Chrono Trigger DS is a remake of a SNES jRPG from the early 90's. It has a rather interesting time travel premise that plays a huge part in the game; you essentially visit the same world in 5 different eras of history spanning from 65,000,000 BC (BC? Did the world of Chrono Trigger have a Christ? Why didn't HE save us from Lavos?) to a post-apocalyptic future. As far as a game premise, it's actually quite clever and works pretty well. Early on, your time travel escapades are limited to entering and exiting times at very specific locations, while later in the game you get a ship that basically lets you fly anywhere/anytime you want. The combination of the two is perhaps my first beef with the game.
The vast majority of your time in Chrono Trigger is relatively linear; the game actually blocks off your time travel portals on a number of occasions forcing you to complete some sort of goal in the time you're in before you can resume time surfing. While I generally prefer more open ended RPGs, I thought it worked pretty well here. It was pretty much always clear where I was supposed to go while still giving me a bit of freedom. Once you get the time travel ship though, perhaps 5/6th of the way through the game, the game opens up dramatically. Generally I would think that it would be a good thing, but it was such a stark contrast with relatively little explanation, that I suddenly found myself having no idea where, when, or what I was supposed to be doing. The game also throws you a handful of option sidequests at this point, which, once again, I felt weren't quite clear enough in a lot of their goals. Also, this all happened so late in the game that I almost felt like there was just no need; my gear was quite good and I was already at a decent level. If all these side quests had been available in some shape or form throughout most of the game, it would have been excellent. Perhaps I just took to long to play the game, but by the time I got to that point in the game, I was pretty much just ready to be done.
There was another thing about the game that just didn't quite live up to hype: "techs." Techs (or techniques for short I guess) is the magic/special moves that your characters can perform. As the game progresses you earn dual and even triple techs that your characters can perform together. It sounds like a great idea on paper, but in my experience the power of the dual and especially the triple techs wasn't any more (and sometimes less!) than it was to have each character do a tech on their own. If you are going to go through the effort of leveling up 3 characters together (or even equipping a special item for lots of the triple techs), they should be AMAZING, but they just... aren't. I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand the number of triple techs I performed in the whole game and on two the number of dual techs. It was disappointing to have such an interesting feature be so utterly worthless.
While there were certainly plenty of things that I didn't really like, the game as a whole was definitely a pleasant diversion. It provided over 20 hours of game play for a direct play through, which is a pretty big helping for a DS game.
Expect a full set of final thoughts on Saturday, while tomorrow will introduce my other new "special" daty: Flashgame Friday. See you then.
In the meantime, feel free to suggest any old school games (preferably ones that you think I've played, although I'm not opposed to firing up an emulator) that you'd like me to discuss next week.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment