About

Chrono is a role-playing video game franchise developed by Square Enix (formerly Square) consisting in two main games: Chrono Trigger, for the Super Nintendo Entertaiment System, Chrono Cross for the PlayStation and a spin-off called Radical Dreamers, a text-based visual novel released for the Satellaview add-on for the Nintendo Super Famicom.

History

Chrono Trigger

The first game of the franchise, it was released in 1995 to critical and commercial success, it's frequently cited as one of the greatest video games of all time^[1] due to it's multiple endings, plot-related sidequests, graphics and soundtrack. The game's story follows a group of adventurers who travel through time to prevent a global catastrophe. Manga artist Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball) designed the characters for the game as well.

Radical Dreamers

Released in 1996, a spinoff visual novel, meant to tie the loose plot threads left from the end of the first game. The player takes the role of Serge, a young adventurer accompanied by Kid, a teen-aged thief, and Gil, a mysterious masked magician, It was never released outside of Japan but a fan translation was made in 2003. ^[2]

Chrono Cross

The successor to Chrono Trigger, released in 1999 as a retelling of Radical Dreamers which director Masato Kato though it was "incomplete" like it's predeccesor it was well received by critics and was a commercial sucess. The story focuses on a teenage boy named Serge, faced with an alternate reality in which he died as a child.

Online Presence

In July 2003 the ChronoCompendium fansite was created,^[3] like it's name suggest it's an archive of all the existing information about the franchise, and it hosts a request sample form for Square Enix to consider start developing the rumored third game in the franchise tentatively named Chrono Break. In April 18, 2011, Youtuber Matthew Patrick, better known as The Game Theorists uploaded his first video of a series called "Game Theory" focusing on Chrono Trigger's time travel mechanics (Shown below, left) as of November, 2015 the video has over 1 million views, in August 8, 2013 another video of the same series called "Chrono Trigger Retells the BIBLE?!?" (Shown below, right) was uploaded, as of November 2015 it has nearly 3 million views in Youtube.

The series gained a huge presence online. As November 21st, 2015 the japanese artist community pixiv leads to over 1000 results under the tag "クロノ".^[7] The artist community DeviantART leads to over 8,500 results under the keyword "chrono trigger".^[6] Fandom presence can also be found on other communities like Tumblr. ^[8]

Fangames

Two fangames have been in development at some point, the first being Chrono Resurrection, which was meant to be a 3D remake of the first game, however, Square Enix issued a cease and desist two months before the game's release, ^[4] the second game, Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes was an unofficial installement in the series, a hacked ROM version of the first SNES game, it started development in 2004 and in mid 2009, nearing it's completion the development team, dubbed Kajar Laboratories, received a cease-and-desist letter from Square Enix ^[5] ordering the team to stop development and cancel all ROM hacking activities, with 98% of the game completed. The game reportedly totaled around 35 hours of play time, and had ten alternate endings.

Related Memes

"…But you're still hungry"

The first game featured a machine called Enertron found in several locations in the game's future timeline, it restores HP and MP, and displays the message, "But you're still hungry." the phrase is a common injoke among fans of the series and it carried over to the second installement as well.

"But…The Future refused to change"

A memorable quote from the game over screen in Chrono Trigger, meaning the apocalypse will take place and destroy life in the game's version of planet Earth, variations of it are usually used amongst fans of the series

Search Interest

External References