RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Do you remember the days when you finished a game and it was over? The credits ran and you turned off your console and congratulated yourself on having fought the good fight and won. There was nothing left to do but move on to the next challenge. Well that wasn’t the case the first time you finished Chrono Trigger…

Can you hear the ticking?

Multiple endings are a fairly common feature in games nowadays, but it wasn’t always so. Chrono Trigger may well be said to have popularized multiple endings. Produced by Square and released in North America in 1995, Chrono Trigger went on to sell 2.6 million copies worldwide. It was later ported to the PlayStation and was recently re-released on the Nintendo DS. Upon finishing the game, players could obtain one of several endings with slight  variations depending on which characters were part of your party — Crono and Magus in particular. The real excitement, though, came after the credits had run, with the New Game + feature (also a notable first in Chrono Trigger), which allowed players to begin the game with their end-game stats and items intact. They could then hop into the teleporter and go back to face Lavos at nearly any point in the game, yielding a dozen or so endings, many of them humorous, showing the unexpected consequences of tinkering with time travel.

But hold your horses — Chrono Trigger was not the first game to have multiple endings, right? Well no, it wasn’t. There are examples as early as the NES era with Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, which was a rather action-y sort of RPG. Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, however, was indeed an RPG (or more precisely a strange hybrid of tactical RPG and strategy elements), one which predated Chrono Trigger by two years in Japan. It featured twelve endings based on in-game actions, alignment, reputation, and gender. However, the game’s influence was limited as the original Super Nintendo release sold only 25,000 copies, compared to Chrono Trigger‘s 2.6 million. That being the case, it’s probably fair to say that Chrono Trigger deserves the title as the game that popularized the feature, though few games have included so many. As early as the PlayStation era, multiple endings had begun popping up as a fairly standard featuring, appearing in games such as Vandal Hearts 2, Valkyrie Profile, and Star Ocean: The Second Story (and the original 1996 Super Famicon release Star Ocean, which never left Japan) and it remains a feature seen in current-gen games such as Fallout 3 and Disgaea 3.

One playthrough? I don’t think so.

Along with its multiple endings, the New Game + feature is now quite commonly seen in games. Though much earlier games such as Super Mario Brothers and even RPGs (of sorts) such as The Legend of Zelda included post-game content, Chrono Trigger‘s New Game + feature with its carry-over stats was the first of its kind and was used in many subsequent games by Square and other companies, with examples such as Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story,  Final Fantasy X2, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Suikoden V, and The World Ends With You.

Chrono Trigger‘s original writing team came up with the multiple endings because they were unable to write storyline splits within the game. With the increase in memory capacity in modern-day systems, the trend towards branching scenarios may become more common. Already games such as Alpha Protocol for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and Vakyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume for the Nintendo DS promise such features, Covenant of the Plume going so far as to describe the game as a “multi-story system” with a plot divided into branching chapters. Yet it was Chrono Trigger that can be said to have revolutionized the genre with its whole heap o`endings and its New Game + feature, and thus it doubly deserves the title of Game Changer.