I do agree there’s a certain elegance to how Chrono Trigger starts to raise the stakes beyond the Magus and royal family stuff before those subplots are fully resolved. It’s certainly an improvement on what some earlier Square RPGs did (suddenly unveiling the bigger villain right after you defeat the first one).
What I meant by “for no reason” is that what sends you to the future is one of those chaotic “rifts in time”. It serves an overall storytelling purpose, but no particular plot or character dynamics led to it, nor immediately issue from it. So suddenly you find yourself exploring a time period in which none of your party members have anything they want to accomplish, beyond finding a way to return to the past (and even this motivation is not explicitly expressed by anyone at the outset).
Anyway, I didn’t personally experience this as a big storytelling flaw during my first playthrough. I mentioned it mostly because in practice, a lot of people do seem to stop playing there. I’ve met at least two people who told me that’s where they quit.
It is impossible for me to be anything regarding objective on this point but Chrono Trigger is, to me, the only jrpg with flawless pacing (except maybe Dragon Quarter), so this critique is interesting to me
the real hiccup in chrono trigger’s pacing is right before the end of the game where you have a bunch of character specific sidequests to wrap up and it feels all the narrative pressure to actually finish the game was taken off of you so that you can focus on doing those sidequests
The whole game is propulsive in how it takes you from setpiece to setpiece until that point, then it feels like the game is completely spent and I’m just going through the motions
sometimes if I am bored in like a movie and can’t focus I’ll just run through the whole narrative structure of chrono trigger in my head because it’s so crystal clear and memorable how one act leads into another
Xenoblade Chronicles X’s characters having subtle but fucked up eyes that you notice immediately. Within 30 seconds of starting the game I wondered “Why are there eyes like that?”
I was completely spent in FFVI after the floating continent, I just didn’t want there to be anymore game and then there’s like 45% left to do. I quit shortly after
i really like it in final fantasy 6 because by the time you can actually play the final dungeon i doubt most ppl would be able to actually clear it so you’re kind of just touring the world to become strong enough logistically to scale the tower to kill your local demigod…
Clair Obscur also has this structure and even though in its case I quickly burned out and wanted to just get the endgame over with after like 2 or 3 out of 10 last chapter optional dungeons (partially because everything’s HP spikes so much at that point that you’re more or less obligated to shift toward a boring Maelle nuke build, partially because I’m older and 20-25 hours was already a lot), I honestly liked the choice a lot, it felt like both a successful acknowledgment that their FFX-esque narrative structure was still conversant with the 90s, and it’s just a nice pacing change at the end imo.
Yeah i liked the side quest part of chrono trigger because it specifically felt like i was setting a final few things right to become powerful enough to fight the final boss
I can’t find the source of the interview, but at some point last week I saw a clip of Leslie Benzies, sitting on a couch with what I assume to be the senior Build A Rocket Boy leads, playing the unfortunately released Mindseye. He said the line “We have to make sure, when you hear a line in mission 3, that it makes sense in, ah, mission 17.” which makes me think that Mindseye was a miserable experience for the animation team having to re edit finished cutscenes to make a middling NBC single season sci fi drama.
It’s also causing that one northernlion line about how “On your death bed you’re not going to remember the things that made sense, you’re going to remember the things that enkindled your soul.” to get drilled into my memory.
See, I feel this segment of the game makes as much sense at it’s possible to make, compared to, say, Final Fantasy VI. In that game, in theory, every second you don’t spend working towards Kefka is a second he can spend making things immeasurably worse (and the fact that he’s just faffing around waiting to be killed is something that could definitely stand to be altered if the game ever gets remade). In Chrono Trigger, however, the dramatic plateau coincides with the party gaining the most control of time travel that it’s possible to have, which means that, in theory, they have no need to hurry to do anything: Lavos will always be there, not doing anything until a certain date, and they can always get to it. What’s more, given how badly their last encounter with it went, there’s no reason to rush to a rematch.
