Dragon Ball Creator Akira Toriyama Made The Greatest Video Game In History

If you’ve never played Chrono Trigger before, now is the perfect time to do it and it’s a great way to honor Toriyama’s legacy if you’re a fan of his other works. The game was released in 1995 and essentially everything about it still holds up today. Even if you’re not the biggest fan of JRPGs, Chrono Trigger transcends the genre thanks to its complex plot and endearing characters, who were designed by Toriyama.

In fact, the entire team behind Chrono Trigger was something of a creative dream team (so much so that developer and publisher Square referred to the team as such). Along with Akira Toriyama, the development team behind the game also included Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, and Yuji Horii, creator of the Dragon Quest series. In short, it’s hard to imagine a more capable team if your goal was to create a JRPG.

And the three, along with the rest of the creative team, more than delivered. Chrono Trigger follows Crono and his friends as they try to save the world from a parasitic monster known as Lavos. The story incorporated time travel in an incredibly interesting way, allowing you to jump millions of years to explore the world during different eras, making the setting constantly interesting. The game also had a whopping 13 endings, making it highly replayable. 

Of course, a large reason that Chrono Trigger works is that you get highly invested in the characters. Each character was incredibly well-written, and you truly got absorbed in the world the dream team had created. It also helps that the score from Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu is one of the best video game scores of all time.

Chrono Trigger has been wildly popular ever since its release, getting glowing reviews from gamers all over the world and becoming the second best-selling game of 1995 in Japan. The game has been ported and re-released several times, but it’s also one of the games that has the most fan demand for a (faithful) remaster/remake. Of course, this is a tricky undertaking when you’re talking about one of the most revered games of all time, especially in the wake of Toriyama’s passing.

Regardless, rumors of a Chrono Trigger remake are at an all-time high right now, especially after director Yoshinori Kitase, who was a director on the game and a producer on the Final Fantasy VII Remake Trilogy, posed a question about what fans would want out of a remake during an interview. Speaking on the My Perfect Console podcast, Kitase said, “If players are to play this game today, what would be the most favorable way in which it is presented?”

So, there may indeed be a Chrono Trigger remake on the way. But, in the meantime, the original is still well worth playing. It’s one of the great video game masterpieces of our time and one of Akira Toriyama’s best works.