What you can notice, if you've played all the SNES Final Fantasy titles is how the sixth installment takes the strengths of both the fourth and fifth game while eliminating their weaknesses. Like Chrono Trigger, it takes the original and traditional JRPG formula, but instead of enriching it with new elements, it perfects it in nearly every aspect. It doesn't do much new at all, but what it does, it does extremely well. But the mere fact that Chrono Trigger did it more than 10 years before the first Mass Effect came out and 8 years before the release of Knights of the Old Republic is a testament to how much the game was ahead of its time.įinal Fantasy VI however is a much more traditional experience when compared to its big competitor. Whether or not it was the first JRPG to successfully implement a non-linear progression system is something unbeknownst to me. The game even breaks the fourth wall to an extent by tailoring some of the details of its story around your gameplay approach. This idea is something that even today's games like Mass Effect 3 – basically all the big BioWare heavy hitters – are still struggling to implement correctly, and Chrono Trigger played around with it in 1995. There are areas that can be visited in different sequences, areas that you don't even have to visit and a final boss, that can be fought on a number of occasions. From a certain point on, the game opens up and becomes a very non-linear experience. It may not sound like much, but knowing exactly when you are about to engage in combat is a huge difference.Ĭhrono Trigger immensely innovates in another area as well, and that is the linear story-telling that japanese roleplaying games are usually prone to. Chrono Trigger however, does its best to take out a lot of that tedious nature of the genre by not having any random encounters. Sometimes there are areas where you have to grind for a while, and honestly, it can be a bit dry. You really need to devote time and energy into those kinds of experiences. JRPGs are not the type of video games that you can just put into the console and start playing for an hour or two before you get on with your life. Don't get me wrong, I love Japanese roleplaying games, but sometimes they can be a bit ropy. I feel that this takes out a lot of the tedious nature of the genre. No matter how you look at it, there are no randomly occurring battles in the game. They are scripted and thus can be predicted in many instances. However, those aren't random encounters either. Sometimes enemies just jump out of bushes and attack you. Of course there are some battles that are impossible to avoid. You can chose to walk around them or to engage combat. Instead, you can see enemies way ahead of time. You don't suddenly transition from dungeons, forests or deserts to the battle screen randomly. The most obvious observation is of course that there are no random encounters. What sets this game apart from all the rest is the way it innovates in a number of areas. However, the '94 and '95 games expanded on that principle – each in their own way. That's pretty much what Dragon Quest and the earlier Final Fantasy titles had established way before the 16 bit masterpieces were ever put on paper. They follow the traditional JRPG formula of visiting towns, talking to people, going to dungeons, fighting monsters and bosses, gaining levels and finding new equippable items. This allowed the developers to take advantage of all the experience they had accumulated up to that point.Īs a result, both Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI are superior to their predecessors in a number of areas, albeit in different ways. The reason those titles in particular seem to receive the most love, is that they were released late into the Super Nintendo's life span. Nearly everything the Japanese studio did back then was gold, and that's true in the case of both of the games I want to discuss in this article. First of all, Squaresoft was pretty much the company to be 20 years ago.
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