If you're a fan of RPGs, particularly JRPGs, then I'm sure you've played Chrono Trigger in the past, and enjoyed it. Well, what if I told you that the Chinese have struck again, producing yet another pirated downgrade of a beloved RPG? You might not believe me, but it's true, this does exist. And it's actually quite impressive, though not as impressive as the FF7 pirate. How impressive is it? Let's take a look. Don't get your hopes up too high, though, because it still has that Chinese pirate RPG air about it.

First, let's start off with the graphics, because they're actually not too bad, for the most part. The number of sprites and tiles that they were able to cram into a single cartridge is actually pretty impressive, though some of the character sprites are completely inaccurate - Crono's being a glaring example. In fact, up to the bossfight with Magus, all of the parts that people remember about Chrono Trigger are there - all of the characters, all of the essential locations, and the storyline as far as the game goes. Though some of the areas are changed - in Magus's castle, Flea's area is a puffy cloud area with chains bridging gaps, when in the game, it was just a normal area of the castle. Also, there's some graphical errors, but most of them are hardly noticeable.

The music, despite being rendered in a bad sound engine, is quite close to the original. The battle theme, the theme for 1000 A.D., the theme for 600 A.D., most of it is there. Unfortunately, the future's theme is not present, instead being replaced with the 600 A.D. theme. Unfortunately, there was no effort to make the sound effects anything close to the original, and thus they sound nothing like they did in the SNES original. But, I digress.

The gameplay is the real meat, and it shows exactly what went wrong with the porting of this game. Obviously, even with the SNES having weak processors for its time, it was more than twice as powerful as the NES before it, and even the Genesis could run circles around the NES any day. But, how badly could it have been ported? It could've been much worse, but it ends up like the FF7 port in some ways - impressive, for being a downgrade of a game that utilized functions and power that the NES simply didn't have.

The game starts off just as it should, with the same intro as the SNES version. To save space, all of the animation was taken out, but it's still faithful to the original game, and shows that they tried to make it as faithful as they could. You might almost think that it was done by fans as a project...until you realize that the entire game is in Chinese. It's still playable, but it really takes away from the experience of an RPG when you can't read the dialogue. If someone who knows Chinese can see whether or not this version follows the SNES version's dialogue, I'd be thankful.

Once you exit Crono's house, you realize something horrible - the overworld map is completely gone. In its place are roads that guide you to all of the locations present in this version, surrounded by impassable grass. Quite the downgrade, though it does save space, but I digress. After that tidbit, the fair is there, and here's where the console limitations really take effect - the minigames from the original version are gone. Yes, people, all of the minigames are gone. Some of the more memorable moments are no longer there, either, such as the old man with the lunch that you can steal.

For whatever reason, the limitations of the game engine(by the way, the game engine is the same one that these developers use for almost all of their RPGs,) start to really become noticeable. The time-travel animation, for example, is now a two-screen animation that takes up about 10% of the screen and doesn't look impressive in the slightest. A similar approach is taken for the cutscene in which the future of the planet is revealed - though instead, it's an actual animation made of different screens. The "animation" effect is ruined by the lackluster graphic design and the fact that it has to fade to black and load up another image, then fade it to black and load up the next image, and etc. To show you exactly what I mean, let me show you a video that showcases the cutscene in all its "glory."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J7jhgwjUbg

As I said before, I can't really pinpoint how close the story is to the real game, though I can make a guess. Unfortunately, it still isn't safe from typos/mistakes - at one point, 1000 A.D. is referred to as 10000 A.D. I don't know about you, but that seems like a pretty big mistake to me. In fact, I'm taking a point away from the Story rating just for that...it seems like a pretty crucial typo.

The game balance, which is one of the most important parts of an RPG, is usually severely flawed in some of these Chinese RPGs - in some of them, it's so bad that you can't even get through the first area of the game without a ridiculous amount of luck and grinding. In this game, however, this isn't too much of an issue. Enemies give out large amounts of experience and money, and it doesn't usually take too much EXP to gain a level, which refills that character's HP and MP. If you aren't careful, though, it's possible to end up in a situation where you're too weak to fight off the enemies in the area, and you can't go back and grind - the time when you first go to the Future comes to mind. But, there is one problem - if you try to go towards the bridge, you'd better be incredibly overleveled, or the enemies there will slaughter you in about two to three hits. There doesn't seem to be too much of a warning for this...

Speaking of the battling, it's not too bad - it's definitely more advanced than any of the Final Fantasy games on the NES were. It has an ATB battle system, just like the original game. The limitations of the game, however, become readily apparent due to it. For one thing, until your characters get a high enough Speed stat, the combat is hideously slow - you have to wait 10+ seconds for the bar to fill up, and you can't select commands while any animation is being played, even if the gauge is full. Also, the game doesn't pause when you select commands, items, or techs, which means that you have to rush to make sure that an item won't be administered too late.

To finish up, the game's actually pretty good, for the most part. The flaws that it has, aggravating-at-times they may be, are overshadowed by the sheer amount of effort that was put into it to port it onto a cartridge for a far inferior system. It's actually somewhat surprising that nobody has tried to translate and improve this game, considering the amount of effort that went into translating and improving the FF7 port...

Final Rating - C+(It shows that effort was put into it, and it's worth a play, but it doesn't shine as brightly as the FF7 port)