That's it, I'm done. I'm not gonna play through again to get the other endings (especially after reading a list of all the different endings, which, aside from a few trolley problem choices, are novelty endings). I did, however, eat the mountains of shit required to see the 'new' ending, which was actually a very cool pay off.

The new areas (aside from the previously described Reptite village) are three vortexes of semi-'random' dungeons. Each has a unique beginning and end, but the 'rooms' between the beginning and end are randomly selected from pre-existing rooms throughout the game (though each of the three has it's own unique selection of rooms to 'choose' from). This is kind of pointless since there's no new treasure in the different kinds of rooms, and you can kill most of the games old enemies in one hit by now. I guess it's good for using Charm on bygone enemies, but it's mostly just a filler.

They each end with a boss fight against a doppleganger of one of the three main characters, Chrono, Marle, or Lucca. When you defeat the doppleganger it 'fuses' with the character and 'awakens their true power' and you get a bunch of stat boosts. It's never really explained or justified. I figured that each of them lost something by altering their pasts through time travel (Chrono was un-killed, Marle was un-un-born, and Lucca was un-traumatized), especially considering Lucca and Marle's battles take place in their respective bedrooms, which is where their events occurred (though, Chrono is just by Leene's bell). Anyway, whatever.

Defeating the dopplegangers and also clearing every single other side quest (which took me around 35 hours) unlocks a new ending option. The bucket now lets you go to "Time's Eclipse" which, similar to the End of Time, is a special dimension outside the flow of time. At first I was preparing to be disappointed, but the new ending actually delivered by tying up the single loose end in Chrono Trigger's story: The Entity who created the gates:
Click to read spoiler

Inferred back story: Lavos was not a time traveler, but he had a kind of temporal-warp cocoon around him that formed a 'pocket dimension', possibly a part of his space travel or hibernation. Anyway, this temporal-manipulation is probably the power that Queen Zeal was intending to harness for her immortality with the Mammon Machine, and Schala's pendant. When Schala vanished, she used the temporal powers her pendant stole from Magus to escape from her mother inside her own pocket dimension. However, remaining in that dimension and consistently using and 'living off of' the power of Lavos over time turned her into a Lavos-Schala hybrid. That entity has both Schala and Lavos's power, but Shala's will (albeit slowly slipping) and is the entity that created the gates to Lavos-specific eras, in hopes that her brother Magus could stop Lavos. So, when you enter the bucket to Time's Eclipse, you enter Lavos's pocket dimension. Magus is there, from another time (presumably the standard ending where he is in your party) and he tells you to go home, that this is his fight. Even if he is currently in your party (he'll be like "!?") or defeated, he'll pay little mind to the team. He then enters into a gate. Which you can follow into a identical pocket dimension. Magus pleads with a creature that looks like a pink variation of Lavos with a bubble in it's forehead, in which Schala's sleeps. The beast, called Dream Devourer, blasts Magus off-screen with the same kind of beam that initially killed Chrono. The party fights it (it's pretty easy, and fights similarly to Lavos when you fight him in the Undersea Palace) and eventually wins. When they win, they are similarly blown away by the beam (but not killed) and Magus gets up and talks to Schala, and says he won't give up until he can find a way to save her. She says she knows he'll never give up, and that if he keeps trying to save her it will ultimately lead to his death. She says her control over this entity she's become is slipping, and with her last bit of will, she presumably sends the party home, then takes Magus into a black space. She completely devours his memory, and warps him to a forrest. He wanders around, not knowing who he is, but knowing he is still looking for something. Magus goes on to become the character Gil in the Japanese-only Radical Dreamers, and possibly Guile in Chrono Cross, which is set in a parallel dimension.

I just finished one of the two new areas, The Lost Sanctum, and it was an exhausting 5 or 6 hours of 'gameplay' that mostly consisted of this pattern: Go to the end of the monstery area, hit a roadblock, go back to town, go back to the roadblock, get a little further, hit another roadblock, go back to town, etc. That loop of 'going back to town to pass a roadblock' probably happened at least 20 times, and the stupid monstery areas bottleneck you into fighting monsters at least 5 times in their full length. And there's not a story so much as there are a bunch of unimportant NPCs with bad 'flavor text' but no actual narrative or explanation for this place existing. It's a village full of Reptites in a parallel world, so I would assume it was there to show they survived or something. Whatever.

The other new area isn't accessible until after I beat the game once and save-and-continue (beating that area shows the new 'true ending'). So now I'm focusing on the core game, which is much better and much more clever. I went through the (new? I think) bestiary section, for the first time, and it says all the items you can get from enemies with Charm, and I'm so fucking disappointed. There's all these cool things you can get from bosses that I've missed out on. Almost enough to make me want to NG+ it.

The equipment is very very fun. Often in mediocre RPGs (Golden Sun) I'm so "whatever" about the equipment, but the simplicity of the attributes makes it really fun to customize your characters. "I can make Frog do x8 normal damage to magical beings and absorb shadow! He'd be perfect for going into a ghosty area!" etc. It's also fun to make their attributes match their character, like making Robo convert electricity into HP. (Speaking of Robo, in his side quest there was a room where homeless people were on a conveyer belt into a machine that turned them into sparkley dots, was that supposed to imply that Robo is really powered by a human consciousness? Because that's something I like to know about my fictional robots)

Anyway, once I finish all these side quests (which are all really interesting, except for the rainbow shell one which is dumb) I'm gonna go fight Lavos, then I'll do the dimensional vortex and watch the final ending.

I originally thought the controls and menu were bugged. It turns out that they are, but there are fixes. The menu will sometimes get in the way of combat, and I thought I had no control over this, but pressing the Y button flips it, so, there's that. ALSO, I was using classic mode (because I wanted the classic experience?) but since the screen is smaller, classic mode isn't REALLY classic mode, it's just shitty menu mode, and then DS mode is non-shitty. I just switched to the DS menu and it's great.

I got to the new area and I've been poking around in it for a while, and I can conclude that it's stupid and I hate it. The dungeon design looks like a shitty rom hack, and there's not really a "story" in the town area just maybe 5 or 6 NPCs who each represent a new sidequest that you have to do in the shitty dungeon. What's worse, the little narrative elements that there are in the bonus area betray some of the game's basic concepts. For example, there is a Nu who talks in a caveman voice, presumably because he's a prehistoric Nu, but the real game heavily implies that Nus are actually magically constructed golem-like slaves of the Zeal, not 'real' creatures. Also, the new area is set inside a dimensional portal, and originally they think that the portals were caused by the meteor, but then later they decided they were caused by a deity's regret, since all of the portals were relevant to Lavos. But this portal isn't! This portal's totally irrelevant and unexplained and annoying.

ALSO, there's a lot of stuff happening in this portal that feels like more of a generic fantasy game than Chrono Trigger is. Nothing "magic" really happens in Chrono Trigger, and if it does it's ultimately given a science fiction explanation. But a lot of the side quests are about finding magical bullshit.

Outside of that, what am I supposed to say? It's apparently the greatest game ever, it's just a halfassed port. The new shit could've been like Mega Man 9 but instead it looks like some garbage an intern threw together. Bad porting aside, the actual game is amazing.

Nintendo Power, Volume 226 (9.0/10):

[...] the modified translation somehow feels less inspired then [sic] the original, and, like in the PlayStation version of the game, there is a brief lag after battles.

Of course, if you've already conquered Chrono Trigger in its previous incarnations, your big question is probably whether the new content makes it worth playing yet again. The answer: not especially. The new areas are enjoyable, to be sure, but they're not directly connected to the story, and they focus more on combat than anything else. The Dimensional Vortex dungeons, in particular, would have benefited from better designs instead of a reliance in large part on recycled maps. And though the monster-battle arena is a nifty idea, you're more an observer than an active participant.

[...]

The rest of the review praises the game heavily, but purely for retaining the greatness of the SNES original. Ehhhhh...

As much as I love Chrono Trigger, I am personally against buying things I already have. So I'm glad my new Nintendo Power gave a quick run-down of the DS remake's new features. Touch controls - sure, cool idea. Animated scenes from the Playstation remake? Meh. A "modified" translation, and a monster recruitment/battle feature? Blech.

But then they had to go and mention the new dungeons, and a new town. So much for my $[Chrono Trigger DS MSRP].

The extra dungeons are hardly a surprise, as they were hinted at when the game was first announced. But listen to this:

Halfway through the game, mysterious portals appear in prehistoric times and in the middle ages, both leading to an area called the Lost Sanctum. Consisting of a village, several field areas, and two full-fledged dungeons, the Lost Sanctum adds hours of fresh gameplay through multiple side quests that intertwine between the two areas.

Three additional Dimensional Vortex bonus dungeons open up once you've completed Chrono Trigger's main quest. We don't want to spoil everything, so we'll leave it at this: the dungeons feature new items, enemies, and bosses, and one of them even incorporates a fabled "lost" area that was reportedly planned for Chrono Trigger's initial release. Conquer all three Dimensional Vortices and you'll get the opportunity to square off against a brutal new final boss and witness a new ending (bringing the total ending count to more than 13).

!!!

In previous playthroughs, I had never really concerned myself with checking out multiple endings, but I made that a focus of my CT romps over the weekend and I really enjoyed it. It's remarkable how much refinement and polish was put into this little gem - I've fallen in love with it all over again. But, times are tough, so getting all that's left will have to wait.

I've got a little downtime before this month's big Wiilease, so I figured I'd start replaying CT for old time's sake.

So far, it's every bit as sophisticated and charming as I remember. I will say that the battles seem to be slower than I'd like, but I'm pretty sure this is just because I'm still in the early stages of the game.

Gato rules!

This is one of the greatest RPG's of all time, and I'm not just saying that because the person below me said it. This is one of those highly hyped games that actually lives up to its hype *cough*FF4*cough*.

What I love about this RPG is that the story makes sense. You don't wander around wondering what to do because the story has a logical flow. That's not to say it's easy, mind you. But it certainly beats wandering around aimlessly because one guard won't let you in to where you need to go. How do you know that you need to bake a cake for him that's found world's away? ARGH!!

Oh, and no random battles? A million times .. YES!!

My favorite part, by far, was restarting the game and giving the characters highly inappropriate names. You should have seen what I named the ship.. or maybe you shouldn't.

All in all, Chrono Trigger is gold. And do yourself a favor and play this on the SNES, or some cartridge based system. The load times on the PSX are not worth the 2 minutes of anime footage, I promise.

The one, the only, the legend, Chrono Trigger. So great that it couldn't be confined to a Super NES cartridge - Chrono Trigger was also packaged as part of the Playstation game Final Fantasy Chronicles. CT was a revolutionary game, in its length, its depth, and its relatively non-linear nature. Its reputation lives on today as one of the finest productions of all time.

Many of the features Chrono Trigger first implemented are still innovative by today's standards. It was an ambitious project, and has yet to really be equalled. With its charming blend of startling features and familiar archetypes, Chrono Trigger is a game to be remembered.

Once upon a time, in the year 1000 AD, a boy named Crono went to visit the Millenial Fair. He bumped into a pretty girl named Marle, then went to watch his friend Lucca demonstrate her remarkable new invention: a teleporter. While Crono got Marle to demonstrate the device, disaster struck, and she vanished; desperate, Chrono follows her through the strange portal into which she disappeared. One thing leads to another - apparently the teleporter accidentally functions as a time machine, apparently Marle is the daughter of the King, apparently there's a great and undying evil ready to take over the planet - and Crono and his friends, as well as more he meets along the way, are off to save the world. It's a delightful story, full of twists and turns, and highly dynamic because of the time-changing concept of the game.

Chrono Trigger has you going back and forth through time to save the day over and over again. Every era of the world, from prehistoric times to a post-apocalyptic future, builds upon the same basic world map to make a wholly believable continentally-drifted overworld. Part of the greatness that is Chrono Trigger comes from taking many tried-and-true RPG elements (often refining them to set the standard for RPGs to come) and mixing in a few of its own spicy additions. CT's battle system expands upon the attack/magic/item norm with techniques (CT's magic equivalent), which have different effect methods, such as in a line or within a certain radius, and can be combined with what other party members have learned for Double or even Triple techniques. There are tons of technique combinations, enough so that it's a challenge just to witness all of them. A distinctive difference from most RPG enemy-encountering methods, like random battle initiations or running into a single enemy representing a party, is CT's system of seamlessly blending battle into the normal overhead walking view. If you get in an enemy's way, battle will start with everyone getting into combat position (including the enemy's friends which were probably hiding behind a nearby bush). An interesting facet of this method's implementation is that there are no battles in CT that are actually random; every single one is written explicitly into the game. Thus, when returning to an area, you'll know where the monsters are (unless new ones have come in since your last visit).

For their time, CT's graphics were simply amazing. They're still more than respectable today. Chrono Trigger really shows off the Super NES, giving it more graphical prowess than one might expect of it. Sound effects are fitting and perfect. The game's soundtrack is beautifully composed, with many of the tracks addictive and readily hummable.

Once through, Chrono Trigger is easily 15-20 hours of game. It doesn't skimp on replay offerings either - there are several sidequests, each with their own great rewards, be they a powerful item, a greater insight into the story, or even a party member. There are also a dozen different endings to keep you coming back for more. And if starting from scratch doesn't appeal to you, Square's got you covered: once you beat the game, the New Game + option opens up, allowing you to use character stats from your finished game to start over again from the beginning with an unstoppable superparty.

Chrono Trigger simply reeks of creativity and fun. Every era is a blast to visit, and somehow, dancing through time with the Epoch never gets old. The characters are fun, the story is intriguing, the gameplay is well-varied and enjoyable, enemies and bosses are a joy to fight. If you haven't played it yet - what are you waiting for?