Chrono Trigger
Square's "Dream Team" — Final Fantasy's creator, Dragon Quest's creator, and Dragon Ball's artist — built a time-travel RPG so good that thirty years later it still tops greatest-of-all-time lists. A dozen endings, no random battles, and the game that gave New Game Plus its name.
Chrono Trigger was gaming's supergroup album. Square paired Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi with Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama — a "Dream Team" spanning the two biggest RPG franchises in Japan — and released the result for the Super Nintendo on March 11, 1995 in Japan and August 22, 1995 in North America. Composer Yasunori Mitsuda, assisted by Final Fantasy veteran Nobuo Uematsu, delivered a score still ranked among the best in games.
The game sent a spiky-haired kid named Crono ricocheting between prehistory, the Middle Ages, a post-apocalyptic future, and the end of time itself, with the party's choices across eras rippling forward through history. The design was quietly revolutionary: enemies were visible on the map instead of ambushing you in random encounters, the story branched into a dozen different endings, and finishing the game unlocked New Game Plus — a mode earlier games had toyed with, but which Chrono Trigger named and made standard. Japan bought two million copies in two months, making it the country's second best-selling game of 1995 behind Dragon Quest VI.
Its reputation only grew from there. PlayStation and Nintendo DS re-releases carried it to new generations, the various versions have shipped over five million copies worldwide, and it remains a permanent fixture near the top of best-games-ever rankings. Square never made a true sequel beyond 1999's Chrono Cross — which may be why the original's ending still feels untouchable.
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