Anything You Can Do, Chrono Trigger Can Do Better

Francisco Souki

Thu., June 16, 10:30–12:00, Play Circle Theater

I had my first encounter with Chrono Trigger when I was nine years old. And even then, having never heard about it, I understood it was destined to become a classic. Character development, an amazing tutorial, a solid implementation of time-traveling, clever encounter designs, and much more bring this game close to perfection.

What it comes down to in the end is that the elements of the game seem to all have grown together as siblings in a family, affecting one another and developing a synergy that has deep roots in the design process. The icing on the cake is that the last necessary element is the player himself—giving meaning to the game via interaction and connecting the live wires of the game‘s guts in order to get the machine going.

A walkthrough of these interactions communicates that everything Chrono Trigger does, it does exactly right.

This talk is based on an essay that was written for the Well Played 3.0 book.