Time Recollection

Once the autumn comes around, I get an itch that starts in the fingers and finds its way all the way up to my brain. At this point I can apply all the topical creams and choke down all the pills that my doctor may prescribe, but not even cowbell can help me at this point.

I have to play Chrono Trigger.

I’m not sure when this habit came up. I know I have done it for the past three years, maybe four, but I’m not sure. The funny thing is despite all my playthroughs of a game that hosts twelve endings, well, now thirteen, I have only seen two of them. The first being the standard “do everything” ending and the second being the new one only introduced in the DS version that came out last year.

One of the main draws of this game is supposed to be this multiple ending bit, but I’ve never done it. I’m not entirely sure why, but as I have played the game from start to finish three times in as many years, maybe a change up is due this year.

But why do I play this game so often? If you analyze it, the game isn’t perfect. It’s quite easy to get your characters very powerful and the challenge diminishes quickly. The battles aren’t random, which some like, but this makes the game a bit exploitable on replays, but perhaps that is the idea.

Yet it does feature an amazing journey. And with fast combat and a bunch of characters who can combine their skills to unleash even more powerful attacks. I remember looking through the manual at school during lunch and I think my friends and I got into trouble because of that, but we didn’t care.

Playing it now and analyzing it, it’s just a solid game. Everything it does it does at the very least well, and plenty of it’s points are excellent. You wrap that all up and it is a game that deserves to be played. But I play it every year.

Is it sentimental? If anything, Chrono Trigger is the reason I don’t change character names in games anymore and also don’t like when I have to set my own names.

Back when the game came out I never owned it. My friend Paul, however, did. It was his manual we were reading in school. He brought it over one day and I begged to borrow it. I forget what I lent him in exchange, but I spent tons of time in Chrono Trigger. I loved how fluid the characters looked when they ran around. I had no idea why Frog wouldn’t join my party after I found part of Masamune. I thought he should be happy! I explored every bit of every town. I was loving it, but my time with the game was short.

Summer vacation came and my game time diminished with it. You gotta be outdoors, right? I was also playing Magic The Gathering as well so that was sucking away a lot of my time. I was preparing for my first tournament and was actually pretty nervous about it looking back at it. I woke up the day of the tournament, a Saturday, and started getting ready.

The morning of the tournament, I remember watching TV in the living room and the phone ringing. My father picked it up in his normal jovial manner and quickly became serious. After hanging up, he ran out to get the newspaper. He came back in, flipped through it and called me to the kitchen table to show me the news article about my friend Travis being in an accident. He had died instantly.

I quickly called my friends, Paul, Josh and Tim, and told them the news. I didn’t even say “Hello” on the phone, I just blurted out what had happened. I had no idea what was going on.

I can’t remember well but I think my parents convinced me to go to the tournament to think about something else. I went, lost and went home. That evening I was supposed to go help my father with a DJ job, but I wasn’t feeling right. I went to my brothers room where the SNES was kept and booted up Chrono Trigger.

After loading my game there in my party sat Chrono, Frog and Robo, all named Eric, Josh and Travis.

I sat there with a bizarre feeling welling up inside of me. I didn’t know how to feel or how to express what I felt and to this day I still don’t.

I can’t recall if I ever finished that save game.

Years passed and my gaming habit died down. In college, I came across a used cart, picked it up and played through the game in a weekend. Chrono Cross then followed. My love for gaming began to flourish again. A year or so after that I did it again and it became a yearly habit, sans the Chrono Cross play.