Every gaming publication in the world will report on this one but few of them will have the impotant details.
What am I talking about and why is Square-Enix’s remake relevant to this blog? It’s because Chrono Trigger was the first game that Kenichi Nishi worked on, alongside Keita Etoh, before moving on to Lovedelic. Both designers were responsible for the ‘Field Planning’. And though I have no idea what that actually means, I’d wager that Chrono Trigger has the best field planning ever seen in any game.
As a citizen of the overlooked continent of Europe I’ve never had the opportunity to play a legitimate version of Chrono Trigger so I’m quite looking forward to the DS remake. I’ll therefore be watching this website with much interest.
There are a couple of interviews with Nishi at cubed3.com and in one he mentions that in a company as large as Square, it was easy to get away with not turning up for work, haha. So I don’t know how much he really had to do with CT.
Regardless, awesome game and cool that you’re covering it. I live in Australia so I’ve been passed over for the original release and subsequent remakes as well.
Alas, at the time, I was only able to play the game in its US version which was quite expensive. It wasn’t worth every penny, even if it was an excellent game back then, with wonderful field planning (smiles).
As for its original SNES version I can understand why it wasn’t released in the 1995 european market – several reasons which I think to be quite obvious. But to see it republished on the PSX years later, again only in the Japanese and North-American systems, at a time when europe was a larger market for RPG games was a tad more incomprehensible. 13 years, it’s a great deal of time to wait such a cult videogame phenomenon. I’m sure none waited that much, being the emulation world so appealing and accessible.