Trabia Garden

I've finally played Chrono Trigger! When I was a teenager, Chrono Trigger was a source of immense frustration to me because everyone on the Internet seemed to rave about it, but it had never been released in Europe. In 2009, fourteen years after its original release, it finally reached these shores as a DS remake. And now I've played it!

To be honest, it wasn't quite as amazing and sparkly and magnificent as I was led to believe by years and years of hype, but it was still a lot of fun. The battle system is excellent, as is the soundtrack, and I like pretty much all the characters. There are a lot of lovely tiny touches in this game; I was rather charmed to realise that, when Marle misses an enemy, she gives an embarrassed laugh.

Ayla is the best. I thought her caveman speech patterns would become tiresome before long, but they actually turned out to be incredibly endearing. And I love that all the other characters have to do a million sidequests and give the world's greatest weaponsmiths the world's strongest materials and power up legendary swords if they want to get anywhere near the damage Ayla can deal just by using her fists.

I found renaming Magus a bit strange. All the other characters give you the 'rename' screen before their name is mentioned in-game. When the 'rename' screen popped up for Magus, everyone had been calling him 'Magus' for a long time. I assumed the screen represented a chance for him to cast off his old name and adopt a new identity, so I renamed him 'Esthar'; the colour of his hair reminded me of the futuristic city in Final Fantasy VIII. But then everyone who'd called him Magus before was suddenly calling him Esthar, even if they had no reason to know he'd changed his name! It made no sense! Presumably Magus liked my new name for him so much that he went through a Time Gate when I wasn't looking and wrote it into his history.

Towards the end, during the fight with Lavos, I found myself thinking, 'If we don't at some point go inside Lavos and walk around, I know nothing about Squaresoft.' I'm glad that my faith in Square's love of stupid final battle locations did not let me down.


I'm starting to wonder whether I should replay Final Fantasy VII. Playing Chrono Trigger at last has put me in a mood for Square RPGs, and I really want to like Final Fantasy VII. I'm sure I'm capable of liking it. I slightly resent VII for three main reasons:

- the translation is lacking (I don't have a problem with 'Aeris' and I can cope with the typos, but sometimes the dialogue just feels awkward to me),
- my memory card broke just before the final boss fight on my first playthrough, meaning I've never actually finished it, and
- the comments of every Final Fantasy-related thing on the Internet are filled with irritating VII fans baying for a remake and using VII to put down later games in the series, particularly VIII and XIII, both of which I adore.

But two of those reasons don't have anything to do with VII itself, so I shouldn't really hold those against it, should I? I think it might be time to give VII another chance. Maybe I'll actually be able to follow the plot this time.