Review of Favorites 1

With so many new-fangled fancy video game technologies out there today, I want to take a moment and remember some classics that I still absolutely love, pixelated sprite characters, 8 bit music, the whole works. To start, a Super Nintendo classic that was ported onto the DS...Chrono Trigger.

To me, this game is perhaps the greatest RPG (role-playing game) of ALL time. Not only is the save-the-world theme AMAZING and EXTREMELY well done, the characters are ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! You've got a knight-in-training-who-was-turned-into-a-frog-by-an-evil-magician, said evil magician being a playable character later in the game, you've got a princess who would rather help save the world than stand around being saved, a genius inventor, and a robot with feelings. Take THAT Haley Joel Osment! You SO weren't the first emo robot!

Basically, the main character Crono, travels through time with his band of merry misfits and participates in history changing events in each time period. An alien being called "Lavos," is the original cause of time being changed, since his very prescence opened the first time portal, called in the game "Gates." The time-changing is so much fun because once you are able to travel back and forth between times, you can see the changes that came about from your actions. The game is THAT well thought out.

The battle system is mostly your standard RPG turn-based battle, but with a more active element. Rather, you don't have a turn, and then your enemy has a turn. As your time bars fill up, you can attack. Same with the enemy. Characters can learn attacks with other characters (called Duel Techs and Triple Techs.) Triple Techs are some of the most powerful attacks in the game.

Once you've beaten the game once, you can go back through from the beginning with a feature called New Game +. Basically, this means you have all your items/equipment/techniques/stats that you had when you beat the game. This enables you to go through the game and beat it at different points to get different endings that correspond to when you beat it. Awesomeness, anyone?

Another plus is the soundtrack. The composer is Yasunori Mitsuda, but I've seen some information that makes me think Nobuo Uematsu was a contributing factor (of Final Fantasy Soundtrack fame for those who don't know.) Mitsuda created a masterpiece for this game, and every theme for every town and battle fits so well. The music creates some very poignant moments throughout the game as well.