Chrono Trigger - Development History

Development History

Chrono Trigger was conceived in 1992 by Hironobu Sakaguchi, producer and creator of the Final Fantasy series; Yuji Horii, director and creator of the Dragon Quest series; and Akira Toriyama, famous manga artist and creator of the Dragon Ball series. Traveling to America to research computer graphics, the three decided to create something that "no one had done before." After spending over a year considering the difficulties of developing a new game, they received a call from Kazuhiko Aoki, who offered to produce. The four met and spent four days brainstorming ideas for the game. Aoki ultimately produced Chrono Trigger, while director credits were attributed to Akihiko Matsui, Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita. Toriyama designed the game's aesthetic, including characters, monsters, vehicles, and the look of each era. Masato Kato also contributed character ideas and designs. Kato planned to feature Gaspar as a playable character and Toriyama sketched him, but he was cut early in development. The development staff studied the drawings of Toriyama to approximate his style. Sakaguchi and Horii supervised; Sakaguchi was responsible for the game's overall system and contributed several monster ideas. Other notable designers include Tetsuya Takahashi, the graphic director, and Yasuyuki Honne, Tetsuya Nomura, and Yusuke Naora, who worked as field graphic artists. Yasuhika Kamata programmed graphics, and cited Ridley Scott's visual work in the film Alien as an inspiration for the game's lighting. Kamata made the game's luminosity and color choice lay between that of Secret of Mana and the Final Fantasy series.

Hiroyuki Ito was responsible for the animations of characters during event scenes and battle scenes and also responsible for the locations of enemies on the field map and how it would seamlessly transition into a battle when a player approached where the enemies were located. Due to battles taking place on the field map, he also had to create a short event scene before every battle started that would transition the gameplay from exploration to battle. His experience working on Chrono Trigger led to him continuing to want to get rid of random battles in future games he would work on. He believes he created an even more seamless battle system with the Active Dimension Battle (ADB) for Final Fantasy XII. His favorite character animation he made in Chrono Trigger is the battle victory animation of Crono. He made Crono break the fourth wall and give the player a thumbs up. He added this as he believed it would feel encouraging from the perspective of the player to see the game congratulating their victory. This mindset was also the source of the "Congratulations" message that appears on the screen when a player defeats a boss in Final Fantasy XII.

Yuji Horii, a fan of time travel fiction (such as the TV series Time Tunnel), fostered a theme of time travel in his general story outline of Chrono Trigger with input from Akira Toriyama. Horii liked the scenario of the grandfather paradox surrounding Marle. Concerning story planning, Horii commented, "If there’s a fairground, I just write that there’s a fairground; I don’t write down any of the details. Then the staff brainstorm and come up with a variety of attractions to put in." Sakaguchi contributed some minor elements, including the character Gato; he liked Marle's drama and reconciliation with her father. Masato Kato subsequently edited and completed the outline by writing the majority of the game's story, including all the events of the 12,000 BC. era. Kato and other developers held a series of meetings to ensure continuity, usually attended by around 30 personnel. Kato devised the system of multiple endings because he could not branch the story out to different paths. Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita then wrote various subplots. Kato became friends with composer Yasunori Mitsuda during development, and they would collaborate on several future projects. Katsuhisa Higuchi programmed the battle system, which hosted combat on the map without transition to a special battleground as most previous Square games had done. Higuchi noted extreme difficulty in loading battles properly without slow-downs or a brief, black loading screen. The game's use of animated monster sprites consumed much more memory than previous Final Fantasy games, which used static enemy graphics.

Hironobu Sakaguchi likened the development of Chrono Trigger to "play around with Toriyama's universe," citing the inclusion of humorous sequences in the game that would have been "impossible with something like Final Fantasy." When Square Co. suggested a non-human player character, developers created Frog by adapting one of Toriyama's sketches. The team created the End of Time to help players with hints, worrying that they might become stuck and need to consult a walkthrough. The game's testers had previously complained that Chrono Trigger was too difficult; as Horii explained, "It's because we know too much. The developers think the game's just right; that they’re being too soft. They're thinking from their own experience. The puzzles were the same. Lots of players didn’t figure out things we thought they’d get easily." Sakaguchi later cited the unusual desire of beta testers to play the game a second time or "travel through time again" as an affirmation of the New Game + feature: "Wherever we could, we tried to make it so that a slight change in your behavior caused subtle differences in people’s reactions, even down to the smallest details...I think the second playthrough will hold a whole new interest." The game's reuse of locations due to time traveling made bug-fixing difficult, as corrections would cause unintended consequences in other eras.