Chrono Trigger is over 30 years old and is considered by many to be one of the greatest RPGs, if not the greatest RPG, of all time. It’s had a few ports and upgrades over the years, the best of which was undoubtedly the Nintendo DS version, but it never got what I would consider a true remake. But what even East a real remake? What does this imply? Should Square Enix bring the old team back together? If so, how many of them? Who else could be trusted to do this? Should they change anything? Should they add anything? Who has the right to determine if they did things right or if they messed up?
What does it mean to remake the greatest RPG of all time?
The Ending Remake of the Greatest RPG of All Time (which I’ll just call The remake from now on for convenience) is not a remake of Chrono Trigger. It’s a new indie PC game, released today, that’s part RPG, part puzzle game, and part meta-commentary on RPGs, video games, and online culture. The game, which began life as a student work, lives up to its title: it is a purported remake of the final dungeon of what is “the greatest RPG of all time”, an unnamed game that appears to be primarily a riff on Chrono Triggerbut with elements of other RPGs thrown in. The remake positions itself precariously close to reality: it was made by students who grew up loving classic RPGs and contains a number of collectible man pages, developer documentary videos, and voice clips from the developers themselves explaining their thought processes for recapturing the magic of this mysterious, nameless RPG.
The first hour of the game consists mainly of trying to navigate through this final dungeon with a max-level party, with no context or notion of what came before except what you can glean from clues offered by the manual or other clues. For example, the combat system is completely obtuse the first time you try to engage with it, presenting a strange row of diamonds and attacks with no names or descriptors, and seemingly offering you no real ability to damage the enemy. The chests and doors are locked and it is unknown what could open them. Your inventory is filled with armor and weapons with unknown effects and stats. Only by finding man pages and curiously delving into the dungeon will you learn how to use everything you’ve found and actually progress.
That first hour or so, where you’re just playing a TunicModified classic RPG, is really a lot of fun. I really like the weird combat system: it has a limited number of cool tricks, and I think it’s perfect for such a short game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. I enjoyed flipping through the manual pages, which are indeed very reminiscent of old RPG manuals, with illustrations and detailed character biographies and scribbled notes from whoever owned the manual before. There are even hidden clues in the dev videos themselves, and an interesting meta-story unfolds in these videos about what it means to remake a game, or even just be a fan of one.
That in itself, I think, would be a pretty interesting premise for a fun few hours…except there’s something very clear and obvious wrong with it The remake of the jump. When you first start the game, there are three existing save files, but two are broken and inaccessible. One of your party members appears to have been badly altered by a strange self-insertion from Gary Sue, and it’s unclear why or who did this. There are paths that lead nowhere, a collectible that seems to do nothing, and places where the collision of missing items leads to secret, unfinished rooms. A rival character’s text boxes keep disappearing. The further you go, the more problematic things become, until you come across a game within an entirely separate game with an unclear objective and an unknown creator. There’s also the question of why a development studio would just redo the ending of a game and then fill it with all their personal baggage, as if the characters default to crappy armor just because their little brother does that all the time as a joke. The remake doesn’t hide its metatextual wanderings, even at first, but I can assure you that things only get weirder as you go on.
© Coin Falling Games I really appreciate The remake even if I feel like I’m flying totally blind. I thought I was close to solving the mystery at the heart of this game, but just this morning I came across another strange clue that suggests an even deeper rabbit hole than the one I already found myself in. It’s not a long game by any means, I only spent a few hours in it, but I did experience some pretty significant slowdowns. One sticking point was a riddle that I just didn’t understand, and I ended up brute-forcing my way to the answer by working backwards from the solution. And there are also… some bugs.
The problem with a game that presents itself as a game is that often it’s hard to tell the difference between the game that actually falls on you and the one that intentionally “breaks” as part of the experience. I think there are elements of The remake this might require a little more refinement: for example, if you already know the answer to the very first puzzle in the game after playing a demo before, for example, The remake doesn’t seem to know how to deal with the sequence break. In my case, I found myself locked in, unable to continue without a bunch of clues I should have collected in rooms I couldn’t return to. There’s also a second built-in point of no return that prevents you from going back and picking up missed clues you might need to move forward. There are other small issues as well, such as button prompts not appearing where they should, or showing where they shouldn’t. I have a lot of forgiveness for all of these things given the scale and scope of The remakebut as a warning, just don’t try to break this thing in sequence. It’s already (deliberately) broken enough as it is.
But even with these delays, I am extremely obliged by The remake and I can’t wait to see where this takes me. There’s some super interesting stuff happening in its middle section, including some interesting philosophical musings about who should be “allowed” to remake a classic, what can and can’t be changed, and what makes a game a classic in the first place. There’s also an incredibly scathing description of commenters on the internet harassing developers like it’s their day job. It’s so blunt that it seemed like a tasteless joke at first, but the more I see of this character, the more his inane, chatty remarks sound familiar, to the point where I came back finding the portrayal irritatingly accurate. There are still several mysteries that I haven’t gotten to the bottom of, including an in-game phone number that I’m afraid to call in real life and the aforementioned poorly edited party member from the game’s first save file. I’m also just… a little interested in what little scraps I can glean from the “original” The greatest RPG of all time. It’s quite a cool story going on! There’s time travel, there’s a skeleton pirate, a guy who uses a broom as a weapon, a really cute robot whose birthday is every day, that sort of thing.
At least it now makes me want to play the greatest RPG of all time. What is the greatest RPG of all time? I still don’t know, but at least someone finally I did it again.
