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Banned
Today Chrono Trigger turned 21 years old!
Let's have a look at the history of the development of one of the best video games ever made!
It all began like a dream, at the start of the 1990s...
Before Chrono - Hiromichi Tanaka
The origin of Chrono Trigger can be traced back to sometime after the release of Final Fantasy III, in 1990. Square had plans to develop a huge action RPG for the Super Famicom Disk Drive, a peripheral being developed by Nintendo and Sony. The project was codenamed Maru Island, and included Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragon Ball) as the character designer.
Hiromichi Tanaka (the main designer of FFIII) had high hopes for this project. He wanted it to be an action RPG, with seamless battles, because this was a direction the Final Fantasy series was not willing to take. The game was going to involve time travel and a title was decided -- Chrono Trigger. However, the deal between Nintendo and Sony quickly fell through and the Super Famicom Disk Drive was scrapped, forcing Square to revise their plans. Maru Island/Chrono Trigger was rebooted as a new project using the setting of Seiken Densetsu, and became Secret of Mana.
American Dream - Akira Toriyama, Yuji Horii and Hironobu Sakaguchi
That was not the end of Square and Toriyama's relationship. In 1992, Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (creator of Dragon Quest), and Akira Toriyama (also co-creator of Dragon Quest) went on a trip to the United States in order to study the latest in CGI.
Their plan, however, went nowhere for a year and half due to unknown difficulties. Kazuhiko Aoki (director of the Hanjuku Hero series) decided to step in and offered to work on the game as producer. They gathered 50-60 Square employees to brainstorm ideas. The theme of time travel came up again, and thus the Chrono Trigger title was resurrected without Tanaka, who was busy with Secret of Mana. Sakaguchi, Horii and Toriyama were dubbed the Dream Team, while the development staff as a whole was dubbed Dream Project.
Masato Kato (a new Square recruit who previously worked on the Ninja Gaiden trilogy), was initially reluctant to the use of a time travel mechanics, because he was a huge fan of time travel literature and felt they might no be able to do this concept justice. Since the concept was greenlighted anyway, Kato became the game's story planner. The main Final Fantasy team, which was working on FFVII for the SNES at the time, eventually had to scrap their project to go assist the Chrono Trigger team. That team included Yoshinori Kitase (who directed FFVI).
If history is to change, let it change - Masato Kato's initial designs for the main cast
Kato created the early designs of the characters, before they were handed to Toriyama for re-drawing. The team took care in making a diverse cast that doesn't only include humans.
There were a lot of debates among over the characterization and arcs of the main cast. Crono for example:
And then there's Marle:
Most infamously, the 8th playable character was scrapped and remains in the game as a non-playable character -- Gaspar, the Guru of Time.
Full speed ahead - Yasuhiko Kamata, Kazuhiko Aoki, Keizo Kokubo, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoshinori Kitase, Katsuhisa Higuchi, Masato Kato, ???, Takashi Tokita
As development on the game progressed, Sakaguchi realized that the 24 megs of data would not be enough. In Autumn 1994, he decided to switch to a 32-meg cartridge, making Chrono Trigger the largest Square game at the time. The extra 8 megs were mostly filled with additional music and graphics, as well as some events and dialogue.
Magus' Castle is one of the areas that benefited the most from the expanded cartridge space. But the most notable change is probably the world map, which was completely revamped.
On March 11, 1995, Chrono Trigger was finally released in Japan.
Misc quotes
Hironobu Sakaguchi: "I was a really strict boss during the development of Chrono Trigger. Every morning I’d gather everyone together and make them give me status reports. I had never done anything like that during Final Fantasy."
Yuji Horii: "We had a lot more freedom than we would with Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. We weren’t worried about the feel of the world; it would be whatever we ended up making."
Masato Kato: "No matter what it is, something that has taken serious effort to make is crammed full of the various thoughts of all the staff members involved in its production. I think it’s a wonderful thing that the crystallisation of those thoughts can reach other people."
Yasunori Mitsuda: Boy, it was tough. It was in development for two years, but I worked on Romancing Saga 2 in the middle of it, so I did it in the one year that was left. In the beginning, the music was ahead of everything. But towards the end, everyone had passed me by, and finally, the music was finished last (laugh).
Sources/Much much more information
http://www.glitterberri.com/chrono-trigger/
http://shmuplations.com/chronotrigger/
https://www.chronocompendium.com/
Let's have a look at the history of the development of one of the best video games ever made!
It all began like a dream, at the start of the 1990s...
Before Chrono - Hiromichi Tanaka
The origin of Chrono Trigger can be traced back to sometime after the release of Final Fantasy III, in 1990. Square had plans to develop a huge action RPG for the Super Famicom Disk Drive, a peripheral being developed by Nintendo and Sony. The project was codenamed Maru Island, and included Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragon Ball) as the character designer.
Tanaka: "I frequently ran back to the office just to receive and look at the screen mock-ups that Toriyama-sensei did in the initial stages of the project."
Hiromichi Tanaka (the main designer of FFIII) had high hopes for this project. He wanted it to be an action RPG, with seamless battles, because this was a direction the Final Fantasy series was not willing to take. The game was going to involve time travel and a title was decided -- Chrono Trigger. However, the deal between Nintendo and Sony quickly fell through and the Super Famicom Disk Drive was scrapped, forcing Square to revise their plans. Maru Island/Chrono Trigger was rebooted as a new project using the setting of Seiken Densetsu, and became Secret of Mana.
Tanaka: "After we finished FFIII, we started FFIV with the idea of a slightly more action-based, dynamic overworld rather than keep combat as a completely separate thing. But, at some point, it wound up not being IV anymore… Instead, it was eventually released as “Seiken Densetsu 2” (Secret of Mana), but during development it was actually referred to as “Chrono Trigger”. (laugh)"
American Dream - Akira Toriyama, Yuji Horii and Hironobu Sakaguchi
That was not the end of Square and Toriyama's relationship. In 1992, Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (creator of Dragon Quest), and Akira Toriyama (also co-creator of Dragon Quest) went on a trip to the United States in order to study the latest in CGI.
Sakaguchi: "During the trip we decided that we wanted to create something together, something that no one had done before. We were really naive..."
Their plan, however, went nowhere for a year and half due to unknown difficulties. Kazuhiko Aoki (director of the Hanjuku Hero series) decided to step in and offered to work on the game as producer. They gathered 50-60 Square employees to brainstorm ideas. The theme of time travel came up again, and thus the Chrono Trigger title was resurrected without Tanaka, who was busy with Secret of Mana. Sakaguchi, Horii and Toriyama were dubbed the Dream Team, while the development staff as a whole was dubbed Dream Project.
Kamata: "We wanted to start with something completely new, and we had a general meeting to solicit ideas of what kind of thing we wanted to do, and I guess someone suggested it there. They said, “I want to do something like a time patrol.” Then everybody thought that sounded interesting, so we threw ideas around, trying to think of scenarios that handled time."
Aoki: "My life was made considerably more difficult thanks to this project."
Masato Kato (a new Square recruit who previously worked on the Ninja Gaiden trilogy), was initially reluctant to the use of a time travel mechanics, because he was a huge fan of time travel literature and felt they might no be able to do this concept justice. Since the concept was greenlighted anyway, Kato became the game's story planner. The main Final Fantasy team, which was working on FFVII for the SNES at the time, eventually had to scrap their project to go assist the Chrono Trigger team. That team included Yoshinori Kitase (who directed FFVI).
Kato: "After that, for the first year I spent hours every week in meetings at Mr Horī’s studio. I had to summarise any suggestions I’d been given or ideas I’d had about quest scenarios. I’d then take the parts that we’d worked on in the meetings back to my own company and think about how to continue those stories."
Sakaguchi: "Horii and I both work in the same field, so there were no real fights between us, but he has his own ideas about how a game should be made, and we clashed on a number of points. Those confrontations gave us the opportunity to think very deeply about the game, though, so I think it was probably a good thing."
If history is to change, let it change - Masato Kato's initial designs for the main cast
Kato created the early designs of the characters, before they were handed to Toriyama for re-drawing. The team took care in making a diverse cast that doesn't only include humans.
Horii: "When we were creating the characters, we were thinking about what sort of friends Crono would have in each era. The game’s protagonist is a young boy, so how many females should we have? When Square was working on in the in-battle actions, they thought it would be boring to have only human characters. When trying to think up characters that weren’t human or robot, they started considering the frog. (laughter) There were pigs, too. And monkeys. But they aren’t so different from humans."
There were a lot of debates among over the characterization and arcs of the main cast. Crono for example:
Kitase: "We argued a lot with Yuji Horii over whether Chrono should speak or not. Horii said that the protagonist of an RPG must never speak. And at Square, opinions were divided on the issue."
Kato: "There was also a time during a meeting when the idea of the main character dying came up, and the whole room suddenly burst into laughter. I seemed to be the only one who thought “That was a serious suggestion, what’s so funny?” and sat looking blank. (laughs) Although at that point Mr Horī did say “Hey, that might be pretty interesting.” Incidentally, the idea that I had at that time was for Crono to really die, and the others would have to go back in time and enlist a version of Crono from the night before the Fair. Then after the final battle they would have to return him to that point in time and bid him farewell. But that idea was rejected (laughs). They said it had to be a happy ending, so we eventually settled on the story with the clone as it is today. "
And then there's Marle:
Kitase: "When Sakaguchi officially joined the Chrono Trigger development team, the first thing he got his hands into was the scenarios. There was a scenario involving Marle, where a time paradox occurs and the Marle you end up spending the rest of the game with is actually from a different timeline." / Sakaguchi: "With time travel as our theme, you could have the same character be a totally different person if they belonged to a different timeline. That was the planners’ original idea, but I said it was no good. I said that even if the player changes history, when you return to your original time, it should be the same Marle there that you knew from before."
Most infamously, the 8th playable character was scrapped and remains in the game as a non-playable character -- Gaspar, the Guru of Time.
Full speed ahead - Yasuhiko Kamata, Kazuhiko Aoki, Keizo Kokubo, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoshinori Kitase, Katsuhisa Higuchi, Masato Kato, ???, Takashi Tokita
As development on the game progressed, Sakaguchi realized that the 24 megs of data would not be enough. In Autumn 1994, he decided to switch to a 32-meg cartridge, making Chrono Trigger the largest Square game at the time. The extra 8 megs were mostly filled with additional music and graphics, as well as some events and dialogue.
Higuchi: "Almost all the things we added with that 8M can be seen in the opening demo."
Magus' Castle is one of the areas that benefited the most from the expanded cartridge space. But the most notable change is probably the world map, which was completely revamped.
On March 11, 1995, Chrono Trigger was finally released in Japan.
Misc quotes
Hironobu Sakaguchi: "I was a really strict boss during the development of Chrono Trigger. Every morning I’d gather everyone together and make them give me status reports. I had never done anything like that during Final Fantasy."
Yuji Horii: "We had a lot more freedom than we would with Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. We weren’t worried about the feel of the world; it would be whatever we ended up making."
Masato Kato: "No matter what it is, something that has taken serious effort to make is crammed full of the various thoughts of all the staff members involved in its production. I think it’s a wonderful thing that the crystallisation of those thoughts can reach other people."
Yasunori Mitsuda: Boy, it was tough. It was in development for two years, but I worked on Romancing Saga 2 in the middle of it, so I did it in the one year that was left. In the beginning, the music was ahead of everything. But towards the end, everyone had passed me by, and finally, the music was finished last (laugh).
Sources/Much much more information
http://www.glitterberri.com/chrono-trigger/
http://shmuplations.com/chronotrigger/
https://www.chronocompendium.com/
