Chrono Trigger has always been praised as some end all be all magical wonder RPG of the SNES, at least, since emulators became popular. As a youngling, id only met a handful of other people who'd played this game, and like myself, none could find much enjoyment in the game. For years i've tried to find where everybody finds these amazing aspects, but replay after replay, cartridge after save state, i come up short.

Graphics: I find the graphics to be about the average for SNES RPG's. While things generally look nice, and animations are well done, they arent exactly eye popping or stand-outish.  the supposedly amazing skill amimations fall well short of this, generally being some simple image stretched to terrible looking sizes, or a paralax background shifting slightly in shape/size.

Sound: i find the sound to be a bit boring for an SNES RPG. its not bad, per say, but when you place it up against most music from most others, it will not be the song youd prefer to hear. sound effects are the same as you always hear and as such not worth really noting. the praise the sound generally hears, is not about the sounds themselves, but of the composer of said sounds. 

Addictiveness: meh, its a generic cookie cutter RPG with a basic cookie cutter battle system that just looks a little bit different. it boils down into the same "hold confirm and attack constantly" strategy that console RPG's so often had. couple that with the overall generic and lackluster feel of the game, and for me there is very little to keep me coming back except in the hopes that ill one day find that 3 seconds of gameplay i seem to keep missing that gets everyone else hooked.

Story: the story is a jumble of nonsensical idiocy, coupled with the insertion of what the japanese apparently find funny....which never is. while not quite as bad as the spiritual successor, it is still an overly convoluted mess of things that make no sense no matter how you look at it. the character development is laughable at best, and some of the alternate endings just ruin the game entirely. when i can talk to the developers of the game by beating it in a specific manner, it breaks any immersion, and now were just following a couple preset paths. its no longer a story, its just a bad, half hour anime stretched into 25 hours.

Depth: there is ALOT to do in this game. 78 different areas, not counting the world map, 7 characters with a decent supply of equipment, 13 different endings, a huge amount of secret events, items, and useless trinkets, "sealed chests" which give a legit reason to WANT to go back to previous areas, as some have some really nice gear, and a very large array of enemies, make this game stand alone in this category. that i know of, no SNES game period offers nearly this much to do. while alot of it is boring, like going to find chests, some is quite amusing such as "cloning" all of your characters. the endings are where this really shines however. even though every ending as as stupid as the one before it, there are 13 DIFFERENT ENDINGS. sure, you have only basic control over these, as in "make a choice here, this is the ending you will receive", but there were still alot of endings for this game, and alot overall to do.

Difficulty: ppppft. this isnt even worth a paragraph. you just go through the entire game doing nothing but attack, and the occasional healing when boss fighting. its harder to die than it is not to.

overall, i cant see what the big deal is. ive read and heard about this game frequently in recent years, but its almost always talking about the people who worked on it, and how they were such badasses over at final fantasy. nobody ever bothers to mentiont hat this game makes no sense at all, or how its 100% generic except the additions of some random crap to do. sometimes they praise the "combo system", but they always neglect to mention how almost every combo attack is worthless, because doing the attacks that it used seperately is almost always more efficient. this is just another dumbed down Lite RPG made for people who didnt want an RPG, they wanted a side scroller with a level up function.

TetraDigm : Nice review. Nice and lengthy and stuff. Good spacing and stuff. Uhm... Categories and stuff. Very well described feelings of the game... yeah... Nice review and junk bro.

Hiya

..uh nice review i guess i personally really loved the game myself

This review wasn't that bad! There was a good amount of detail, and a good length for a review. I think you should review Earthbound. The most exotic RPG ever made. Good luck with the reviews!

PixelBrick : i have been tempted, but it would literally be nothing but a review talking crap about the entire game. i generally try not to review any games where i cant find ANYTHING positive to say about it.

TetraDigm : I have yet to play Chrono Trigger, myself. Been meaning to. But from what you have said, this seems just like Earthbound. People raved and raved about it calling it the best RPG of all time, etc etc. When I finally played it, I was severely disappointed in that all the events that happened seemed random and hardly even fit together at all. Just random thing after random thing that just got molded into the main quest. Was not a fan. I'll probably try Chrono Trigger eventually, but not expecting it to live up to the hype.

I like it very well descriptive and a lot of detail you would be in the top 3 reviews I have read today so good for you.

This is a great review and I'm glad that you were honest when writing it. Lots of people let popular opinion cloud their opinions about a game when in comes to reviewing it.

Although I don't think it's "The Best RPG of all time" I do find it to be a good game. The character development is pretty good and you get a feeling for the relationships built while the story progresses. It's also pretty cool that there are several different endings...that wasn't something in a lot of games back then.

Overall I thought it was a very good game certainly one of the better action/RPG's on the system but I would stop short from saying it's one of the best games ever.

Jordanv78 :

i could argue the quality of the character development all day on this game. though it was there, and it was pretty much always happening, it happened in a way that just made little to no sense, or made every character look like they were the most incompetent beings on the planet.

I like this review, it's a good size and all the details are in there that one would need to know. However, I would suggest that you put the category grades in the paragraph as well.

You rated the difficulty 1, so you obviously haven't fought Masa & Mune yet.

Although I completely disagree with your opinion, I had to rate it 4 since it was very well detailed and you actually supported your arguments (although you could have added a little more detail). I'm surprised you rate it so low; are you a child of the 16-bits or 32-bits era?