My (Last) First Time

If I had any sense of self reflexivity, I'd have known when I first started this autobiographical anecdote that it lacked a climax. While I think this finale disappoints on its own, it also disappoints even more so due to its concluding place in the narrative arc of these episodic blog posts.

Chrono Trigger circles and occasionally intersects with my personal history with video games, and functions as a fixed point to my shifting sense of taste. Indeed, Chrono Trigger has become one of my favourite games, not of its own accord but because it has had a pseudo-continual place in my life, if only as the game that continually confounded me but waited patiently for me to come to a place where I could finally appreciate it.

What Chrono Trigger is, is a fantastic game, that I am remarkably bad at. Even as we resume the story, things don't go as simply as they should.


I bought the fucker over the internet, a re-acquisition of the game/bane of my childhood. I received the cartridge in the mail, which I felt weird about almost immediately. I don't know if was the fact that I had initiated the sale and shipment of a now antiquated but niche product, an act that tainted me as one of those people, a collector; or if it was the receiving of the cartridge through the mail, and the process of removing the packaging that emphasised the cartridgeness of it. I had not opened removed a SNES game from packaging in some time, and so this felt different than buying the game at a pawn shop.

I pulled my old SNES from a box somewhere and booted up Chrono Trigger for the first time in years.

Whenever I revisit good games on the SNES, their sounds and graphics comfort me, like they're the smell of a childhood home, a certain sensual nostalgic pleasure, a reminder of times before the development of taste, a time where I could run real fast and launch into the sky with my yellow cape flapping behind me and my terrified green dino-mount clutched between my two legs.

I spent a few weeks with the game. I appreciated it a great deal. I renamed Robo and Frog as C3PO and Toad, respectively, because my names are just an inch less obvious. I loved the battle system, and the JRPGness of the experience, and the quaintness of the world map, and the place between dimensions where the Doctor Who alike stands with his monocle and explains the rules of time travel and the approach of Ragnarok.

Chrono Trigger successfully creates a world that feels genuine, one that makes the stakes of world destruction actually matter to me as a player beyond the fear of game over. Each time period feels authentic in its own fantasy world way, and when they are all layered upon each other, give me a real sense of this world's history. Instead of asking me to save a generic fantasy world as the over-arching game play, Chrono Trigger creates a tangible history of people and place that I want to save apart from my desire to "beat" the game.

I did indeed desire to save Chrono Trigger's world, and so when I came up against the golems, with their devastating counter-attacks, I quickly found the game, again, impossible.

I now know why they were impossible, but at the time I didn't. I had built a party based on physical attacks. Much like when I played the game as a child, when I was unable to defeat an enemy seemingly immune to magics, I now could not defeat a set of defiant gold blobs. My combat team was Chrono, cave-chicky, and C3P0. My main strategy with this party was to heal with C3P0 while I spammed the one attack where Jane through Chrono into the air and he slashed across the screen doing (serious) physical damage to all the monsters of the field. This tactic, when posed to the the golems, elicited a certain all-but-TPK'ing counter attack that left my party dead 'n gone after a few rounds.

I tried this stupid bitch of a battle several several times but died so quickly so many times, I once again decided the game was out for me. This game is dumb and is impossible and not my obvious/obtuse inability/refusal to adapt tactics to different kinds of boss battles.

I gave up. I talked about my failure with my friends (Meg) and they told me I needed to use magics, but I was a) too lazy to go back, b) didn't know shit about using magic in the game, c) figured my magic characters were too under-leveled to take into such a battle. Since I didn't want to grind for days to remake a new party, I gave up even harder.

And that was the end of SNES Chrono Trigger. I haven't played it since then. Sad, I know. Let it out. Let the tears come.

Years passed, and then, for us philistines (also for obsessives) the powers that be released Chrono Trigger for the DS. I picked it up to play on Meg's DS, because I 'm apparently a glutton for punishment. And, now with a sense, a real sense, of how to play RPGs, I was able to figure out the most obvious tactical strategy for the golem battles, and was able to even defeat the battle you aren't supposed to win but can if you've grinded (ground?) enough. And I finally was able to beat the game.

And it wasn't even hard. Indeed, that battle with the golems was harder than the final battle. For it I took Chrono, C3P0, and the bad guy turned good guy with a scythe. This wasn't even an optimized group, but I still kicked ass. It was a good day for me, a year ago to this day (what a stupid lie) I beat Chrono Trigger, the game that haunted me throughout my life as the good game I could never play.

(The DS version actually is sucky because of some seriously tacked on, artificial game lengthening where you climb up and down a mountain like a billion times. It gives you nothing of real value and you seriously waste 25 hours of your life fighting the same 8 groups of enemies. I never even bothered to explore the new dungeon for fear of it being even remotely like that mountain bull shit.)

So, my first time has a certain unceremonious conclusion to it. The story has tragedy in my loss of the game, and the sentimentality of re-acquiring the game, but it ends, for realz, in a cash-grab DS re-issue.

As a result, I feel a need to justify this anecdote otherwise, as something more than a narrative failing. In a sense, Chrono Trigger does track my relation to RPGs throughout my life. Indeed RPGs have a largely unremarkable role in my life, only recently have I acquired the taste for them. It's a shame; I've more than likely missed a great deal of good games due to my lack of appreciation. I guess the real question then, is whether FFXIII can foster this sort of regret/appreciation for the JRPG subgenre. So far things aren't looking good, especially if Chrono Trigger failed to do so as a JRPG itself. Or is it? Was that distinction around when it was made?. Hmm, but whatever.

P.S. Yes I know of Chrono Cross, and no I haven't played it. I have it on good authorities that it sucks.