Chrono Trigger Review

This perennial time-travel adventure is worth falling in love with all over again.

It's been more than 13 years since SquareSoft first released its time-travelling epic Chrono Trigger on the SNES. With an endearing cast of characters and a fantastic story that took place throughout the ages, it went down in history as what many would call one of the greatest games ever made. It was later rereleased as a part of Final Fantasy Chronicles on the PlayStation, and though it included several new features such as anime cutscenes and a detailed bestiary, it suffered from long and frequent loading times. The Nintendo DS rerelease includes new areas to explore, an all-new ending that better ties into its sequel, Chrono Cross, and all of the additions of its PS1 predecessor (minus loading issues), making it the definitive edition of Chrono Trigger.

When the Kingdom of Guardia gathers to commemorate its millennial anniversary, the young Crono celebrates by sleeping in. Roused out of bed by his mother, he rushes to the festivities to catch the public demonstration of his inventor friend Lucca's latest creation, and in his haste literally runs into Marle, a hyperactive girl who looks more than a little familiar and insists that he show her around. With little choice in the matter, Crono brings his new companion to Lucca's show, where an experimental teleportation device malfunctions, sending Marle through a rift in the space-time continuum. Armed only with a wooden sword and dangerously spiky hair, Crono follows Marle into the past to attempt a temporal extrication, only to begin a long and arduous journey to prevent a tragic future from unfolding.

Along the way, Crono and his friends encounter an exceptional cast of allies, including the heroic Frog, a medieval knight sworn to defeat the sinister Fiendlord who turned him into an anthropomorphic amphibian; Robo, a humanoid robot from the future with a penchant for gardening; and Ayla, the hotheaded and enormously strong chieftain of a prehistoric tribe. Together, these time trotters face down a memorable cast of villains, from the cold and calculating Azala, queen of a race of hyperintelligent dinosaurs, to Magus, the scythe-wielding sorcerer supreme better known as the Fiendlord, in their quest to defeat the evil entity known as Lavos. From beginning to ending (all 14 of them!), Chrono Trigger offers a deeply satisfying combination of storytelling and character development that few games have managed to top, and that even the most stone-hearted will find emotionally stirring.

To this day, Chrono Trigger is a fairly nonstandard role-playing experience due to a number of innovative design decisions, but this was especially true at the time of its release. Its combat system allows for your three party members to attack separately or to combine their skills to create double or triple techniques of enormous power. Given that enemies are not randomly encountered and instead appear to wander the various dungeons that you explore, it's very possible to skip the vast majority of your fights should you choose to. As a result, the world map, which is represented by an extreme birds-eye view of your party, can be peacefully explored without fear of ambush. Considering that Chrono Trigger deals with the concept of time travel, any decision you make can have world-changing--and often not immediately noticeable--effects on the future. For example, your every deed at the Millennial Fair in the very beginning of the game may potentially come back to haunt you not long afterward. This cause-and-effect gameplay forces you to consider the short- and long-term consequences of your actions, and is also used to great effect in completing side quests.

In addition to all of the bonus content originally added as part of the PS1 port, the DS version of Chrono Trigger includes an optional touch-screen control scheme, the Lost Sanctum quest hub, the Arena of the Ages monster battleground, a series of dungeons called the Dimensional Vortices, a revelatory new ending, and a polished-up retranslation. The touch-screen controls move battle commands from the top screen into the bottom to free up more space, and the new translation maintains the charm and gravitas of the original while reinterpreting some words and lines to give them a bit more meaning. The Dimensional Vortices and new ending offer additional challenges, new items, and story closure on several ambiguous issues directly relevant to Chrono Cross. The Lost Sanctum is an isolated region that exists in two different eras and is ultimately forgettable thanks to its unimportance to the story and the frustrating fetch-quest nature of its missions. The Arena of the Ages is a new area that lets you adopt a monster and train it to battle against other monsters for potentially useful items. As with the Lost Sanctum, the Arena serves no story purpose, and even the ability to pit your monster against a friend's via local Wi-Fi isn't enough to make it worth accessing regularly.
Visually, Chrono Trigger hasn't changed one bit throughout the years, and its rich, sprite-based graphics, beautiful vistas, and colorful spell effects actually look better than ever on the DS. Similarly, the epic and moving soundtrack brilliantly crafted by famed composers Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu continues to amaze years later.
Chrono Trigger is a fantastic synthesis of excellent storytelling, game design, music, and gameplay that has withstood the test of time and should be considered required playing for any fan of role-playing games. Though its extra content is hit or miss and it's essentially a direct port of a game released 13 years ago, the DS version is easily the definitive edition of this masterpiece, regardless of whether Chrono Trigger is one of those games you've only ever heard of before or you're a dedicated fan who has played through it dozens of times.

By Lark Anderson, GameSpot

Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia Review

Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia improves upon its predecessor just enough to make it a fun, solid addition to the spin-off series.

Just over two years ago, Pokemon Ranger gave Nintendo DS owners an unorthodox spin on Pokemon with its unique touch-screen capturing controls. It turned out to be an enjoyable game, eschewing the franchise's traditional evolution and "Gotta catch 'em all!" tenets. With Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, Nintendo gives more of the same, though with a few small but welcome improvements that add a little depth to the experience while keeping its quick pace.

You start out as a fresh-faced student at a ranger school, where you learn about the various aspects of taming and helping Pokemon in the wild. Like in the original Pokemon Ranger, there's no battling here: rangers and students instead strive to keep the peace between Pokemon and humans. You capture the critters as in any other game in the franchise, but in this game you do so by expressing friendly, benevolent feelings through a device known as a styler, and once you use the Pokemons' special abilities to help you, you kindly release them back into the wild. There's no Pokemon leveling up or evolution here. As you progress from student to full-blown ranger, you take on the job of stopping the fiendishly named Team Dim Sun criminal organization from brainwashing Pokemon to do its nefarious bidding. The entire concept sounds a little trite, and many of the story's surprises are predictable, but it's got just enough lighthearted mystery to satisfy a younger audience.

In any case, the real star of Shadows of Almia is its refreshing capture system. The core idea entails drawing a circle around the Pokemon you're attempting to capture. If it bumps into the line you've drawn, it gets destroyed and you have to start drawing again. If its attack hits your line, you take damage. However, where the last game required that you draw a certain number of consecutive circles around a creature (without interruption) in order to succeed, in Shadows of Almia you need to fill up an empty friendship gauge. One complete circle fills up the gauge a little bit, with the catch being that it gradually depletes if you wait too long in between scribble attempts.
These changes make the capture process a bit easier because you're not forced into an all-or-nothing situation, and they also add a hint of strategy. Instead of just scribbling circles as fast as you can, you're now employing an exciting stick-and-move strategy in some of the tougher encounters--lifting your stylus just in time to avoid a series of attacks or catching an especially quick Pokemon when it pauses briefly. Each Pokemon has different attacks and movement patterns (though a number of them are similar) such that almost every new monster encounter brings a unique capture experience and a slight level of intrigue and uncertainty. Save for the large boss encounters, each capture instance can be completed in tens of seconds. Therefore, capturing rarely gets boring thanks to its brisk and varied nature.

Any Pokemon you capture can be used for its special ability during other capture sessions. For instance, you can use a fighting-type Pokemon to enhance your capturing power or a grass-type Pokemon to slow down your target by causing it to sprout foliage. You can also use special abilities on the field as you explore Almia. Like in the last game, the exploring portions are less exciting than capturing, and they employ the same obstacle-clearing mentality. For example, you can't clear a stream without a Pokemon that can swim; if there's a boulder in your way, you'll need a Pokemon with a high-level crush ability to smash it. These parts get progressively intricate and sometimes require a little use of your noggin. But you'll also quickly learn that in many cases, either the Pokemon you need for especially taxing obstacles is close by or a unique-looking Pokemon encountered for the first time will come in handy later in whatever dungeon you're in. This takes away some of the challenge, but at least it saves you some of the frustration of backtracking just for one little critter.
Exploration has changed too: Shadows of Almia includes optional (but highly recommended) side quests. Bystanders will ask you to help find, rescue, or calm down their Pokemon, among other similar tasks. It's nice to take a break from your main Team Dim Sun-thwarting duties to wander around a bit and fill out your catalog of monster encounters, but the quests also offer you the opportunity to meet partner Pokemon--those that never leave your side until you substitute in another partner--and to power up your capture tool with a variety of offensive, defensive, and elemental bonuses. These additions help flesh out the game a bit more, and leveling up your styler might satisfy those who would miss leveling up their Pokemon. The only slightly annoying factor here is that the quests must be taken one at a time, forcing you to backtrack to clients before taking on new quests instead of just queuing up quests as you encounter them.

The world of Almia is presented with vivid 2D graphics and large detailed sprites. Each area you travel to has a distinct feel, with colors that pop off the screen and its own collection of inhabitants. Though this variety is primarily due to the predictable use of lava, snow, desert, and underwater environments, the world is no less pleasing to the eye. What should have been improved upon are the Pokemon calls that you hear whenever you pass by them. They reek of 8-bit audio, and hearing a Ninetails or Shieldon in this game roar at you is incredibly grating, though not in the intimidating way a roar should be.
Nintendo hasn't made sweeping improvements on the original Pokemon Ranger, which is a slight disappointment given the two-year gap between entries. All told, however, the improvements do make for a more complete experience overall that provides the same invigorating mechanics introduced in the first game. With a meaty adventure that could easily take you past 25 hours, the return of downloadable side quests thanks to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, and the same core that made the original game so refreshing, Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia is a worthy addition to the series.

By Austin Shau, GameSpot

Neverland Card Battles Review

Neverland Card Battles gets off to a poor start and goes downhill from there.

Turn-based strategy and collectible-card gaming collide in Neverland Card Battles, the latest release in the little-known Cardinal Arc franchise from Japan. And when we say "collide," we mean it, because this strategy-card hybrid is awfully close to a train wreck. Breaking out a regular deck of cards for some 52 Pick-Up is a better use of your spare time than firing up this exercise in frustration, which is afflicted with an obtuse tutorial, brutal difficulty, tedious gameplay, and eight-bit visuals.

Even with all those negatives, Neverland Card Battles could have been a contender. Developer Idea Factory certainly starts from an interesting place. The single-player campaign's backstory (there is also a storyless ad-hoc multiplayer mode) is based on tales told in the Japanese anime-influenced Neverland universe, which gives the game something of an exotic vibe from the very beginning. You play Galahad, a human gambler blessed with the ownership of a pack of magical Spectral Cards, shards of a gate that imprisons the evil god Hellgaia, who wants to destroy humanity. Given that this gate is in the process of breaking down, you are summoned to do battle by Egma, the leprechaun-like teen guardian of the gods, with the survival of the entire world of Neverland at stake. Or so it seems. Making sense of the story developed here relies on you already knowing something about the world on which everything is based, and we don't, so some of the finer details may be a bit off-kilter.
Game mechanics are also mildly innovative. Play is based on an oddly fitting mishmash of the classic board game Othello and traditional collectible-card gaming in the style of Magic: The Gathering. Instead of building decks and throwing down cards in straightforward duels, you earn the points needed to play cards by taking control of spaces in checkerboard battle arenas. In each turn, you move both your hero Galahad and any summoned allies to change the color of the board and thereby gain more card-playing power. The idea is of course to take control of more boxes than your opponent and use the points earned to play and maintain the most formidable card army on the board. Combat itself plays out in a fairly conventional fashion for a collectible-card game, with each card representing warriors, mages, monsters, and spell effects. All have various special attributes: stats such as hit points and attack damage, costs for use and maintenance, and so forth. As with every other card-based game out there, battles involve a mix of strategy and luck. You need good fortune when drawing cards and solid tactical thinking when it comes to determining the right time to play them.

Sound simple? It sort of is, although Neverland Card Battles sure doesn't take it easy on you. The tutorial is more of a sample battle than an actual primer on how to play the game. Your supposed teacher, Egma, tosses off a couple of brief comments about the fundamentals of play, but then simply settles in to a duel that is awfully tough for a novice to win. No actual tips are provided regarding card selection, movement strategy, when to play specific cards, or even how to move. You're just stranded in the middle of a match and have to figure out what to do by watching your opponent's moves. Expect to lose this opening "tutorial" battle a couple of times while figuring things out. You can't skip this fight, either, because the campaign isn't unlocked until you emerge from it with a victory. Even a draw isn't good enough.
Things don't get any easier when you progress to the actual campaign. Battles are extremely tough, considering that you have to face a computer-controlled opponent that not only knows the deck inside and out, but also seems to get some incredibly favorable draws while you get stuck with underpowered crap that you don't want to play or overpowered crap that you can't afford to play. The learning curve levels off somewhat as you move through the dozen or so matches, but it still takes many hours before you learn the deck well enough to feel like you're on a level playing field. The game's checkerboard battlefields tend to be huge, too, which drags out the frustration early on because it takes so long to stumble through each match. Even after you've mostly sussed everything out, the big maps still put too much territory between you and your enemies when duels begin. Limiting you to drawing just a single card per turn throughout games, even when you're down to holding one card in your hand, also slows everything to a crawl. Almost all of these irritants would have been avoided with a more thorough and comprehensive tutorial, which could have at least explained the card limitation and the strategy that you might employ when starting at such a long distance from your opponent. It's hard to imagine why the developers didn't make more of an effort here. A proper walkthrough of the deck and the strategic concepts behind play is sorely needed, especially for those without collectible-cardgame experience.

You don't need to have any experience with other collectible-card games to know that this one is ugly. Aside from the close-ups of the oft-beautiful card art displayed when you go into battle or pull up a card to check its numbers, everything here is blurry. The battle visuals are so rough and indistinct that it is just about impossible to tell one summoned creature from another; they're all little more than colored blobs on a checkerboard. Dueling screens are even worse, with slightly larger blobs duking it out via simplistic animations that you would normally need a time machine to see in this day and age. Audio is similarly old-timey. The soundtrack is the same old triumphal ode that has been featured in games going back to the Sega Genesis, and the voice acting is the standard sub-Saturday-morning-cartoon junk depressingly common to anything inspired by anime. Vocals are at least unintentionally hilarious at times, especially when characters start yelling in the middle of sentences for no reason whatsoever.
A sense of promise wasted is what lingers after giving up on Neverland Card Battles. Combining turn-based strategy with card-based combat is certainly an intriguing concept, but a series of terrible design decisions blows any opportunity of blending these concepts into a successful game.

By Brett Todd, GameSpot