Ink Tea Stone Leaf

The advance of years has altered my relationship to video games; once as dedicated to keeping abreast of the latest developments as any enthusiastic youngster, my interest in the “industry” of games has moderated to the point where most of my time with this hobby is spent on retro experiences: old games, and newer games that remind me of them. I am a few years shy of entering my fifth decade and I have truly mellowed on this score. If there are any of you like me, who keep to old habits rather than searching for new ones, I invite you to join me for a moment of relaxing and enjoying how willfully out of touch we are.

One of the nice things about primarily enjoying retro games is that there are so many out there that I haven’t played, and so many of those are of really exceptional quality. Tracking down authentic copies of games from the time of my youth can be frustrating and expensive, but I have never been such a purist that I wouldn’t settle for a well-executed port or reissue in a convenient package. That is the reason I picked up Collection of Mana for the Nintendo Switch, a compilation of the first three games in the Mana series of role playing games by Square. I had only ever lightly dabbled in Secret of Mana, the most well-known installment of the series and often regarded as a top-tier classic, and I was excited to give it a fuller measure of attention.

What really piqued my curiosity during my time with the game, however, was a sampling of information I gleaned from Secret of Mana’s wikipedia page. The project that became Secret of Mana (that’s Seiken Densetsu 2 in the original Japanese) was a home console follow-up to a 1991 game for the Nintendo Game Boy that was known outside of Japan as either Mystic Quest or Final Fantasy Adventure, being marketed as a sort of spin-off to Square’s flagship series of RPGs. This was all as expected: Final Fantasy Adventure is also on the compilation I bought, and in fact I played it through before I got to Secret of Mana. Less expected were details about connections to other ongoing projects of those years. Writer and producer Hiromichi Tanaka, who had previously worked on another Square RPG (Final Fantasy III), states that when he began working on Secret of Mana, it was originally intended to become Final Fantasy IV. The first Seiken Densetsu game (That’s Final Fantasy Adventure, keep up!) had been designed as an expansion of the Final Fantasy series’ turn-based gameplay, translated into a real-time battle system; people like Tanaka evidently had intentions at that time of incorporating some of those changes into the series proper. This was ultimately rejected and Secret of Mana was instead transformed into a launch point for a whole new line of games, but before it could acquire this new identity it operated under a (seemingly random) code name that was later used for a different project, and will be instantly familiar to fans of retro RPGs: Chrono Trigger.

At this point in my life, I had played through Chrono Trigger and most of Final Fantasy IV (something shiny distracted me from it back in the day, and I never got back to it), so this trivia held some resonance for me. The discovery of this tenuous yet intriguing connection between these two games and Secret of Mana got me thinking about how titles become fully-realized games, and how games like these are designed to be differentiated despite their common genre and the tendencies of a common development company. It also struck me as an excuse to play through all three games and then write about them, which seemed like a lot of fun. Why not look at Final Fantasy IV, Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger as a coherent group, given their common heritage?

To be totally transparent, this framing is flimsy. Final Fantasy Adventure was released in June 1991; Final Fantasy IV was released in July of the same year; Secret of Mana was released two years later, in August 1993. Whatever window Secret of Mana may have had to actually become Final Fantasy IV must have been quite small. The case for a Chrono Trigger connection to both games is stronger, as Chrono Trigger (released in March 1995) is known to have incorporated unused ideas from Secret of Mana, and was developed with the participation of key staff members from the Final Fantasy team. Despite all this, it must be admitted that a group consisting of these three games, and only these three games, is artificial and arbitrary. I admit this freely, and I am doing it anyway.

I am going to discuss each of these games according to some conventional and unconventional criteria, weighing their relative merits against each other while noting commonalities. Although all three are certifiable classics, the intention is not to determine anything so grand as which should be called the greatest SNES RPG by Square; that conversation would necessarily have to include games like Final Fantasy VI, and their presence would only be disruptive here. Instead, the winner (as such) will be awarded the exclusive title of “Secret of Final Trigger,” an award that I just made up and which by definition only these three games are eligible to receive.

Playing the Games

I still have my original Super Nintendo from the early 1990s, and I do play it from time to time, as it’s set up in my bedroom with my other retro consoles. However, although Final Fantasy IV, Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger all received North American releases for that console, I did not have access to them in that form. I had to settle for ports; as I said before, this does not bother me, but it does mean that I necessarily had to consider them in somewhat altered versions. Since this was mostly a matter of personal circumstances and necessity, there will be no “points” awarded for this section.

Secret of Mana, as I stated previously, was available to me as part of the Collection of Mana set for the Switch. Some time ago I had a copy of the original SNES cartridge in my collection, but this was only in a caretaker capacity, and has since been reclaimed by its owner. As far as I am aware, the version of the game I played is mostly identical to the original, and so I will regard it as being like the original with no reservations.

Final Fantasy IV was originally called Final Fantasy II in North America, due to Final Fantasy III and the real Final Fantasy II being unavailable there. Original cartridges (which, again, I don’t and never have owned) bear that title on the label, but it regained its proper number for all the various remakes, ports, and even sequels that came later (sequels to numbered Final Fantasy games are a whole other thing). One such port was for the Sony PlayStation, as one half of a 2001 compilation called Final Fantasy Chronicles. I happen to own Chronicles and a working PlayStation 2 (backwards compatible!), so that became my go-to platform for this game. The Chronicles version contains a few extra bells and whistles, such as a set of computer generated full motion videos to illustrate key moments of the story, and a method for quickly saving temporary data to the console memory (since doing a proper save to the PlayStation memory card takes about two million years, for some reason). The videos don’t add too much to the experience; unless I am mistaken or I missed something, they are only found at the beginning and end of the game, and they look very dated (significantly more so than those for Final Fantasy IX, which came out a year before Chronicles, so I don’t know what’s up with that).

I once had a SNES Chrono Trigger cartridge in my possession: an unexpected and generous gift from a friend, who asked for it back about a month later so that he could give it to some one else (I hope they enjoyed it). But the other half of the Chronicles compilation, as chance would have it, is Chrono Trigger. It also has a few added features, including full motion video done in a lovely hand-drawn anime style, reflecting the art design of the game; these videos are also actually integrated into the course of the game, rather than only being tacked onto the beginning and ending. However, I did not play the Chrono Trigger version from Chronicles, because it is otherwise a less-than-excellent port. Back in 2001 or so, it tragically failed to sustain my interest due to terribly slow loading times between battles and screen changes. Rather than subject myself to this again, I turned to my preferred Chrono Trigger port: the 2008 version for Nintendo DS. It has all the videos from the Chronicles version, plus new optional dungeons and quests and modifications that take advantage of the DS’s touch screen. You can turn off some of those modifications and play it like the original, although the game will still display an area map and some menu buttons on the touch screen; between that aspect and the fact of having to play on such a tiny screen, this was by far the most altered version that I played among the three games, but it loads up right quick.

Graphics and Art

Crucially, the versions of all three games that I played look very much like they did on the Super Nintendo. I recently acquired the compilation of “pixel remasters” of the first six Final Fantasy games, and I look forward to working my way through them all at leisure (I’ve never played III, and never finished I, II, or V), but in this case I did not want the deliberately enhanced visuals or sound to influence my perception of Final Fantasy IV.

That game was the first production by Square for the Super Nintendo, and a passing familiarity with the overall look of Final Fantasy games for the previous Nintendo console will lead you to note the clear visual continuity. The world you move through is divided into discrete squares and marked by subdued but crisply defined colors. Character sprites are small and sometimes difficult to see clearly, but the designs by Yoshitaka Amano are distinct enough to prevent confusion, add a little visual interest, and clearly resemble the portrait versions seen in the menu screens. The upgrade from an 8-bit console to a 16-bit one does allow Final Fantasy IV to take advantage of some very smooth effects, such as the use of Mode 7 to transition from a flat landscape to a slightly curved one when using an airship. But although the design of the world is visually pleasing and new technology is integrated well, its overall style seems mostly conservative. Backgrounds are clean but much less detailed than typical of later games for the console, as though reflecting an uncertainty of what the SNES was capable of. In spite of this overall conservatism, however, the static hand-drawn sprites for enemies in battle are gorgeous to look at, even if the resolution doesn’t always do them justice; they reflect a wonderfully imaginative melange of mythology, folklore, and horror that bring the world to life. There are also lots of exciting effects for things like magic spells and summons, and some genuinely beautiful depictions of stars and planets in space, glimpses of greater ambitions to be realized in time.

Secret of Mana, on the other hand, is one of the most brightly colored and intricately detailed games in the SNES library. Through a variety of settings and environments, the visual philosophy of this game seems to be to depict a world teeming with life and the organic forms of leaves and roots. It is also much bolder in its use of Mode 7 to simulate three dimensional space, as characters are shot across different parts of the world in cannons, or ride through the air on the back of a dragon-like “flammie” creature. The sprites are much larger, easier to see, and move with a graceful fluidity that fits with the real-time battle system and contrasts with Final Fantasy’s customary turn-based combat. I’m not quite as impressed by the look of the average humanoid NPC, and I do question whether the programmers were aware that in other games of this type one can typically walk at least partly through the space behind buildings where all or most of a character would be out of sight. On the whole, Secret of Mana is consistently a joy to look at, but aspects of its design are somewhat dated.

The passage of time and the resultant mastery of the SNES hardware are to the benefit of Chrono Trigger, the latest of the group. Its color palate is more subdued than Secret of Mana’s, but it is also more variable and dynamic, complementing its complex lighting effects and highly detailed backgrounds. The character sprites, based on designs by Akira Toriyama, are so detailed and easy to see (even on a little handheld screen) that it is difficult to believe. Magic effects and the warping of space and time that are so central to Chrono Trigger’s story are depicted with astonishing fluidity. The world of Chrono Trigger sometimes looks more like that of an anime than of a video game of the 1990s, even though its elaborate designs are as much within the tradition of the artists at Square as they are of Toriyama (and very reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI). By 1995, Square was customarily creating visuals for the Super Nintendo that would have seemed impossible a few years earlier; even so, Chrono Trigger is an outlier for sheer quality.

Points: 3 for Chrono Trigger, which honestly kind of runs away with it.

2 for Secret of Mana, which still finds ways to impress.

1 for Final Fantasy IV, which walked so that others might run.

Sound and Music

*There are three of these, and one is technically an underworld, and it does technically have outer boundaries, while another is, shall we say, over the other two.

While the Nintendo Entertainment System had been capable of producing only a few kinds of sounds (and was further limited in how many of those sounds it could play at once), the Super Nintendo had a much more sophisticated capability to simulate a variety of musical instruments. While the result is distinctly artificial and bleep-bloopy, the synthesized instruments are recognizably themselves: horns sound like horns, and strings like strings; drums, guitars, piano, organs, etc. are all possible to represent with reasonable verisimilitude.

In contrast to its relative visual conservatism, Final Fantasy IV is incredibly progressive on the audio front. The series composer for Final Fantasy, Nobuo Uematsu, is widely considered to be one of the greatest in his field, and he seized the advantage presented by more advanced hardware to orchestrate a lush and grand score, rich with horns and flutes and strings. Playing Final Fantasy IV, I didn’t come away with the feeling that it was his greatest work, but it is extremely characteristic, full of heroic flourishes, exciting harmonies and counter-melodies, and rhythms that are equally appropriate for a rock group as for an orchestra. Uematsu finds textures that perfectly suit the feel of the game’s many surprising settings, which branch out to non-traditional fantasy areas (check out that Moon theme), as well as melodies to support the game’s exceptional characterization (the “Theme of Love” is exactly what it sounds like).

The music of Secret of Mana is inventive and at times perfectly suited to the game’s larger creative themes. The introductory music, preceded by simulated whale song, is a gorgeous piece that simply could not be improved upon. Unfortunately, the rest of Hiroki Kikuta’s soundtrack is more hit-and-miss for me. There are lots of lovely pieces that evoke the magic of nature or the foreboding of darkness, but there are also pieces that failed to move me, or seemed motivated to annoy me (like that tune from the dwarf village in Gaia’s Navel). It’s strong overall, but not ideal.

Chrono Trigger is an audaciously original game, and its soundtrack lives up to it. The main theme by Yasunori Mitsuda is an astonishing piece with a melody that feels synonymous with high adventure, but it also proves flexible by appearing in other arrangements that convincingly represent a wide emotional range. The music helps to set the mood through five (or more) distinct eras of time, and the arrangements never miss. On top of that, Chrono Trigger puts its thumb on the scale in this category; a few pieces of the score were actually composed by Nobuo Uematsu, at the same time that he was working on what would become one of his greatest scores, Final Fantasy VII. Some of that game’s sound bleeds into Chrono Trigger, and at that point a winner becomes clear.

Points: 3 for Chrono Trigger, though it is kind of unfair.

2 for Final Fantasy IV, for showing the way to sophistication in style.

1 for Secret of Mana, which just hits a few too many unsatisfactory notes.

Gameplay Mechanics

Point One: Battles

All of these games have broadly similar play experiences: exploring towns and dungeons, talking to NPCs, hunting for treasure and other secrets, and gaining experience points to increase levels and stats by fighting battles against enemies that range from the mundane to the apocalyptic. This is all bread and butter for role playing games.

Regarding the battles, each game also uses a variation of a mechanic that Square developed in the early 1990s called “active time battle,” or ATB. This mechanic is intended to bridge the gap between traditional turn-based combat and action in real time; essentially, a period of time elapses between each character’s turn, its duration depending on their speed stat. The result is that a very fast character might have two turns in battle in the same time that a slow character has one. The precise rules for when the “turn clock” runs and pauses are variable and can be adjusted from the menu screen.

ATB is strongly associated with the Final Fantasy series, and Final Fantasy IV was the first to implement a version of this design. In practice, a player who doesn’t spend a very long time deciding what action a character should take (attack with a weapon, defend, change rows, flee, use an item, cast a spell, or some other ability) may not always notice that they aren’t simply trading turns the old fashioned way. Battles take place on a special screen, and most are initiated randomly while others are scripted. The game doesn’t indicate the passage of time except by alerting you when it is a character’s turn, and most common enemies can be defeated in one to three rounds when your characters are appropriately leveled. It’s typically when battling bosses and other unusual enemies that you must pay close attention to the rhythms created by ATB, and act quickly lest you squander opportunities to gain the upper hand.

Some later battles can be brutally unforgiving in this way, and at certain points the player may just have to resign themselves to the ritual of the grind—spending indefinite amounts of time triggering fights with enemies that grant generous experience yields when defeated, until your character’s stats are sufficiently superior as to ease your passage to victory. Of all the things associated with traditional RPGs, grinding is among the least loved, as it is repetitive (there are only so many ways to kill an evil bat) and detracting from verisimilitude (no matter how urgent the time crunch for confronting the boss, there is somehow always time to kill about five hundred evil bats). I did manage to make it nearly to the final dungeon of Final Fantasy IV before further advancement required a serious commitment to the grind, but it was a test of patience nonetheless.

Secret of Mana approaches the ATB concept in a much looser way. There is no principal distinction between battle screens and any other area, except for the presence of enemies. Characters can move freely and theoretically take any action at any time, except that the strength of an attack is reduced almost to the point of impotence if the character’s time gauge is not allowed to refill itself. Spells and items can be activated outside of the flow of time by opening up the game’s unique “ring menu” system, which takes a little getting used to but is very efficient.

On top of that, Secret of Mana takes an enormous swing by incorporating multiplayer into its battles. Up to three people can control the three player characters on screen, a very bold choice given that the SNES only comes with two controller ports (you could buy an adapter back then, of course). If you play solo, you can switch between the three at will while a surprisingly decent, customizable AI manages the other two. Eight varieties of weapons and a huge set of magic spells make for a pleasing variety of action and strategic depth in nearly every encounter, greatly relieving the tedium when the need for a little light grinding inevitably arises.

Combat is fast-paced, fun, and it all works much better than it has any right to, but unfortunately a lot of the play involves managing design flaws and inadequacies. The free movement of three characters on screen means that the overhead camera doesn’t stay centered on the player-controled character, making it annoyingly difficult to avoid running blindly into enemies lying in wait just off screen. Not all of the weapon types are intuitive to use, and it’s not always obvious why an attack does or does not strike true. AI character movements are generally very good and the computer is capable of making effective contributions to a battle, but it is also capable of getting some one stuck on a staircase for no discernable reason. That none of these things are totally broken, however, is a testament to the skill with which this genuinely complex system was designed; I’ve played games of much more recent vintage that didn’t work nearly as well. On this front, Secret of Mana is a gem.

The combat system for Chrono Trigger is built on a more conventional application of ATB. Like Secret of Mana, battles take place on the same screens as general movement and are scripted rather than random, but characters mostly take up static positions on the battlefield. Unlike Final Fantasy IV, the time gauge for each character is visible on screen (and they mostly seem to fill up a lot faster). The key element that sets this combat apart is the ability to delay a character’s turn in order to combine it with one or both of the other character’s turns, unlocking an impressive set of dual and triple maneuvers (called “techs”) that combine elemental and attack types to suit a variety of tactical challenges—a basic spin tech might combine with fire for extra damage, or turn a single-use healing spell into one that heals all allies.

Chrono Trigger is built around flexibility and customization. Final Fantasy IV has a large cast of playable characters, but the player is never offered a choice as to which ones to have in their party as the story progresses. Secret of Mana offers only three playable characters, and again no choice as to whether to bring them along. Chrono Trigger has seven (spoilers, lawl), and following a certain point in the story the player has complete freedom to use any combination of three they wish. If you’re like me, you’ll want to try every combination for the sake of unlocking all the combination techs, and you’ll probably find that it takes the sting out of grinding too.

Again reflecting its later development time, Chrono Trigger has what is probably the most smoothly executed battle system, and the combination tech mechanic with variable enemy positions keeps battles consistently interesting. That makes it a very strong contender against the others for this point, but not quite the front runner in my estimation.

Points: 3 for Secret of Mana, for going big and succeeding admirably.

2 for Chrono Trigger, for extreme polish and originality.

1 for Final Fantasy IV, for pioneering ATB, a fact which should not be ignored.

Point Two: Exploration and Navigation

Video game RPGs mostly distinguish themselves mechanically in how players gather experience point, most typically by killing monsters and bad guys. In addition, there are some important differences in another area that I think are worth exploring: the way that characters move through the world.

Apart from battle and menu screens, there are two basic types of screens to navigate in Final Fantasy IV: locations with discrete boundaries, and the unbounded overworlds* that allow travel between them, on foot or by vehicle. They each have distinct properties and characteristics, such as differing depictions of the world’s physical scale. The player is always subject to random battles when traveling on foot through overworld screens, while location screens are divided between random battle zones (dungeons, caves, etc.) and safe zones (towns and castles, though scripted battles may still occur here). Regardless of the scale depicted, the player moves through them strictly in the four cardinal directions, one square unit at a time.

Adventuring in this kind of world (a very typical configuration for RPGs) is an exercise in logistics. One of the most important distinctions between overworld and location screens is that the player can save progress at will in the overworld, while saving is only permitted at designated spots within locations. This also limits where the most effective healing items (tents and cottages) can be used, so it is necessary for players to be mindful of the location of their last save, and manage their inventories accordingly. This means spending money in towns, which means battling enemies for their money, which means keeping an eye on the cost/benefit analysis of spending too much time (and too many healing items) wandering in caves and fighting evil bats. It’s not a terribly difficult cost/benefit problem over the long haul, but it is an essential part of the classic RPG experience, and it does evoke a sense of the world as a complex landscape, nearly every part of which is fit to be explored.

By way of contrast, Secret of Mana does not make a visual distinction between screens where enemies may be encountered and screens where they may not. There is no overworld as such; even when flying freely over the planet, most of the landmasses you encounter are so thoroughly covered with mountains, forests, and other impassable terrain that they are effectively not a part of the player’s world. All of the areas that are navigable on foot form an archipelago of activity among vast expanses of stillness. All that stillness is gorgeous, of course, but the balance of what you can see and what you can touch is very different from the model of Final Fantasy.

Furthermore, the lack of an open “field” environment to traverse between action areas means, by the logic of the 1990s RPG, that saving the game can only ever happen at designated locations, primarily inns. Since the story will sometimes take you far from any hospitality institutions for extended times, the patient gamer must trust in Square’s timely distribution of saving opportunities. They mostly get it right, but it can provoke more anxiety than necessary.

Chrono Trigger adheres more closely to the traditional overworld/action screen dichotomy than Secret of Mana, though like that game it eschews random battles for encounters that, if not always unavoidable, are still totally scripted. A consequence of this approach is that there are no battles to be fought on the overworld at all; wandering over the countryside of Chrono Trigger is a uniquely peaceful experience. Despite the fact that nothing “happens” as such while you walk from one town to the next, the tranquility of the journey is still a welcome reminder that you are experiencing a fully integrated world.

Due to the time travel theme, Chrono Trigger actually contains multiple navigable overworlds, visually distinguished by climate, vegetation, and even the arrangement of continents. They aren’t especially big by the standards of the day, but extending the exploration through time more than compensates for the lack of expanse. The Earth of Chrono Trigger is alive with growth and motion than is typically to be found.

Points: 3 for Chrono Trigger, which leverages its thematic material to deepen the experience.

2 for Final Fantasy IV, which delivers the classic global immersion of traditional RPGs.

1 for Secret of Mana, which teases you with a beautiful planet that you can mostly only see from afar.

Story

Complex narrative is a defining feature of role playing games, and the Super Nintendo generation took great strides in raising the standards for in-game stories. Due to graphical limitations, these stories played out in a primitive fashion, like a puppet show featuring characters painted on Popsicle sticks against a mostly static background, their actions communicated by a limited vocabulary of animations. Nevertheless, this 16-bit theater was still capable of creating moving scenes, thanks to the growing strength of the writing and the emotional investment of the player driving the action.

Japanese RPGs of this era (from Square and others) drew from a common pool of themes and perspectives. Despite a focus on violent gameplay they tend to be skeptical of war and militarism in particular; ancient civilizations with marvelous technologies destroyed by hubris and catastrophic wars are a recurring motif. The relationships between humans and the natural world is central, with nature often idealized as a mystical life force. Many of these games can play out as fables of environmentalism, or as paeans to a sustainable, harmonious lifestyle threatened by the forces of industry and the logic of domination. The influence of contemporary Japanese anime, particularly the work of Studio Ghibli, is evident in their generally humanistic outlook.

The first game in the Final Fantasy series to attempt a sophisticated story with individualized characters was Final Fantasy II; I haven’t played it very much, and most people don’t think it’s very good. Final Fantasy III reverted to a more generalized storytelling, but with the launch of new hardware capabilities, Final Fantasy IV firmly established the expectation that games in this series would have plots that held water, themes that resonated with real people, and characters that were three dimensional (in a figurative sense).

Final Fantasy IV is at its most progressive on the story front. Its central protagonist, Cecil, is introduced as being deeply implicated in genocide, carrying out the orders of a tyrannical king and conducting a senseless, barbaric war of aggression and plunder, while following a personal path he knows can only end in self-destruction. The faint stirrings of conscience make him an enemy of the state, while a series of trials and sacrifices transform him into a figure of redemption. The transformation is literal—at a key point, Cecil must actually begin again at level one with a new set of skills and abilities, and set about earning the trust of people and nations that rightly regard him with suspicion.

There is a global, existential threat for Cecil and his companions to confront, as well as a lot of classic fantasy verbiage about magical crystals and ancient prophecies. However, there are very few elements of the story that do not personally concern Cecil, as the grand drama of the story’s conclusion is coupled with revelations about his history, which in turn have meaningful implications for how the narrative plays out. His divided loyalties to king and country, friends and lovers, family ties and the ideals of knighthood, make him far more compelling than a blank slate.

However, blank slates are not necessarily a problem for RPGs. The heroes of Secret of Mana (allegedly called Randi, Primm, and Popoi, though there’s no indication of this in the game, and you can call them whatever you want) have some characterization, but most of the time they can be regarded simply as orphan sword guy, rebellious aristocratic tomboy, and wisecracking little magic person. They each have moments of pathos and a place in their world, but beyond their being the Chosen Ones, the story of Secret of Mana isn’t really about them in the way that Final Fantasy IV is about Cecil and his personal journey.

The story is really about the quest, an adventure which is suggested to be perpetually recurring throughout time. “Mana” is an abstraction for the life force of the natural world, and the heroes who wield the Sword of Mana are charged with defending nature’s balance from the disruptive, corruptive influence of technology and military ambition. The centrality of the Mana Tree as a bridge to the world’s past is laden with classic symbolism; the scale of this enormous plant and the stakes of its continuity are reminders that the adventure is about taking part in something larger than oneself.

Chrono Trigger is also concerned with continuity and epic scale, its central conflict playing out across multiple eras spanning thousands (even millions) of years. Its central character, Crono, is among the very blankest of slates: he never speaks a word that the player can hear, and his primary attributes (apart from courage and whatever) are that he enjoys sleeping in and is pretty good at swords. He looks like somebody with personality, though (thanks to Dragonball artist Toriyama’s colorful, spiky-haired design), and in a video game this can go a long way.

Similarly excellent designs, along with clever writing, elevate a supporting cast that would otherwise be easily reducible to types. You have the rebellious princess who seeks freedom beyond the castle walls; the nerdy inventor girl with a social conscience; the valiant knight laboring under a curse; the robot who strives for free will and emotion; the rowdy Amazon warrior dressed in animal skins; the enemy-turned-ally with a noble heart who is still kind of a dick. Their disparate origins and diverse motivations tell the story of a struggle across the entire history of their world, as the instrument of time travel allows them to make common cause against threats in multiple eras.

Chrono Trigger is very smart about its time travel mechanic: at ease in the freedom of non-linearity and instantaneous movement between eras, and diligent in making use of the possibilities of altering history to affect the particulars story. One of its most celebrated features is a web of multiple story endings, reflecting the time and circumstances under which the final battle is fought. The game simply cannot be fully unwrapped in a single play-through, which is why it includes the option to start a new game while carrying over items and experience from the last one. In an age of narrative experimentation and innovation within the RPG genre, Chrono Trigger is among the most audacious and successful.

Points: 3 for Chrono Trigger, for its comprehensive embrace of time travel as both a gameplay mechanic and an instrument of story.

2 for Final Fantasy IV, for building a cohesive story within a traditional framework around an exceptionally well-characterized personality.

1 for Secret of Mana, which tells an otherwise standard story with grace and charm.

Miscellaneous Criteria

Point 1: Airships

Vehicles are an indispensable element of globe-spanning fantasy RPGs, and flight is an enduring fascination. You will find yourself in the air sooner or later; the only question is, how imaginative and capable will your ride be?

In Final Fantasy IV, Cecil is introduced as the captain of a flying warship, and the loss of his command for disloyalty is his first major setback. Naturally, by the end of the game, he manages to assemble a whole fleet of vehicles, most of them in the steampunk vein typical of the series. Apart from a one-off adventure on the back of a flying chocobo, Cecil acquires an amphibious land cruiser, an airship (the Enterprise) equipped with a crane for carrying said land cruiser, a second aircraft (the Falcon) equipped with a drill for burrowing in and out of the Earth’s interior(!), and the Lunar Whale, a massive spaceship built for transportation to the moon’s surface. It is an embarrassment of airships that you find yourself with, and it’s honestly pretty rad.

There are no airships as such to play with in Secret of Mana, and initially the party finds that the most effective means of long-distance travel at its disposal is being shot out of massive cannons. It’s whimsical, highly amusing, and of questionable safety. What is really a step up, however, is the introduction of Flammie, a six-legged dragon you summon with a toy drum, who careens out of the sky and zooms you high above the Earth in a majestic sequence reminiscent of the Never Ending Story. Flammie sequences are magnificently rendered with the SNES’s famous Mode 7 effect, and while navigation can be a little tricky it is honestly pretty rad.

Chrono Trigger grants you the use of a time machine (naturally) called the Wings of Time, renamed Epoch by the party (though like the characters themselves you can actually call it whatever you want). Visually, its flights over the land are unremarkable, but the fact remains it’s a time machine, technically granting it the greatest freedom of movement of any vehicle ever. At the opposite end of the technological spectrum, a sequence in the prehistoric era finds our heroes riding on the backs of pterodactyls, and that’s honestly pretty rad.

Points: I honestly cannot rank these; they all get 3 points.

Point 2: Replay Value

Why should an RPG hold up to repeat play-throughs, anyway? There are so many to play that you can never

Well, I paid good money for these games, even if I paid it decades ago. I expect value for my money, bang for my buck, but most importantly that the experience of a single play-through is of such quality that it bears repeated exposure, even if that means returning to it years later. A good RPG should lend itself to nostalgic reappraisal.

Intrinsically, the experience of Final Fantasy IV does not present a lot of argument for frequent replaying, unless you’re the kind of person who can’t be satisfied until you’ve unlocked every little thing that can only be unlocked through relentless grinding. However, I do have plans to play Final Fantasy IV again in the near future. As I mentioned, I have the complete set of Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, with enhanced graphics and music. I’ve sampled the opening bits of most of the games and found them irresistible, and I look forward to experiencing and reevaluating this remarkable story in due time. Its surprising sophistication has given me a new appreciation for the art of narrative in this medium.

But will I return to the version I just played on Chronicles, Super Nintendo by way of PlayStation? It seems doubtful. The deficiencies of this particular version (mainly the slow loading and saving times) are enough of a barrier to keep the disc firmly in place on the shelf. It might be a different story if I had the original cartridge (my most recent playing of Final Fantasy VI on the SNES was less than a year ago), but that’s just not something that can be known.

I don’t have any particular plans to replay Secret of Mana at this time, having found nearly all the secrets and having so many other games I’d like to get through (including Trials of Mana, the third game on this compilation set). The act of playing it, however, was such a blast that I simply can’t believe I’ll never jump back into that world again—especially since I have yet to try out the multiplayer battle function. Won’t somebody play Secret of Mana with me? It’s not often I can ask this about an RPG.

And as for Chrono Trigger? Buddy, I’m playing through again right now. Not literally right now, because I’m typing, but the adventure is in progress. Not only is the story strong enough to keep me engaged a second time, but one could argue it isn’t really finished until you’ve unlocked a decent number of the alternate endings, through the power of time travel. After all, why make a time travel RPG if you’re not going to do everything you can to set things in motion all over again, and make it fun all the while?

Points: 3 for Chrono Trigger, in the one category it was most clearly designed to excel.

2 for Secret of Mana, for dangling the possibilities of multiplayer fun before my eyes.

1 for Final Fantasy IV, for being a solid RPG that tells a story worth being told again.

Point 3: Feminism

It is a truth too seldom acknowledged, within a hobby subculture dominated by angry nincompoops, that narratives within video games have historically treated male characters as central and female characters as accessory. In the 1990s, RPGs by Square and others were certainly not lacking in old stereotypes and unimaginative thinking about gender relations. However, this is not to say that there was no progressive representation to be found, or that each of the three games under consideration was equally sexist or egalitarian.

In Final Fantasy IV, Rosa and Rydia illustrate the ambivalence with which male-centric fantasy traditionally regards powerful women. Both are absent for substantial portions of the plot, which is not a problem in itself as this is true of every character except Cecil. However, Rosa’s presence in the story is always defined as a booster of her lover, the Guy with the Sword. As for Rydia, she enters the story as a vulnerable child in need of a man’s guardianship and protection, then re-enters the story (aided by some shenanigans with the flow of time between dimensions) as a wild sorceress of exotic beauty—two well-worn representations of women as defined by male interest for the price of one.

To be clear, both Rosa and Rydia are fine and essential characters. This makes the eyes roll all the harder when, at the start of the story’s final movement, Cecil and two male characters attempt to compel the ladies to remain behind, as it is “too dangerous” for them to face the ultimate battle. The result is too predictable: the women come along anyway, and Cecil, perhaps belatedly recognizing that attempting to run a tough campaign with a party that lacks both its best healer and offensive spell caster is tremendously foolish, vows to fight all the harder to keep them safe. Such noble, very girl power.

The game largely upholds the pervasive dichotomy in character classes and stats in the genre, whereby men possess greater physical strength and stamina, while women (and elderly men) rely more on spells because their arms are too weak to swing such big swords around. There is even a whole kingdom run by a council of magical women, alleged by the characters to have never fought a war in all of its history (women being very peaceful, you see). Though Final Fantasy IV is not especially misogynist, it is clearly uninterested in challenging its audience’s preconceived notions about the essential natures of women.

Things look a little brighter in the world of Secret of Mana. The three playable characters are a boy, a girl, and a “sprite” who may or may not even have a gender (I honestly can’t recall if they did, and that is saying something). There are some seemingly gendered differences between them, as the boy has higher attack strength while only the girl and the sprite can use magic, and between the two of them the sprite’s spells are more offensive in character. None of this is out of the ordinary, or particularly troubling in the big scheme of things.

What struck me as I played the game, however, is the fact that the girl’s physical strength is not so far below the boy’s that it becomes a problem to work around. As a matter of fact all three characters can use the same set of weapons (which is not necessarily the norm in these sorts of games), and all three are capable of contributing to a successful fight as primary or secondary characters, whether magic is involved or not. This is very good, as having it otherwise would have seriously mucked with the rhythm of battle, blowing a hole in the cooperative design.

Furthermore, while the personal stories of the characters are not especially prominent as drivers of the plot, the girl’s motivations are noteworthy: she joins in the quest in an effort to rescue her boyfriend, who is introduced as a mighty warrior but serves the plot as a distressed damsel. The various elements of her characterization are not especially original (she’s a rebellious runaway aristocrat, estranged from her father over the issue of marriage), but in a larger sense it is clear that the game sees her as a person with her own concerns beyond supporting her male counterpart, who incidentally never does anything as stupid as telling her not to come along for the final battle. It is clear that the Mana team was trying to say something about women and girls that ran contrary to established norms.

As for Chrono Trigger, the general excellence of the writing is a benefit to all the characters, who each have motivations for participating in the quest other than mere allegiance to protagonist Crono. The women in the group (three out of seven, about as balanced as can be considering one of the other four is a theoretically gender-less robot) all have distinct skill sets and personalities, and while they are of recognizable types they are still taken seriously by the narrative. The total lack of personality for Crono (again, he sleeps a lot, is good at swords, and has spiky hair) allows for all the other girls (and boys) to have more personality of their own.

There are tropes in their characterizations that suggest an effort to appeal specifically to boys, from Marle’s flirtatious dancing to Ayla’s near-nudity and cat ears, and apart from Ayla’s battling with bare fists the game seems to assert that women are unsuited for melee combat. The truth is, in just about every game of this type you can find “armor” for women that consists of cute or sexy clothes with little defensive value, jokes that play on the supposed vanity and jealousy of the fairer sex abound, and representations of heroic warrior maidens who need to learn how to express their secret vulnerabilities. Chrono Trigger, however, is so propelled by the forward motion of adventure that it never gets bogged down in anything really unsavory.

Points: 3 for Secret of Mana, for placing a female protagonist in virtual parity with its male one on nearly all fronts.

2 for Chrono Trigger, for allowing interesting stories about more than one woman to feature in the larger web of narrative it weaves.

1 for Final Fantasy IV, for a small effort with a disappointing lack of imagination with regard to female participation in the party.

Point 4: Ancient Civilizations and Allegories for Nuclear Energy

If you wanted to be perversely reductive, you might observe that all three of these games (and a huge swath of others from the 1990s JRPG scene) really have the same story: the heroes strive to counter a threat to the world based on the actions of an ancient civilization with advanced technology and corrupted morals, the legacy of which is manifested as a source of power that is potentially constructive or destructive (a rather obvious metaphor for all things atomic). At this point I would bap you on the head with a rolled up newspaper for being so reductive, and remind you that a background plot element is not synonymous with an entire story, but afterwards I would happily explore with you the various ways these games explore these tropes.

The plot of Final Fantasy IV is driven by the bad guys’ quest to gather sets of crystals, which were created by a race of Lunar aliens who seem to have had competing sentiments about the inhabitants of the Earth they orbit. On Earth these crystals have elemental powers that seem to sustain the kingdoms that guard them, but when assembled at the high-tech subterranean Tower of Babil, they can summon a gargantuan kaiju (the Giant of Babil) with the power to destroy everything.

In Secret of Mana, the ancient civilization in its folly constructed a lethal flying fortress, powered by mana and awakened after the seeds of the Mana Tree are collected. The world is thus threatened both by the destructive power of the Mana Fortress, and by its own defensive response: the Mana Beast, another enormous kaiju. You might think that these are all the words that could possibly be preceded by “Mana” in a single paragraph, but of course the Mana Beast can only be defeated by the Mana Sword.

In Chrono Trigger, it is the kaiju that kicks things off: Lavos, a slug-like monstrosity, arrives with a meteorite impact in prehistoric times, and grows within the Earth’s core for millions of years until it is strong enough to corrupt and seduce the leaders of an ancient civilization into tapping its vast reserves of energy with the Mammon Machine, allowing it to gain a foothold in the world above, which it uses in the distant future to devastate the surface.

If we take the various kaiju and crystals/seeds as straight metaphors for nuclear technology, then Chrono Trigger is the most nuclear-pessimistic of the three stories. Lavos is not only alien to this world but has had a purely malignant effect on our history, the benefits seemingly provided by the Mammon Machine (what a name, right?) being little more than a Trojan horse. The ancient civilization of Zeal is presented in far greater detail than the equivalents in the other two games, but we know very little about the wholesome alternatives to Lavos’s influence. Conversely, the crystals of Final Fantasy IV reflect the idea that the result of a reliance on their power depends on the intentions of those who rely; it is militarism and hostility that brings them together to summon the Giant of Babil. The crystals are still basically alien to this Earth, however, and it is a hostile Lunarian who instigates the crisis, suggesting a certain innocence on the part of human beings in the matter. It is only in Secret of Mana that the energy underlying the nuclear allegory is considered an organic part of the natural world, and only the work of human beings wrought with destructive intent (the Mana Fortress) is regarded as an abomination.

But is it appropriate to read all of these things as straight metaphors, or is it all merely a melange of exciting fantasy and sci-fi concepts? Ultimately it’s a matter of how seriously to take these games, and specifically how seriously to take the narratives they contain. Granted that the primary audience of the time was children, these games may be seen as either an attempt to educate them about humanity’s relationship to science and the natural world, or to entertain them with simplified versions of concepts they were not mature enough to analyze seriously. Your assessment of the proportions may differ from mine, but having played all three I feel that both aims are meaningfully present—particularly in Secret of Mana, a game so suffused with an environmentalist perspective that it is impossible to ignore, no matter how entertained you are.

Points: 3 for Secret of Mana, having the most nature-focused take on the perils and promise of humanity’s maddest science.

2 for Chrono Trigger, for its comparatively detailed depictions of life in Zeal that say surprisingly little on the subject of alternatives.

2 for Final Fantasy IV as well, for an otherwise nuanced take that leaves humanity weirdly off the hook.

Point 5: General Strangeness

If you know me, you’ll know that I consider “weird” to be an endearing, even necessary quality in any work of art. The spirit of weirdness suffuses the world of Super Nintendo JRPGs, with their offbeat senses of humor augmented by generally odd translations from Japanese to English (I would be remiss if I did not drop a reference to a certain spoony bard). Sometimes it borders on the sophomoric; other times it is fully sophomoric, and no excuses can be made other than the fact that we were all a lot younger then.

Cataloguing all the weirdness in these games would be exhausting, and it really is best experienced in context. Instead, I will simply tell you the weirdest things I can remember off the top of my head, two from each game. “Weirdness” is difficult to quantify and perhaps cannot be quantified at all, but it can be recounted, and I feel it is worth doing so, because it makes me smile.

Final Fantasy IV: Every town features at least one “dancing girl,” who will when spoken to do an elaborate dance routine in a bikini (in non-censored versions of the game, anyway). The girl in Mysidia uses her dance as an opportunity to lull Cecil into a false sense of security, then transform him into a pig for his crimes. A man in the pub in Troia will try to talk you into spending 10,000 gil on a ticket to watch six girls dance on stage; nothing else of value can be found there.

There is a town known as Mythril, where Mythril is mined (naturally). It is inhabited entirely by people who have been transformed into pigs, toads, and tiny humans. A trio of brothers, one in each form, will offer to do a dance for you. Nothing else of value happens in Mythril; this town and the pub in Troia seem to be little more than elaborate pranks on the player.

Secret of Mana: One of the bosses in the game, Frost Gigas, is actually Santa Claus. Santa was transformed after attempting to use the Fire Seed to grow a Mana Christmas Tree. There’s really not much that can top that, if we’re being honest.

Prior to the introduction of Flammie, the only method for traveling long distances is being shot out of a cannon. The question of whether this method of travel is actually survivable is not dwelt upon. I’ve mentioned that already, but you have to admit it’s pretty strange.

Chrono Trigger: One of the game’s bosses, the fiend called Ozzie, leads the party on a chase through a castle filled with various traps, which end up backfiring on him like Acme products on Wile E. Coyote. His descendant in another era lords it over a town of fiends who have (mostly) resigned themselves to a life of quiet domesticity.

One of the game’s possible endings, unlocked if the final battle is fought as early in the story as possible, reveals that Frog has become an ancestor of the present royal family, who are consequently all anthropomorphic frogs in disguise. The implications are staggering.

Points: Everybody gets 3 points again, this is all ridiculous.

The Final Tally

Having assessed these three games according to every relevant detail, it is time to reveal The Secret of Final Trigger:

Final Fantasy IV: 18 Points

Secret of Mana: 22 Points

Chrono Trigger: 27 Points

What have we learned? Perhaps only what many players would have told you from the beginning: Chrono Trigger is nearly a perfect RPG, and it was foolish to put any of its peers in contention for the crown it was always bound to walk away with, unless I planned to stack the deck with categories like “best appearance of a guy named Cid” or “best application of a multiplayer mode.”

Yet I hope we have learned something else: Chrono Trigger is only nearly perfect, and indeed only one step along a path of growing sophistication for a genre and a company that made its reputation pushing the boundaries of that genre. The path is not straight, and many games of later eras have failed to live up to the promise of some of the best on the Super Nintendo, but the excellence of Chrono Trigger in this little contest is a testament to what a few years of experience and technical mastery can do when you are already standing on giants’ shoulders.

As I said before, the connection between these three games is tenuous, but with the passage of time it has actually grown less so. They and others have become representative of an explosively creative period of gaming history. It’s true that as a matter of fact I am from that era, and so I may be biased on that account, but I believe it is one that will always be worth revisiting.