger/YMMV


  • 8.8: IGN gave the DS port this score exactly. NGamer magazine in the UK gave it 87%. The hate mail has already begun.
  • Accidental Innuendo: This remark made by a blue imp when the party first arrives in Medina Village. It was removed from the DS retranslation:

"Did you just come out of the closet?!"

  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Frog. Is his outdated Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe supposed to be an attempt to make him sound like he’s from the Middle Ages, or a lonely, scared man trying to put on a brave face by (poorly) imitating the way he thinks a hero should sound?
    • Did Magus's origins shape his villainous character in the middle ages? Or was he deliberately using a Machiavellian method to obtain power and defeat Lavos? Either way, it was rather petty.
    • Crono and his allies are Well-Intentioned Extremist Villain Protagonists. They can confront Lavos and stop the apocalypse as soon as they each the End of Time for the first time, but instead choose to travel though time gathering more information on him to try and stop his rise to power in the first place. Not only do they fail, but there's no telling how many lives they've doomed to non-existence due to their interference in the timeline. I Did What I Had to Do indeed.
  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • Ozzie barely qualifies as a boss, but in your first battle against him, he hides behind an impenetrable barrier until you hit a switch to drop him in a pit. In the rematch, a cat wanders in during the battle and hits the switch to dump him for good.
    • The Golemboss (Golem Overlord in the DS release), fought on the wing of a giant airship. Being afraid of heights, it doesn't attack you and runs away after a couple of turns. Killing it gives some nice tech points and exp though, if you're fast enough.
  • Awesome Music: In a game packed with awesome music, Magus' character theme still stands out.
  • Badass Decay: Ozzie isn't especially intimidating even when you first meet him, but late in the game he's downright pathetic. In fact, the one time you actually fight Ozzie, he's accompanied by Slash and Flea, each of whom you've fought twice before, both times three-on-one.
    • And even saying that you "fight" Ozzie is a bit of a stretch there, as once you take out his two goons, he literally sits there and does nothing for the rest of the battle, simply letting you beat on him until the battle ends.
  • Best Level Ever: Fiendlord's Keep and the Ocean Palace.
  • Breather Level: The Prehistoric Era in general can be considered this. Both times you visit, it specifically comes after the Wham Episodes like Crono's trial, an After the End future, and the war in the Middle Ages.
  • Complete Monster: Queen Zeal is an utterly vile piece of work during the game, but it is revealed that she was actually a fairly nice woman before coming into contact with Lavos, so she really isn't her true self during the story.
  • Ear Worm:
  • Ensemble Darkhorse:
    • Magus. He is either a Jerkass or wears a Jerkass Facade, but either way, he's got great lines!
    • Even though her popularity doesn't quite match Magus', Lucca is still a tad more popular than the rest of her party members.
    • Schala may be an NPC, but she's nonetheless one of the most beloved characters in the game.
    • His name is Gato, he has metal joints. Beat him up, and win 15 Silver Points.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Magus, with his forbidding, vampire-ish looks and Jerkass, revenge obsessed behavior. But he's just so Badass.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Despite Crono/Marle being the Official Couple and being fairly popular in its own right, a considerable portion of the fandom has held torches for Crono/Lucca.
  • Fan Wank: The Chrono Compendium is a fansite that takes all the many Epileptic Trees and tries to make some sense out of them.
  • Faux Symbolism: There was a lengthy essay out there that argues that Chrono Trigger is a retelling of The Bible. Masato Kato has denied this, especially when you take into account the Woolseyisms.
  • Game Breaker:
    • Marle's Haste spell, and auto-haste equipment like the Haste Helm.
    • Give Crono the Rainbow (70% crit rate) and Fury Band (80% counter rate). Factor in that he can counter things like barrier changes and enemy revives and he becomes a killing machine.
    • Ayla by herself. She's got the highest Strength and Speed in the game, can use a variety of very effective very low cost Double healing techs with other good characters like Frog. The only downside is her lack of elemental attacks and pretty boring lines.
      • Boring lines may be a case of YMMV; I think a lot of her lines are some of the most amusing.
    • Also Dino tail.
    • Get three Gold Studs to cut your MP costs, and you can spam your most powerful magic without a care in the world. This is incredibly easy to do as well as one enemy in the game gives them after they are Charmed. Combine this with Marle's Haste above, and you'll have a team that can spam Triple Techs like there's no tomorrow. Most bosses go down like chumps.
    • The Prism Spectacles dramatically increase the damage a character does. And I mean dramatically. Put them on your best physical hitters, like Crono with his 70% sword or his shiny new 90% crit sword, or just on Ayla, and their attack commands start hitting as hard as other characters' spells. Then, if you start casting with them...
    • The DS version gives Robo an arm with a base power of zero...but a critical hit is guaranteed to deal 9999 damage. Then equip him with the Dragon's Tear, which greatly boosts the wearer's crit rate, and even the Bonus Boss becomes a pushover.
  • Goddamned Bats: Those rats and frogs from the Lost Sanctum bonus dungeon. You cannot avoid fighting them. Considering that the whole dungeon is one giant Fetch Quest Ad Nauseum, you will fight them well over 30 times just traveling back and forth. It's not that they're hard... but you just cannot avoid fighting them, so it breaks the flow and becomes annoying very fast. However, at least the frogs at some point can be one-shot by normal attacks, but the rats, mainly the Dire Rats, are annoyingly so fast that they always get the first move, which will somehow screw you over with some HP or MP lost, unless you've managed to max out everyone's speed.
  • Hell Is That Noise: The snowstorm in 12,000 BC; Lavos' cry.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay:
    • Glenn and Cyrus. Especially in the DS remake.
    • Frog and Crono, to a lesser extent. The character that plays the Crono resurrection scene is determined by a priority list, presumably with the characters that are closer to Crono having a higher priority. Marle's first, Lucca's second. Guess who's third.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: A surprising aversion. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest aside; this is probably the easiest game ever made by Squaresoft, and is certainly easier than many of its SNES-era cousins (even Final Fantasy VI was harder). Yet nobody appears to have any problem with its easy difficulty.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks: The most common criticism brought against the game, especially in the new century. However, even some of those critics admit that the tightly plotted story might make up for its shortness.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Magus, thanks to a mixture of being incredibly badass but having one of the more tragic backstories in the game. The fact that he's an Ensemble Darkhorse doesn't hurt either.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Lucca is popularly shipped with most of the other playable characters, and even with some NPCs.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Magus was once Janus, prince of the Kingdom of Zeal in Antiquity, until Lavos destroyed the kingdom and sent Janus forward in time to the Middle Ages. There, choosing the name Magus, he became the leader of the non-humans, deceiving them and declaring war on the Kingdom of Guardia. By doing so, he sought to gain enough power to summon and kill Lavos. When Crono and the party disrupt this plan, Magus is sent back in time to the Kingdom of Zeal before Lavos destroyed it. Disguising himself as a Prophet, Magus used his knowledge of history to gain the favor of Queen Zeal, positioning himself to kill Lavos when it surfaces. When this fails, Magus can be recruited as a party member, recognizing he cannot kill Lavos himself. If recruited, he leaves the party to try to find his missing sister. Selfish and never truly turning good, Magus is nevertheless a brilliant, powerful and determined sorcerer that defied the Evil Overlord archetype with Hidden Depths.
  • Memetic Molester: Thanks to YTMND, the tune "Burn! Bobanga!" from the game has forever become associated with Brian Peppers, a sex offender from Ohio whose odd-looking physical deformities granted him memetic status.
  • Memetic Mutation: "But you're still hungry."
  • Player Punch: Fail to save Lucca's mother from her accident. But if at first you don't succeed, try, try, again.
  • Polished Port:
    • The Nintendo DS verison added new weapons, extra New Game+ sidequests, an an extra Bonus Boss, which ties this game to Chrono Cross. It also features the anime FMV sequences from the PlayStation version, polishes some the gameplay mechanics, removed many game-breaking equipment, and added the ability to swap party members outside of The End of Time. The localization also has been revised from the Super Nintendo version and correcting the inaccuracies it had.
    • After post-launch efforts, the 2018 PC version addresses many of the problems it had from its initial release. It features a UI and HUD that is much more controller and keyboard friendly by default, fixes the game's text font to be much closer to the DS version, an option to disable the smoothing filter, widescreen support, remastered audio, and features the extra content from the DS port.
  • Porting Disaster:
    • The game received a PlayStation port which featured some extras the Super Nintendo version didn't have such as new anime FMV sequences, but the novelty wears off quickly as this version is marred with Loads and Loads of Loading, the game having in between in-games menus and battles.
    • On February 27, 2018, the game was released on Steam. Unfortunately, it was, by all accounts, a bad port of the mobile version. Reviews of this port were "Mostly Negative", with complaints including horribly blurred and distorted graphics, the mobile touchscreen interface constantly being visible even when using a controller or keyboard, said interface being counter intuitive for controller or keyboard, lower quality FMVs, among other glaring problems. Due to the negative backlash on this port, Square Enix began working on patches in an attempt to rectify many of these issues and include features based on the criticism and feedback it received.
  • Self Fanservice:
    • Magus is drawn in Fan Art as a typical White-Haired Pretty Boy (that is, in addition to his long white hair, he is also drawn very pretty), but Akira Toriyama's original character design for him is anything but. Ironically, however, later games in the series imply that despite Toriyama's design, he really is quite attractive.
    • To a lesser extent, some female characters like Lucca and Ayla.
    • In-game, Frog is only half of Crono's height and artwork of him is almost always Ugly Cute. Not in fan art.
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Whooo! Let's race again, or do another strength test, or win another cat! Huh? Something about Lucca's machine? Who cares about THAT?!
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: Word of God is his Leitmotif isn't a 16-bit version of "Never Gonna Give You Up", but it sounds an awful lot like it.
  • That One Boss: Despite being one of the easiest of Square's RPGs on the whole, there's still a few:
    • Magus, due to the constantly changing barriers, although thankfully, he stops doing this midway throughout the battle. Depending on your party selection, he can be immune to your attacks up to half the time, and will likely always be immune at least one out of four.
    • Giga Gaia. There are three targets to hit, with two of them (the hands) dual casting powerful fire and shadow spells to mess up your entire team. It becomes a joke after a hand is destroyed, but by how much damage a player is likely to take, they may only have one person attacking with the other two healing each turn. Plus, the hand you destroyed won't be gone forever.
    • Lavos qualifies if you choose to face him at the very earliest possible moment in a New Game+ (via the Teleporter at the Millennial Fair); since you're only going into battle against all three stages of Lavos with only Crono and Marle, it's arguably the game's hardest battle (and if you choose to go in with Crono alone, it really is the game's hardest battle). But Lavos' defeat in this situation (or at said palace) is followed by the special "Developer's Room" ending.
    • Lavos in the Ocean Palace is not quite a slouch; while he's intended as a Hopeless Boss Fight during an initial playthrough, he actually is beatable here and doing so unlocks the "Developer's Room" ending. However, even for a team who's gotten all the late game treasure, beaten the game and made their way through most of a New Game+, his heavily enhanced stats in this fight can still make him pretty studly and a tough fight. Thankfully, this only applies to his "outer shell" form, and the other two forms at this point have regular stats, since you weren't expected to win the first one.
  • That One Sidequest:
    • The Lost Sanctum in the DS re-release. To wit: A series of blatant Fetch Quests involving inescapable, scripted battles, going up and down the same mountain at least seven times, and not being able to progress without speaking to the right NPC to set off an event flag despite having all the items necessary to proceed. Many of the rewards are quickly outclassed by those found in the post-game dungeon, the Dimensional Vortexes.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The DS's retranslation (and inclusion of a new Bonus Boss and secret ending) inspires ire from some fans. This is in spite of the fact that most important stuff remained the same; all that really changed were Frog's Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, some item/monster/tech names, and a bit of dialogue cleanup here and there. Locations as well. this guide tells everything that was changed from the SNES/PSX to the DS versions. Not all of it is bad though.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Frog King seen in Frog's flashback might have made an interesting Bonus Boss, but he never shows up outside said flashback.
  • Tier-Induced Scrappy: Some players hate Marle because she doesn't have any solo "group cure" spells or any good solo offensive spells. This view is not universal by any means, and both the supporters and detractors of Marle can go back and forth infinitely on the subject.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion:
    • Azala is apparently female, and because she and Nizbel are the only prehistoric characters who know what pronouns are. Reptites don't have Non-Mammal Mammaries, apparently. This isn't helped by Azala's gender not being referenced ever in the SNES version. Thankfully, Nizbel II settled the matter in the DS version.
    • Flea, who looks like a woman but still takes great offense when the party assumes he's a woman. According to Flea, since power is beautiful and he's powerful, looking like a woman is appropriate.
  • Wangst: Frog. He gets over it, eventually.
  • The Woobie: Frog, Robo and Schala. In-game, Ayla woobifies Azala right before her death.
  • Woolseyism: Done by Woolsey himself, no less:
    • Likely the source of Ozzie/Slash/Flea being named as such rather than their original condiment-themed names. Also, Schala was originally named "Sara" in the Japanese version; Janus was named "Jackie". Similar to Tina/Terra, this is a case where the names that would've sounded "exotic" to Japanese speakers, but commonplace to English speakers, was changed to preserve the exoticism. Same goes for the Gurus' names, Gaspar, Melchior and Belthazar, which were "Gash", "Mash" and "Bash" in the Japanese version, but make a lot more sense in the English translation.
    • In a subversion of using an "exotic" name, Woolsey changed Marle's real name Princess Marledia to Princess Nadia. Also, Janus' Japanese name is Jakki, not Jackie, though it's likely Woolsey didn't know that as both names are written the same in Japanese.
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