Chrono Trigger celebrated the 30-year anniversary of its US release this week. Below, we look back at how it continues to endure and what continues to make it a powerful, relevant classic.
After 30 years, I still often find myself thinking about Fiona’s Forest in Chrono Trigger, and one of the scenes that captures what makes the game so enduring for me.
It’s a late-game moment after you complete one of Chrono Trigger’s few but meaningful side quests. In it, you meet a woman named Fiona, who has dedicated herself to planting a forest around her small cottage. Her husband has gone away to war as the local kingdom, Guardia, takes on a powerful magician known as the Fiendlord and his army of demi-human creatures. When you find her, Fiona worries over his safety and laments that while the couple had hoped to grow the grove together, she can’t tend it on her own.
Chrono Trigger is a time-travel game, and Fiona lives in the year 600 A.D. A plurality of the cast hails from 1000 A.D., so you learn pretty quickly after first meeting Fiona that no forest survives into the future. It’s not exactly clear what happened in Fiona’s story, but we can make an educated guess. The war continued. Her husband didn’t return. She never realized her dream.
That changes over the course of the game, thanks to your influence. The story pushes you to help the kingdom of Guardia fight key battles, like the one at Zenan Bridge, where you resupply Guardia’s soldiers and then help stop the advance of the Fiendlord’s forces. Later, you personally defeat the Fiendlord and his lieutenants, putting a stop to the war and changing history.
When you drop by Fiona’s cottage later in the story, her husband has returned, but now listless monsters, with no Fiendlord to follow, have scattered into the region, turning the whole area into a wasteland. So you offer to lend a hand and dip down into the nearby Sunken Desert and carve up the undead creature sucking the life out of the area.
Returning to Fiona, you tell her the good news–she can tend the land without fear. But Fiona realizes that even with her husband, the job of cultivating the forest is too big, and they won’t live long enough to see the it through. That’s when your robot companion, Robo, volunteers to hang around for 400 years to assist in tending to the grove.
You zip forward in time to 1000 A.D. and now, where once stretched empty sands, green trees march for miles. Fiona’s cottage has been replaced by a shrine, tended by acolytes paying tribute to her for her efforts. On a dais at the center, bathed in sunlight, is Robo, now rusted and still, venerated for his tireless work in bringing life to a place where there was none.
I first played Chrono Trigger when it was released in the U.S. in 1995, when I was 10 years old, and at the time, it was revelatory; formative. It was one of those random Christmas gifts from relatives, my aunt and uncle seemingly having chosen it arbitrarily from the shelves of a Toys ‘R’ Us or K-Mart. My uncle is a fan of games, but the kind of person who’d go out for a Legend of Zelda and snag a copy of Doom or Madden, and has never really been one to stay up on new titles, especially in the mid-’90s. I’m doubtful he knew anything about the game outside its cover art, which had a similar vibe to A Link to the Past, and he knew I liked that because I played it at his house whenever I visited.
That makes his decision to grab Chrono Trigger, rather than anything else, something of a fateful one. I played Chrono Trigger over the course of what felt like the next year–when I finally defeated Lavos, I remember it being bright and sunny and summer outside–and it blew my tiny brain out the back of my young head. Chrono Trigger was the first time I saw that games had the potential to be as powerful, emotional, and even moving as a book or a movie, that they could be something more than mechanically satisfying like Mario or fascinatingly expansive like Zelda. Every game I had ever played before it was a toy, but Chrono Trigger was a piece of art. I had always liked games–but I loved Chrono Trigger.
It is, in no uncertain terms, the game that put me on the path to be a person who writes about games.
When you show up 400 years later, for the people caring for it, the shrine is also Robo’s tomb: a place to remember and celebrate him for who knows how many more centuries. But he’s a robot, and the genius inventor of your team, Lucca, only needs a few hours to fix him back up again. With nothing to do, you and the other characters find yourselves in Chrono Trigger’s quietest and most contemplative moment.
Your group of misfits, cobbled together from across the history of the planet, make camp in the forest that now exists purely because of your efforts and Robo’s sacrifice. Everyone stretches out under the leaves and the stars, ringed around a campfire, and just talks for a bit. While you can gather seven total characters together in Chrono Trigger, you only ever travel with three. You can visit your waiting party members in the strangely liminal space that is the End of Time while they wait for you to call them off the bench, but this is one of the few times, if not the only time, in which they just share each other’s company.
Chrono Trigger’s story is, for the most part, not especially deep. Replaying it recently, I was struck by how much I’d projected onto the characters, and how little there really is of each one demonstrated through dialogue. They’re mostly thin, and even though you have chances to dig into their backstories, the game never adds a great deal of dimension to any of them. Crono is brave but silent; Lucca is brilliant and (mostly) humble; Robo has a Data-like quality of fascination in the concepts of humanity and friendship; Frog is stoic, loyal, and guilt-ridden; Ayla is boisterous and daring.
Of them all, Marle is the most human, struggling under the yoke of her role as a princess and her desire for exploration and adventure, and to experience the world. She’s also very clearly the group’s heart, an incessantly uplifting and selfless voice inspiring the others to step up, to help, to do whatever they can for whoever they meet. When Crono, Lucca, and Marle wind up in the future for the first time and discover that the world ends in 1999 A.D. with a huge monster, Lavos, erupting from the ground to ravage the planet, it’s Marle who first steps forward. Marle is the one who decides that the three of them–three teenagers, who’ve nearly died more than a few times as they’ve accidentally traveled through time–must find a way to stop it.
Video by YouTuber OmegaVideoGameGod.
Chrono Trigger is pretty clearly a game written with a younger audience in mind, the sort of folks who might receive a copy of Chrono Trigger for Christmas in 1995. And indeed, at 10 years old, it hit me incredibly hard. Today, seeing Crono, Lucca, and Marle watch with horror and despair as Lavos annihilates their world, before deciding as the theme music swells that it’s up to them to keep the worst from happening, it still hits hard.
There might not be a great deal of depth to Chrono Trigger’s characters, and they might not go through especially involved arcs over the course of the story, beyond classic tropes like coming to terms with past failures or reconciling with parents. But they are, fundamentally, heroic and selfless people, and sometimes, that can be enough.
And despite mostly being a somewhat predictable adventure RPG, Chrono Trigger can still be surprising. In the camp scene, it becomes downright philosophical. Robo has had hundreds of years to think about why the group has been pulled on this journey, about the forces that have drawn them together. The team discusses ideas of fate and purpose, and speculates that a higher power–implied to be the afflicted, dying planet itself–might be responsible for the gates that allow them to travel through time.
Sitting in this forest they helped bring to life, the characters contemplate the connection they share with the world, and with each other, allowing one of the game’s major themes to come into clear focus.
Just before I set about replaying Chrono Trigger, “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan gave a speech at the Writers Guild Awards, after winning the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement. In it, Gilligan–famous and, at that very award show, lauded for creating one of the all-time anti-heroes in high school teacher-turned-meth kingpin Walter White–called for fewer stories about awful people and more about clear heroes.
After praising “Breaking Bad” writers and Walter White actor Bryan Cranston, Gilligan said, “Walter White, because of the work they did, he’s one of the all time great bad guys. But all things being equal, I think I’d rather be celebrated for creating someone a bit more inspiring. In 2025, it’s time to say that out loud, because we are living in an era where bad guys, the real life kind, are running amok.”
“When we create characters as indelible as Michael Corleone or Hannibal Lecter or Darth Vader or Tony Soprano, viewers everywhere, all around the world, they pay attention. They say, ‘Man, those dudes are badass. I want to be that cool,'” Gilligan went on. “When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the cautionary player that they were created to be. God help us, they become aspirational.”
In the final moments of the campfire scene, after suggesting the game’s time travel might be the planet itself reminiscing over its life and revisiting mistakes or regrets, someone asks Lucca if there’s anything she wishes she could change. Lucca hesitates in the moment, but when everyone’s asleep, you take control of her as she slips off and enters one of the time gates alone. This one isn’t blue like all the others, but a somewhat frightening red.
If the player has visited Lucca’s house now and again back in 1000 A.D., they’ll recognize the location the gate takes them to as her home. Pages from a journal scattered around give a sense that you’ve traveled to some point in Lucca’s past, before she became the intrepid inventor you know–before she was even interested in such things.
Stumbling out into the front room, you get what is easily the most harrowing scene in the game. Lucca’s mother, cleaning one of the contraptions her husband has invented, gets caught in the machinery and is being slowly pulled into it. As you watch, a child Lucca scrambles about, trying to stop the machine, but too young to know how.
This is Chrono Trigger at its most intense, and also its most subtle. If you’ve previously visited Lucca’s house, you might not have realized what you were seeing. It’s possible you didn’t put together the fact that Lucca’s mother, Lara, always sits quietly in a chair in one of the house’s rooms. While talking to her, you might have seen Taban, Lucca’s father, bring Lara lunch. But while other characters sometimes mill about or change locations between scenes, Lara never does. She only sits quietly and, mostly, alone.
You’re seeing the worst moment of Lucca’s life–the reason why her mother is always in that chair.
The scene is one of only a couple of moments in Chrono Trigger in which time travel isn’t just part of your adventure, taking you somewhat haphazardly from era to era, where you help out whoever you meet. Here, you specifically go back to the past and right a wrong. If you’re quick about it, you can shut the machine down and save Lucca’s mother. If you’re 10, you might be overwhelmed, having had no idea how you should have prepared for this challenge–having no idea you could prepare for it. That can be horrifying.
Video by YouTuber Bruce Riggs.
But succeeding–saving Lucca’s mother, changing her life, altering the fates of these three people–is powerful. The results of the situation aren’t clear until later, when you return to Lucca’s house to find an energetic Lara moving around the rooms, doing housework, excited to see her daughter.
It’s not rare that in RPGs, you wander a world, interacting with people who need help like a sword-swinging, gun-toting Mr. Fix-It, taking on odd jobs and quests. In many of them, you can even be magnanimous about it, turning down payments characters offer or never asking for any. Often, they’ll hand you their grandma’s favorite sword or some such instead. Even when you refuse payment, there’s an implicit transaction in your actions, because after all, this is a game and you need to advance. Some games even let you ask before you take on somebody’s request: “What’s in it for me?”
Chrono Trigger is never really like that. You receive rewards for doing quests, sure, but that’s not why the characters do them. It’s the kind of story where you meet a person who wants to grow a forest, and someone in your group says, “I’d like to help.”
I think that’s why Chrono Trigger has stuck with me for 30 years, when so many other stories have come and gone, and why it feels especially powerful now. When Crono, Lucca, and Marle watch Lavos burn down the world, that event, legitimately, is not their problem. They’re from 1000 A.D. and will be long dead before the apocalypse. So will their children. Their children’s children. The children of their children’s children, and on.
They fight anyway, for people they’ll never know. They don’t know that they can stop Lavos. They just know that they should try. A forest could grow here, with help. Life is worth the effort.
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