Left feeling a bit empty after playing it for the first time a few months ago(why did I wait so long?) I am afraid no JRPG will be able to surpass it. Would love to have a discussion about similar games that reach the same quality level (Note: I have already played Final Fantasy VI ).
Sea of Stars JUST dropped.
Sea of Stars
I’ve heard a lot of vague talk about it. I have Game Pass (which it’s one). Does it live up to the hype? It might be my next try if/when I cool on Starfield.
I played the demo and liked it a lot. Beautiful looking game that feels good to control. The only reason I’m not playing the full game is that I feel like I owe Baldur’s Gate III my attention, since I so rarely buy new games :p
It’s directly Chrono Trigger inspired.
If this wasn’t !PatientGamers, this’d be a lay up for Sea of Stars, and every comment would just say “Sea of Stars”.
Nice. You definitely just nudged it up on my playlist.
What I’ve heard is that it’s very much like Chrono Trigger aesthetics-wise but very different regarding writing quality. Now, a lot of people play JRPGs not necessarily for their plot, story, character motivation/development and quality of prose but for their particular atmosphere crafted by their use of graphics, music, animation/sprites, etc and there’s nothing wrong with that, so maybe it will be your vibe
Undertale, tales of vesperia, golden sun, Earthbound are some decent choices
Its not a very “patient gamer” recommendation, but Sea of Stars came out a couple of weeks ago, it is a modern game inspired by retro JRPG titles like Chrono Trigger. I haven’t played it yet, but it looks super cool.
Finished it yesterday, can confirm, while it’s not on par of course, it’s a great game and an amazing tribute to old JRPG.
Bravely default for the 3Ds or emulate it with Citra
Not gonna spoil anything, but I fell so hard for the twist and it absolutely made the game for me lol, big recommend.
Oh i have already played it. Yes same here, I went into it blind so it was great. Emulated it too so I could speed up the grinding
Chrono trigger has a sequel, Chrono cross
Great game. Awful sequel.
Whenever someone makes that claim I just assume they haven’t actually played Chrono Cross.
I played CC.
Sure, the story is connected - Kid being raised by Lucca, the Time Devourer being Lavos, Guile being strongly hinted to be Magus, all that thing. But the loads of characters make you look at the big picture, instead of focusing on their individual personalities; the theme (dimensional travel vs. time travel) is different; and the battle system is nothing alike. Those things are actually improvements, but at least for me, they make it that CC doesn’t scratch the same itch as CT.
And there’s always that lingering melancholy in Chrono Cross that is at the same time beautiful and completely unlike the “happy” Chrono Trigger.
That’s why I say that it’s a great game, but an awful sequel. It doesn’t have the elements that make you say “THAT is Chrono Trigger 2!”, but it’s fun and in certain aspects better than CT.
In fact one of the goals as stated by the team was that they very explicitly did not want to pump out “Chrono Trigger but it’s got a 2 at the end of it”.
Yup. In other words they didn’t want to pump out a sequel. Even then that’s what plenty people expected from CC, since it’s “part of the Chrono series”, and then got disappointed and an otherwise great game got this “but what about CT…” stigma. (I remember the outrage back then. And the kids distorting it into a SNES vs. PS fight.)
I agree with this assessment a lot. The art and environmental design is gorgeous. The music is top notch (the battle theme is a bit polarizing though). In terms of production it’s seriously well put together, for the most part. But, it suffers a lot of the worst excesses of 90s JRPG design, with a meandering, nonsensical plot and a battle system that’s more interested in being fiddly than in being fun. It feels like one of the worst examples of a company just straight up not understanding the appeal of a game and making a “sequel” that could easily have been called something else. As a recommendation for someone just coming off of Chrono Trigger, I can hardly imagine something worse, oddly.
I disagree. As for the meandering, your nostalgia is blinding you to how bonkers Chrono Trigger’s story is.
“You turn the corner and you’re in a space station now but it’s also at the bottom of the ocean and floating up in the sky at all times simultaneously and the guards are knockoffs of this one goofy karaoke cat machine your childhood friend made for some reason, now crash your TARDIS into it so you can go fight cyber god mom before she wakes up the ufo that’s using our planet as an egg for the third time, your team is a super Saiyan clone with a samurai sword, the mechanic from dr slump, a cavewoman you abducted, an evil robot with memory loss, cyber god mom’s goth son Dracula, tomboy princess and some frog”
The major plot points are “fighting a bridge zombie”, “Ozzie’s in a pickle”, “showing a necklace to some treasure chests”, “jailbreak”, “oh no time is broken”, “genre whiplash”, “jailbreak again”, “the time machine flies now”, “did those two goblins just say by our powers combined”, “eyes cream”, and “time to kill god x5”.
I love Chrono Trigger deeply. But the biggest sin Chrono Cross committed was that they just threw more things at the wall in their nearly identical “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach.Sidenote: I will fight for Cross’s combat system.
This is an interesting topic now that I think about it.
I’d like to give people in this thread the warning I wish they had given me about this game. Don’t go into Cross expecting it to have anything to do with Trigger (or expecting it to be 10% as good as Trigger). They made a weird JRPG where every character is just a text filter and then decided in the last 3 hours that it was the sequel to Chrono Trigger. It has nothing in common with CT except a couple of place names and some dead characters, and would be a much better game if they called it Lynx Quest or Radical Dreamers 2 or what the hell ever.
Hey so my rebuttal is just a really long list of spoilers for Chrono Cross, demonstrating how every corner of Cross is deeply connected to Trigger. Seriously, like, every aspect of the game.
I will always prefer an experiment that fails over an unending stream of bland clones.I disagree with the extent of your warning, but only just. I also originally bounced off of Chrono Cross because it wasn’t what I was expecting (3D Chrono Trigger). Once I went back to it like it was a brand new game, I grew to enjoy it on its own merits.
At least play it long enough to get the nostalgia whenever you hear the music come up on rainwave :p
Can’t agree enough. My brother and I played through Chrono Cross together and that’s honestly the only reason we even finished it.
It’s tenuously connected to Chrono Trigger at best and those plot points are terribly written anyway. Combat is mediocre, the element system is annoying, and there’s so many characters that only a couple of them get any screentime.
If you enjoyed CT, don’t play CC; you’ll almost certainly be disappointed.
I don’t think it’s fair to say not to bother with Chrono Cross but I do agree it’s important to stress how unrelated to Chrono Trigger it is. As a sequel it fails. But as its own stand alone JRPG, I think it’s great.
Personally I love Chrono Cross and how different it was. And the music is ridiculously good (Yasunori Mitsuda main Chrono Trigger composer.)
I think it’s worth a go. It starts you somewhere in the middle of the story so you get action straight away. So anyone who tries it will know quickly if it will be up their alley without having to invest too much time.
Really good final fantasy of the era, but not a real sequel to Chrono trigger.
Pop quiz, who’s the final boss of Chrono Cross?
As I recall it’s the time devourer which is lavos after merging with part of schala, but it takes more than a final boss to make something a real sequel to another thing.
So the fundamental theme of scratching back our destiny from our own self-destructive nature isn’t a 1:1 match?
You’re free to disagree and think it’s a perfect sequel that has everything you ever wanted out of a chrono trigger sequel. Lots of people like it. I just don’t feel that it’s a real sequel.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t get into many of them after it and replayed it so many times.
Secret of Evermore, or switch genres. Nothing beats Chrono Trigger.
If you want something more modern, but that still feels very classic, try Sea of Stars. It gives off major chrono trigger energy from my play through so far.
It’s got that Chrono Trigger Feel™. The first time we triggered a battle, the party and enemies all jumped to their starting places on the map. I was so happy
I find the usual large and long SNES/PS1 era JRPGs quite bloated and grindy, to be honest. A while ago I played Phantasy Star IV, which is a lot more lightweight, linear and shorter than say, FF6, and I found that quite refreshing. Maybe you can try that as a change of style.
Phantasy Star II is pretty awesome too.
II is very good, but it does get VERY grindy right at the end.
This is true. I played it when it was new and I had fond memories of insanely grinding SMS PS1, so it seemed normal. The best thing to do is to go to Climatrol and farm Blastoids (they reproduce within a battle and you can get insane EXP by waiting for them to do that). Some weird slima-slug-somethings do that too.
Yeah, at the time it didn’t seem so out of line. I guess I just feel like it hasn’t held up as well against modern games as something like Chrono Trigger or FFVI.
That also shows up in the comparison between PS II and IV… IV is way more cut-sceney, linear and streamlined with less grinding required. I guess I actually like the grinding!
Nothing surpasses chronotrigger even after all these years.
Two contemporaries of chronotrigger that were much different but still quite good are terranigma and seiken detensu 3.
Two games that claimed to be trying to do something similar mechanically that are RPGs are septerra core and anachronox. Both are for PC and should run on a potato these days.
The legacy of Kain series and in particular the soul reaver offshoot has a great story and time travel elements, but they’re more action puzzle games.
My big 3 on that system were Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and Mario RPG, in no particular order (though I generally lean toward Earthbound). I would throw Zelda: A Link To The Past as an honorable mention (not an RPG in the same sense of course). All classics and worthy of respect in their own light
Gotta say I want to recommend Zelda: LttP too, even though it’s more action-y. One of those games that feels like you’ve really gone on an adventure.
Earthbound probably
Nothing else reaches the same quality as Chrono Trigger in the same way. You have to settle for lower quality with similar pacing, or try to reach the same level of quality in a different way.
Similar pacing, lower quality: Phantasy Star IV, Super Mario RPG, Final Fantasy IV
Comparable quality, different style: Earthbound, Final Fantasy VII (FF6 is the real answer, but FF7 is the most similar game to FF6)
Similar aspects, lower quality: Dragon Quest IV, Radical Dreamers & Chrono Cross, possibly Radiant HistoriaRadiant Historia definitely hits some of the same notes.
I liked Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age more than Chrono Trigger.
Super Mario RPG is pretty high up there, as well.
Lost Odyssey is a gem that doesn’t get enough love. Chrono Trigger might be a bit higher on my list, by this is definitely worth a playthrough. Be prepared for some real pulls at your heart strings if you read through the short stories in the game.
There are a lot of good jrpg recommendations in this thread, but more focused on the jrpgs of that time. If you are looking for something more recent, I can’t recommend Persona 5 enough, you don’t need to have played the earlier ones as the stories are independent from each other, it is as good as Chrono Trigger for me, and now quite accessible since persona 5 royal came to pc and all consoles. The recent dragons quest games are also pretty good.
