In 1995 Square put three famous names on one cartridge. Hironobu Sakaguchi had made Final Fantasy; Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama had made its great rival, Enix’s Dragon Quest, Horii as designer and Toriyama as artist. Edge, previewing the Japanese release, called them “a team of designers who have attained almost legendary status in their native land”, and reported that Chrono Trigger was “currently the most eagerly awaited game in Japan”. It went on sale on 11 March 1995. Nintendo Power reported two million cartridges sold in Japan in two months.
The game was a time-travel story. A boy called Crono and his friends discover that in 1999 a creature called Lavos will break out of the Earth and plunge the world into a dark age, and they set out through the centuries to stop it. Two ideas made the game stand out: its battles happened in the places you walked through, with no cut to a separate battle screen, and you could face Lavos at almost any point, with a different ending depending on when.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Square (Square Soft in America).
- Japanese release: 11 March 1995, Super Famicom; America followed in the summer of 1995.
- Cartridge: 32 megabits, which Super Play called Square’s “biggest and most ambitious game to date”.
- Principal creators: Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama (character design); Masato Kato was the story designer.
- Music: Yasunori Mitsuda, with pieces by Nobuo Uematsu.
- Later versions: PlayStation (1999), Nintendo DS (2008), and later phones and PC.
- Sales: more than five million across all versions by March 2025, by Square Enix’s count.
Three names on one cartridge
Super Play reported in January 1995 that the game had first been discussed two years earlier, when the three men met at a software conference in America. Edge put the work at “two years” by “a team of designers”. Horii, who had written every Dragon Quest from the first to the sixth, was its chief designer, Edge said; Toriyama, famous in Japan for Dragon Ball, designed the characters; Sakaguchi was Square’s vice president and the director of the Final Fantasy series. Masato Kato was the game’s story designer, the credit a PlayStation magazine gave him in 1999 when he went on to write Chrono Cross.
The mixture showed on the screen. Super Play’s import feature thought the spiky-haired hero had “a very simple, suggestive Dragon Quest flavour”, that some monsters could have come out of Dragon Ball Z, and that the backgrounds belonged to Final Fantasy. It reported that Sakaguchi had wanted the characters drawn larger than usual, to show off Toriyama’s designs.
Six eras
Crono’s own time is AD 1000. From there the party reaches the Middle Ages in AD 600; 12,000 BC; the age of the dinosaurs in 65,000,000 BC, where the cavewoman Ayla lives; AD 1999, the day Lavos rises; and AD 2300, a ruined future where the party finds the robot Robo. The companions are Marle, Lucca the inventor, Frog, Robo and Ayla. A place outside time, the End of Time, links the eras, until the party finds a time machine of its own.
The game plays with cause and effect. As Super Play explained, you can make something happen in one period, then go back to the same place in a later or earlier one and find the situation changed.
Battles on the map
Nintendo Power explained the combat to American readers in July 1995: “The difference is that battles take place in the world in which you move around, not on separate battle screens. This means that you can skirt around enemies and avoid fights altogether.” Fights were still chosen from menus, with a gauge for each character like the one in Final Fantasy III (the American name for Final Fantasy VI), and they could run in real time or wait for your orders, a version of Square’s Active Time Battle.
Two things were new. Where the enemies stood on the screen now mattered, as Edge noted, and two or three characters could combine their special techniques into one Combo attack, Crono and Frog’s together, or Crono and Lucca’s. Edge saw it as a real effort by Square to rework the turn-based fight.
Endings, and starting again
Lavos can be fought early, long before the story expects it, and the ending changes with the moment you choose. Nintendo Power reported in July 1995 that “more than ten endings have been discovered so far”; its review the next month said ten. Once the game is finished it can be started again with the same, stronger party, which Nintendo Power described as starting over “with a powered-up Crono”. The menu option was called “New Game +”, and Super Play was still explaining to readers in 1996 how to use it to reach the endings that turn on Frog’s story.
The music
Yasunori Mitsuda was a sound programmer at Square when he was given the score. He later recalled that he had gone to Sakaguchi saying he would quit unless he could compose, and Sakaguchi answered: “There’s a project starting right now actually, that I was thinking of entrusting to you.” Mitsuda said he knew the game “was expected to sell 2 million copies”, and that while writing it he developed “an extremely painful stomach ulcer”; Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy’s composer, “supported me and wrote a few songs”.
Nintendo Power called it “a fresh and innovative sound track”, already “slated to become a CD in Japan”. Not everyone agreed about every piece: Super Play’s reviewer found the music superb at times but the battle theme, the tune heard most, “quite weak”.
Reception
Nintendo Power gave it the full treatment in August 1995: “a gem—polished, brilliant and beautifully presented. It belongs in every game library.” Its short verdict was “You’ll be spoiled for every other RPG.”
British magazines had to review imports, and they were more measured. Super Play thought it “maybe not quite the earth-shattering monumental game I was expecting”, but “a worthy addition to the Square library” and worth buying the moment it reached America. Edge reviewed the American version in November 1995 and gave it seven out of ten. It found the game “more lightweight than Final Fantasy in almost every department”, though “a welcome oasis in the barren wasteland of translated Japanese RPGs”.
Later versions and legacy
The game kept selling. A New Zealand magazine reported in 1999 that the Super Famicom version had sold more than 2.5 million copies. That year Square brought it to the PlayStation in Japan with new animated scenes, and released the sequel, Chrono Cross, written by Masato Kato. The PlayStation version reached America in 2001 as part of Final Fantasy Chronicles. A Nintendo DS version followed in 2008, overseen by Kato, with a revised translation, two new areas and a new ending. By March 2025 Square Enix counted more than five million copies shipped across all versions.
Its influence shows in the games that set out to recreate it. Thierry Boulanger, whose studio Sabotage made the retro RPG Sea of Stars, told Wireframe in 2020: “Chrono Trigger is my yearly pilgrimage. And every time, I notice new details, and how seamless it is.”
Sources
- Edge issue 19, April 1995, p. 41: prescreen of the Japanese release (11 March; Horii, Toriyama and Sakaguchi; “two years’ work”; 32 megabits; six time zones; “the most eagerly awaited game in Japan”).
- Super Play issue 27, January 1995: preview (first discussed two years earlier at an American software conference; 32 megabits, “Square’s biggest and most ambitious game to date”).
- Super Play issue 32, June 1995: import feature and review (the mixture of Dragon Quest, Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy styles; Sakaguchi and the larger characters; the music and the battle theme; the verdict).
- Nintendo Power issue 73, June 1995, p. 36: preview (the three creators; the soundtrack; two million sold in Japan in two months; the summer American release).
- Nintendo Power issue 74, July 1995: “Epic Center” overview (battles on the map, real time or turns, Combo attacks, the power gauge, “more than ten endings”, starting again with “a powered-up Crono”).
- Nintendo Power issue 75, August 1995: review (Lavos and 1999; the six periods and the companions; “ten endings”; the verdict).
- Nintendo Power issues 77 and 78, October and November 1995: strategy guides naming the eras (65,000,000 BC, 12,000 BC, AD 600, AD 1000, AD 2300) and the End of Time.
- Edge issue 26, November 1995, p. 71: review of the American version, seven out of ten.
- Super Play issue 45, July 1996: readers’ questions and the “New Game +” option.
- Official New Zealand PlayStation Magazine issue 28, November 1999: Chrono Cross, Masato Kato as the earlier game’s story designer, and sales of more than 2.5 million.
- Edge issue 180, October 2007: Yasunori Mitsuda as a member of the Chrono Trigger team.
- Yasunori Mitsuda, interview in Nice Games (2000), English translation published by shmuplations (web, secondary): how he came to score the game, the expected sales, the ulcer and Uematsu’s help. https://shmuplations.com/yasunorimitsuda2/
- Wikipedia, “Music of Chrono Trigger” and “Chrono Trigger” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Mitsuda as a sound programmer before the game; the PlayStation release in 1999 with animated scenes, Final Fantasy Chronicles in 2001, and the DS version of 2008 overseen by Kato. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Chrono_Trigger · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger
- Square Enix, 30th anniversary announcement, reported by Nintendo Life, 23 March 2025 (web, secondary): the 11 March 1995 release and “over 5 million copies shipped worldwide”. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2025/03/chrono-triggers-lifetime-sales-have-now-surpassed-the-five-million-mark
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020: Sea of Stars feature, with Thierry Boulanger on Chrono Trigger.