Editor’s note: This review was written by Matt Parmenter, a student at Full Sail University. Matt was born and raised in metro Denver. He started playing games like the Super Solvers series on the PC from an early age. His first console system was the Super Nintendo, and since the day he received that system, he’s been hooked. Matt’s grown more and more interested in role-playing games over the years, with recent iterations such as the Fable series and Dragon Age: Origins vying for his attention. However, his attentions are not dominated by RPGs alone; other favorite games include Army of Two, Katamari Damacy and the Kingdom Hearts series. After graduating from Full Sail University, Matt hopes to enter the videogame industry and make an impact writing and designing emotionally fulfilling and intriguing games.

Chrono Trigger is known as a standard in videogame RPGs, and there’s a very good reason: solid gameplay and a truly epic story. Sure, it has the classic — and now overused — themes like a princess that just wants to tag along, a seemingly heartless villain with a complicated backstory and an alien that wants to eat the world, but all of these elements are still fresh anytime I play the game. One of my best friends and I still talk about Chrono Trigger because its story is rich and timeless.

Chrono Trigger is, at its core, about saving the world. A boy, his friend and a princess get pulled back in time by an experiment gone wrong, and throughout their adventures, they meet more friends and stumble upon a horrific alien entity named Lavos, who eventually attacks and scars the world horribly. The brilliant part of this story, to me, is the time-traveling element. There are several different periods of time you visit throughout the game, and because of this, you get to see what changes and what stays the same. You can also directly affect future periods in some ways by doing something in an earlier time.

The game makes great use of time-traveling in many different ways. You rescue the princess you unwittingly befriended only to later have her disappear because something happened to her ancestor in the past. “Rats!” you might imagine your character to say, were he ever to speak. I didn’t realize it when first playing it, but nowadays, with games like Mass Effect, in which your main character actually speaks, the main character of Chrono Trigger falls a little flat in terms of personality. However, he still expresses what he needs to express, which is usually determination to save his friends and his world. The wonderful thing about Chrono Trigger’s story is there is room to explore each character’s own individual trials. Every character goes through something quite traumatic, and it was my great pleasure to witness such dedication to telling those tales.

In the game, you travel everywhere — well, everywhen would be more appropriate — from 65,000,000 BC to 2300 AD. Your main character starts in 1000 AD, but you pick up a cave woman named Ayla in 65,000,000 BC and even a sentient robot, conveniently named Robo, in 2300 AD. You also befriend a former squire who’s been turned into a frog-man, and if you do things correctly, you can even befriend a mysterious, powerful and gruff sorcerer.

Throughout your travels in Chrono Trigger, you deal with an ancient reptilian race that tries to take over the world, a factory full of unfeeling robots and a group of magic-wielding people with an underwater fortress. I enjoyed the technique system that allows characters that gain experience together to learn dual and even triple techniques. Your robot friend and your main character can learn a devastating spin technique, and eventually, your science-whiz friend, Lucca, can add fire to it to make it even more destructive. These combinations add some flavor and a feeling of growing camaraderie between this group of people traveling through time in an epic, and surely exhausting, race to save the world.

The combat system is fairly basic. Each of your characters has a gauge that builds up; when the gauge is filled, your character can do a basic attack, use a technique or use an item. If two or more characters have a full gauge and have unlocked a dual or triple technique, they can unleash that upon the enemy. Once you’ve got a handle on that system, it’s just a matter of keeping an eye on your characters’ HP and MP and figuring out what does the most damage to your enemy.

One of the most interesting things to me in an RPG is side quests. If an RPG doesn’t have some fun, engaging side quests and is purely a straightforward story, I might still play it, but I’m going to feel like something is missing. In Chrono Trigger, there are plenty of side quests, and they all deal with people you’ve met before or with people in your party. To get your frog-man friend’s best weapon, you have to deal with the ghosts of his past quite literally. There’s a side quest involving the mystery of Robo’s creation. One side quest involves dealing with the death of a party member.

I could go on forever about the depth and richness of Chrono Trigger. It was one of my favorite games growing up, and with a newer version on the Nintendo DS, I can share it with those who couldn’t or didn’t play it before. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys RPGs but hasn’t had the pleasure of experiencing it yet. The game creates many inspiring moments: Some are tearjerkers, and some are epically amazing. As long as you don’t mind a silent protagonist, you’ll enjoy this game.