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Saturday 26 January, 2008
GAMEPLAY
And now we get to the second gameplay session. Well as I embark on another quest to save the princess (every game has one or doesn’t it seem like it) I discovered I kind of like the battle system that is implemented for Chrono Trigger. Instead of having random battles the enemies are always on the map itself so you can see them before you get into the battle. It proved to be much less annoying then those Final Fantasy games. Anyway it proved to be very satisfying to see the monsters fall to the low bit count attacks.
Another thing I found to be entertaining were the character interactions that go on. The princess, Marle, and Chrono, the main character, get into somewhat awkward situations while the scientist friend Lucca also has her moments when she interrupts the other two in the awkward situation. I must say I really do love the character development that is going on at this point. And I will probably keep playing to see the storyline as it unfolds.
DESIGN NOTES
I loved the way that the multiple timezones have overworlds that do really look like one is the past of the other. It creates a sense that the player is in a huge world that is farther than the ends of the Earth so to speak. Throughout the separate timezones many of the major cities and towns are mirrored albeit in a smaller scale, showing how the expansion of civilization happened over the years. Other then the fact that there are multiple gameworlds, each gameworld in itself is really not that impressive, they are typical for the games on the Super Nintendo.
The battle system is one that takes a little getting used to, it is based on the typical Final Fantasy 1 battle system, where each party member has the action bar fill up so when it is full they can take an action. Chrono Trigger does this and also incorporates area effects and line effects that can hit multiple enemies depending on how your characters are positioned and where the enemies are located. Because of this area effects sometimes it’s better to wait for the enemies to position themselves for a huge attack instead of just moving as soon as you can. And because of this, battles forced people to think hard about what they were trying instead of just attempting to pound the enemies as soon as they could.
Also unlike many rpgs, many of the decisions you make in the game do influence what end result you will get. This fact was found out after several failures on a boss to discover that a decision earlier would get me a better item to fight him with. And because of this the gamer inside me wants to try every possible combination of decisions to try and find out what happens in each different case. I would say this definitely raises replay value (and probably annoyance value).
Chrono Trigger is an rpg that I am definitely going to take the time to beat. I really like this old game.
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