Chrono Trigger

Video games have always been a medium of constant and fast-paced evolution. Every generation of gaming takes massive technological strides forward with game designers always eager to create the latest and greatest. While this can be very rewarding for gamers, sometimes it seems as if the fundamentals of great game design get left in the dust.

One such area is video game music. While there are plenty of modern games that feature fantastic music (the eerie Blade Runner-esque score of Mass Effect comes to mind), there are also a great deal that seem to take a “good enough” approach, that relegates it to an afterthought. Ironically, in an era where any level of quality is possible in game music, I find myself seeing more ambition in the technologically limited past. Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger and Earthbound are three titles that succeeded wildly in the realm of music, while doing it with much less than what the modern big budget game has at its disposal. Anyone who wants to understand what goes into a good soundtrack should look no further than these three classics.

One of the first RPGs I ever played was Chrono Trigger. Oh sure, I had played Dragon Warrior when I was but a wee zygote and I'm pretty sure I hit Earthbound on the SNES first, but I was still damn green when it came to RPGs. I know this because after some moaning to my friend about the difficulty of saving in Chrono Trigger, he informed me that I could actually save anywhere on the world map instead of saving only once in a blue moon at the game's very uncommon save points. I give my old friend endless credit for gently informing me of an RPG trope that is only slightly less common than magic swords. Had he chosen to mock me instead, he might have spontaneously invented the modern usage of the word noob in 1995.

Despite such early stumbles, RPGs very quickly became my genre of choice. Needless to say, I had made a terrible decision  that would cost me dearly in time, money, and general social standing for years to come. At least I had friends leveling up along the road to hell with me! Squaresoft was setting the world on fire back then as far as our little gang was concerned, and the feedback loop of our enthusiasm kept us all going and made “gamers” out of the lot of us. As for myself, I would eventually develop an obsession that not even some of my fellow gamers understood.