Is Chrono Trigger a Feminist Game?

*Spoilers for the 1995 Super Nintendo title, Chrono Trigger.*

Looking back on it after nearly twenty years, the world as it was in 1995 is, simultaneously, almost unrecognizable and yet somehow familiar to the point of surreality. The world economy was recovering from a recession, and Western military forces occupied the Eastern Bloc and the Middle East.

In the mid-90s, the United States sociopolitical landscape was in a progressively transitional period. Instituted in 1994 and repealed in 2010, the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT) policy was an important, if controversial, step toward making military policy respectful of sexual orientation. Despite the tentative foothold on progress gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals managed to achieve, however, the trans* community would not begin to see such advances until the later part of the decade. Today, LGBTQ individuals and their allies continue to fight for equality based on sexual orientation and identity.

Much of this late 20th-century social progress can be attributed to the rise of third wave feminism. The second wave of the 1960s and ’70s focused on an expression of universal womanhood, one which largely ignored the experiences of marginalized women, including: women of color, lesbians and bisexual women, lower-class women, and women outside the gender binary–which is to say, trans*, genderqueer, and gender-fluid individuals. Third wave feminism, fomented in the early 1990s, sought to correct these failings.

Third wave feminists insist that, while the category of “women” was defined politically according to biology and socially constructed gender roles, anyone can and should be able to self-identify as a “woman.” They embrace those things–such as cosmetics, brassieres, and high heels–which second wave feminists considered oppressive and restricting. For third wave feminists, womanhood is whatever a woman defines for herself.

This is the environment out of which Chrono Trigger, the critically acclaimed Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), launched on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1995. Although games continued to be released for the platform until 2000, Chrono Trigger came late in the SNES’s tenure as Nintendo’s flagship console, with the Nintendo 64 (N64) launching the following year. In the years following its release, the game has been ported to a variety of different platforms, including Playstation, Nintendo DS, and Wii Virtual Console, and spawned two sequels.

As GamerGate continues to rage on in its attempt to silence women with the nerve to speak out about marginalization, replaying classic video games is an exercise in retrospective awareness. Sometimes we hold fond memories of a title, only to have them tainted when we replay it as an adult. Some games are easy to categorize in terms of their friendliness–or animosity–toward women, but we often find ourselves taken aback, whether by the pre-ESRB horror that is Custer’s Revenge, or by the emotional depth given to female characters like Final Fantasy IX‘s Eiko and Dagger.

When I sat down to replay Chrono Trigger last month, I was anxious. What if it wasn’t the bastion of girl-power I remembered? Call me silly, but sometimes being blatantly insulted by your entertainment has a way of destroying its appeal. Thankfully, Chrono Trigger remains highly respectful of its female characters, even when it utilizes tropes that would generally demean them.

Chrono Trigger‘s narrative begins with the spunky Marle–who is actually Princess Nadia in disguise–accidentally travelling 400 years backward in time after a conflict between her Pendant and Lucca’s teleporter creates a time portal. Together, hero Crono and inventor Lucca mount a recovery operation, during which they learn that Marle has been mistaken for her own missing ancestor, Queen Leene. Because no one rescues Leene in this altered past, Marle disappears as a result of the created grandfather paradox, leaving Crono and Lucca to find the missing queen and repairing the rift in time.

Chrono Trigger, more than anything, is a classic time-travel narrative. Shortly after rescuing Queen Leene and Marle, the party learns of a coming apocalypse and attempts to defeat Lavos, its harbinger. Because of the variables players may activate through their choices in the game, Chrono Trigger features multiple endings, including six different scenarios for fighting Lavos.

This retrospective is not intended to discuss all of these endings, nor will it examine every female character in the game; notable exclusions include Queen Zeal, Schala, and Atropos XR. Instead, the discussion here is limited to examining Chrono Trigger‘s protagonist, its three playable female characters, and its trans-friendly boss. Ultimately, the game is a fantastic example of third wave feminism’s positive influence on video games.

Crono: the Silent Protagonist
Crono: the Silent Protagonist

Crono: Silent Protagonist

But let’s start with Crono. He doesn’t say much; that’s kind of his thing. The silent protagonist was not a rarity in the 16-bit era. Chrono Trigger uses that trope to its advantage by making every other character read their own interests into Crono’s silence. The interesting thing here is that this strongly resembles the treatment of women’s silence in media. For the large part, silence gets read as complacency or contentment, and this holds true even when the individuals in question have been either forcibly silenced or otherwise denied their voices. Although Chrono Trigger‘s silent protagonist is admittedly more interesting in retrospective analysis than in the game’s heyday, that does not diminish its deconstructive potential.

In contrast to Crono’s muteness, Chrono Trigger features three vocal, female playable characters: Marle, Lucca, and Ayla.

Marle: Espionage Royalty
Marle: Espionage Royalty

Marle: Espionage Royalty

On the surface, Marle seems like a pretty standard female lead in a JRPG: she is a feisty princess who tries to escape her restrictive palace life by disguising herself as a commoner, uses curative magic, and is romantically interested in the hero. She might be a little bit of a manic pixie dream girl, and she might get us thrown in jail, but we love her free-spirited nature.

Throughout Chrono Trigger, Marle refuses to be defined by her class or sex. She’s a fantastic stealth operative who manages to sneak out of her home in the heavily-guarded Guardia Castle and convince everyone she meets that she is a commoner. When she gets displaced in time and sent back to the Middle Ages, Marle takes advantage of her resemblance to Queen Leene in order to secure a safe place to stay until Crono and Lucca arrive. Back in her own time, she stands up to both the King and the Chancellor when they ignore her and frame Crono for kidnapping. Marle: crushing the patriarchy, one jump for joy at a time.

Lucca: Engineering Whiz
Lucca: Engineering Whiz

Lucca: Engineering Whiz

Lucca is easily the most recognizable woman of Chrono Trigger fame. After an accident caused her mother to lose both legs, Lucca took up the study of science and mathematics. In the present, her engineering chops are unmatched. In the opening of the game, Lucca has two inventions on display: her fighter-training robot, Gato, and her teleporter, which is admittedly unpredictable, but so is the TARDIS, so we are not holding that against her. When the party encounters Robo, Lucca not only repairs him, but also reprograms the robot to be their ally. Think about that: even technology thirteen hundred years more advanced than her own is no match for her intellect.

Not only is Lucca a fantastic role-model for young women interested in the maths and sciences, but she is also a woman who needs a man about as much as a fish needs a bicycle. At no point in the Chrono franchise lore does Lucca marry or have a love interest, and, although she does reveal some sexual attraction toward Glenn, she is in no capacity a tomboy pining away for her best friend. Lucca isn’t alone or unhappy with her life; she’s living it on her own terms.

Ayla: Leader of the Pack
Ayla: Leader of the Pack

Ayla: Leader of the Pack

The last playable female character in Chrono Trigger‘s lineup is Ayla. A cavewoman from the year 65,000,000 BC, Ayla is the chief of the Iokan Tribe and a–very–distant ancestor to Marle. She owns everything about herself, including her political power, her physical strength, and, perhaps most importantly, her sexuality. When she first meets the party, Ayla makes a flirtatious remark toward Lucca, who politely turns her down. After her adventures with Crono and the gang are over, she returns home to propose to her male love interest, Kino.

While she embodies many characteristics traditionally considered masculine, Ayla embraces her femininity–in the form of maternity–as well. Although we do not know what kind of a mother Ayla becomes, we do know, because of Marle’s existence, that she has at least one child. It is no stretch of the imagination to think of Ayla as the woman who has it all, regardless of how much information we lack.

Flea: Trans-Friendly Boss
Flea: Trans-Friendly Boss

Flea: Trans-Friendly Boss

In addition to its female characters, Chrono Trigger has Flea: a possibly-transgender boss. Flea is difficult to define as trans*, however, because he is always referred to with masculine pronouns–and in Chrono Crossin which he is a secret boss, his sex is clearly denoted as male–yet he has long pink hair, wears a skirt, and carries the stealable item Flea Bustier.

Neither Chrono Trigger nor either of its sequels gives much backstory on the character, so we may never know exactly how Flea self-identifies. We do know, however, that he considers himself male, regardless of how he performs his gender. When Flea is mistaken for a woman in Chrono Trigger, he quickly corrects the party–“Hey, I’m a GUY!”–and goes on to say, “Male… female… what’s the difference? Power is beautiful, and I’ve got the power!”

Flea’s gender ambiguity is not censored in the North American game releases. This was not typical for games at the time, or even for Chrono Trigger itself, since the come-ons Ayla directs at Lucca were completely removed from US versions. And while Nintendo’s Birdo character was originally referred to as “a boy who likes to dress up as a girl,” most recent Mario titles present him as Yoshi’s cisgendered girlfriend.

Instead of seizing on Flea’s difference for offensive and cheap puns, the game presents Flea in a neutral light: the portrayal is neither sympathetic nor condemning, because Flea is who he is, and that’s okay. This level of respect for others dominates the SNES title, but the promising trend of which it was a part has been somewhat lost along the way. While it is being slowly recovered through franchises like The SimsThe Elder Scrolls, and Mass Effect, non-heterosexual and non-cisgender characters remain few.

One of the most surprising things about Chrono Trigger is the extent to which it attempts to be inclusive. Oftentimes, entertainment media that try to diversify their casts make the mistake of including only one representative; think Tauriel in The Hobbit, Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi: the Next Generation, and Token Black–in a case of underrepresentation meeting self-awareness–on South Park. The problem with these singular portrayals of diversity is that they offer only one minority voice to speak, effectively consolidating the experiences of all queer/Hispanic/female/elderly/etc. persons into an ignorant monolith.

Going against this unfortunate trend, Chrono Trigger not only features several respectful and diverse representations of women, but also shows gamers the experiences of different women in the same intersections. For example: Marle and Queen Leene are both royal women whose power is second to a man’s, while both Ayla and Queen Zeal hold absolute power in their positions. Lucca and her mother are both women with disabilities: Lucca has a vision-impairment, while Lara is a double-amputee. Rather than tossing gamers a single example of a woman in a particular situation, Chrono Trigger makes an effort to show the complexities of individual lives.

Chrono Trigger presents players with a diverse cast of female characters. While Marle, Lucca, and Ayla share very few similarities, none of them is a stereotypical portrayal of a woman. Each has her own strengths and weaknesses, just like any real woman you meet. While we don’t know how Flea identifies, we do know that s/he is a gender non-conforming character, whom Chrono Trigger shows in a positive–for a villain–light. A retrospective analysis reveals that Chrono Trigger fully embraces the values of third-wave feminism by letting the characters it presents be exactly who they want to be.

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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58 Comments

  1. Liz Kellam

    Interesting article. It is not often that we analyze video games and their underlying themes. With so many well written games today, this should be done more often. I have not played Chrono Trigger, but, growing up, I identified with any games that had female leads, since they were few and far between in the 80s and 90s. Lara Croft still stands as my favorite, even though she is often over-sexualized.

    • K.W. Colyard

      I love the new direction in which Lara has been taken. She’s real and gritty now, which I love. Have you played the latest titles?

      • Liz Kellam

        Yes, I have played through them all. Tomb Raider (2003) is definitely the best. It more realistic and raw than previous titles, and Lara is young and inexperienced. She also looks more “real” than previous versions.

  2. Sunni Ago

    “As GamerGate continues to rage on in its attempt to silence women with the nerve to speak out about marginalization, replaying classic video games is an exercise in retrospective awareness.” – That’s utterly false seeing as the majority of the participants in GamerGate have ties to feminism and feminist theory.
    You contradict yourself when you state, “While we don’t know how Flea identifies, we do know that s/he is a gender non-conforming character” as earlier you state, “because he is always referred to with masculine pronouns–and in Chrono Cross, in which he is a secret boss, his sex is clearly denoted as male.” So he’s not trans* he’s a cisgendered drag queen, which is perfectly fine. Even if we’re to look at him under the lens of genderfluidity, it’s a bit presumptuous to look at a character who routinely states himself to be and is referred to as a male, a say “no he’s trans.” Even in the example you give, he’s more concerned with Power rather than a gender binary. I feel like you’re watering down the trans identity by misidentifying individuals, as this would be tantamount to referring to a tomboy as a male because she get’s called male once because she’s good at something that falls into the male binary, even if this stand in contradiction to rest of your time observing her.
    “Call me silly, but sometimes being blatantly insulted by your entertainment has a way of destroying its appeal.” That seems a bit silly, as even if you hadn’t play Chrono Trigger in decades it’s not going to transform into Duke Nukem. TO often people forget to look at a game for what it was, and instead look to it as what it is today. It’s why young people hated Seinfeld, or why many people turned on Belle from Beauty in the Beast. Also, to wit, at what point do you consider yourself insulted in a game? Should I be insulted by the Knuckles Rap of Sonic Adventure? Should African Americans be upset with the pandering EA did with the Street Series and Def Jam Series? I say this because the role of African Americans in gaming is usually consolidated into, “Yo son! What’s Good? Nameen? ”
    All and all you have a good first article, just some hiccups that knocked me out reading for a bit.

    • K.W. Colyard

      Feminists did not start GamerGate. We are its targets, not its lynch-mob proponents.

      Kindly reread my article. I never label Flea as trans*. He is clearly gender non-conforming and trans-friendly.

      I, as a Caucasian, won’t tell you what to be insulted by, and I would like it if you, a man, won’t presume to tell me what to be insulted by.

      • Sunni Ago

        >Chrono Trigger has Flea: a possibly-transgender boss

        • Kahlia Sankey

          I understand the point that you are getting at here Kristian. I do think that it discourages female gamers from playing when their gender is being disempowered and overtly sexualised. Not silly at all.
          I also understand that you are not trying to undermine the LGBT community when you refer to to Flea as “trans-friendly” or “possibly trans”. That’s not in the spirit of offence or ignorance, that is just describing the male-feminized image and the binary nature of Flea as a character construct – phrasing that is commonly used throughout the literature.

          Santiago Rashad, if you are going to make comments on articles, please ensure that they are respectful and informed. Check for understanding, it is certain that you were not clear on the intent here.

        • K.W. Colyard

          Santiago, exactly. “Possibly-transgender”. As in, I’m not going to define him, I’m just going to point out his gender-nonconformity.

      • Gamergater
        2

        The consumer revolt known as gamergate is not targeting feminists. That’s not what it’s about, it’s about corrupt journalism.

        • Gamergater
          1

          Also, with regard to Santiago Rashad’s comment: that was a great comment, it well written, thoughtful, constructive criticism. It’s stupid for the author of the article to react so childishly and obviously get so butt hurt in response, and furthermore it’s flat out wrong to accuse him of being disrespectful – but even if he had, I’m sorry, but that’s the risk one takes when opening up their writing to comments online. All the internet is not your personal hugbox and it is in no way obligated to be.

        • Sunni Ago

          No, it was targeting feminists. I was in an echo chamber of gamers and didn’t see it at the time. I regret defending it.

    • In this wiki you can see that Flea (Mayone) uses the first person “Atai”, that is a slang for “atashi”, a feminine first person pronoun. There is no equivalent in english, so this detail was lost in translation. However, even in the japanese dialogue, she still corrects the protagonists telling them that * is actually a man.

      https://w.atwiki.jp/aniwikigalaxystar/pages/1539.html

      Mayone is also referred as “okama” by other japanese websites, that is japanese slang for transexual mtf person. We call Mayone a woman because of this “lost in translation”, however yes, I actually find curious that Mayone still specifies that * is actually a man. I personally think it doesn’t matter at all if * identifies in male or female: * personality is more defined by the importance * attributes to power and beauty.

  3. Lucca is one of the reasons Chrono Trigger is a classic.

  4. LetMech
    1

    To this very day, this game stands out as my favourite RPG of all time. It has a good balance of mechanics (Active Time Based, but simple list of special moves that can be comboed with two or even all three party members). Very memorable characters (even the more normative characters like Marle and Frog are really interesting) band a fairly expansive story all make for a great experience that i think still holds up (though I would stick with either emulating the SNES game or the DS version as the Sony port suffers from onerous loading time between game and menu, even in digital copies somehow).

    Also Lucca and Robo had one of the best friendship/relationships in JRPGs.

  5. Chrono Trigger is amazing and just BEAMS with feminism. Why can’t we have more games like this?

  6. Great to see the game covered here. To show my age I remember playing Chrono Trigger on the SNES back in the day! Such an amazing and trend setting game for many an RPG to come. The progressive feminist / queer / trans components don’t hurt either.

  7. I love videogames especially RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. I was a really creative child so I had to create my own worlds in which there were black people like me and my mom. Never seeing characters like myself or other black fans led me to hate my skin, my hair, all of myself.

    • K.W. Colyard

      I’m sorry, Dwaine. The lack of racial diversity in video games today is astounding. Speaking as a white person, I’ve found it very eye-opening to hear geeks of color talk about their experiences in the subculture. It’s a problem I didn’t really realize existed until I heard someone living it speak about it.

  8. The truth is that a lot of games had female characters for a long time. Look at Unreal Tournament 99 and Quake 3 Arena. Both very old games, and half the characters were female.

  9. HickTalbot
    0

    Great article, and definitely interesting note for huge Chrono Trigger nerds — in the Japanese version, there are a few subtle jokes about Lucca being bisexual. These were, of course, removed in translation — and a few comments about attractive men were added in.

    • Wow, this is censorship! They should not be able to do that without informing the English-speaking market they were getting different dialogue. The consumer has the right to know what they’re bloody buying.

      And it’s always nice to have non-heterosexual characters in video games.

      • Sure, it’s probably Nintendo of America censorship in this case.

        But warning people that they’re getting different dialogue? Unless you can read Japanese, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about getting different dialogue. The act of translation necessarily means the dialogue will change. Believe me, you don’t want literal word-for-word translations. You want a translator who can translate the feeling and subtext of a work, along with the meaning of the words.

  10. Chrono Trigger is the best game. It is such a ridiculously great game! If I had to pick another great nostalgic game it would be Lunar Silver Star Story. So good!

  11. I actually just love Chrono Trigger in general. That game has so much heart, it’s coming out of its ears. My first time through was the DS version, and I’m so glad I played it.

  12. Tyler Edwards

    This is awesome! Gaming is usually only looked at from a feminist perspective when surveying the industry as a whole, rarely within the minutiae of an individual game. Well done!

  13. I really enjoyed this article.

  14. Jemarc Axinto

    Definitely one of my all time favorite games, if I were to question why I’m a feminist today I would say that this game is a big reason for it, and I had no idea. The equality represented in the game is fantastic, thank you for writing on it!

  15. Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all times, and I feel like this article couldn’t have been written at a better time. With Gamergate and all of the attention that it’s been receiving, I feel that it’s great that you revisited such a classic game and decided to focus on its complex female characters. In some ways, literally and figuratively, Chrono Trigger was ahead of its time. One of the reasons why I have such fond memories of it to this day is due to its cast of amazing female characters. You could literally beat the game without even having to use a male character, and that, to me, is pretty amazing. Actually, Ayla alone could probably defeat every enemy in the game single-handedly. And I’m not saying that you don’t see strong female characters like this anymore with such variance and power, but on this great of a scale (and all in one game to boot), you don’t. Although there have been some recent games focused around all female casts and female protagonists, (Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XIII, etc.) I still think that we need more Chrono Triggers in this day and age. Games like CT help remind people that female characters don’t always need to be saved, and that they can kick butt in the process of doing said saving as well.

  16. One is tempted to ask what happened to the gaming landscape over the past decade, that video games have transformed from sites of theoretically significant experimentation with gender (a possibly trans character in a video game from the early nineties, when an equally non-stigmatized portrayal of transness would not come to live action short form media for another eighteen years!).

    Perhaps, in the last instance, video games succumbed to capital – in the early years of the twenty-first century, men bought and played games, therefore, games were sold to and catered to stereotypical male interests – objectified female bodies, violence (often against those same bodies) and brute physical power, rather than ideational experiments.

    • K.W. Colyard

      Even when Chrono Trigger launched, video games were known as a hobby for young men, so there’s no reason to think that capital drives decision-making in game design any more today than then. I don’t deny that most mainstream video games cater to male power fantasies, but I also don’t think, necessarily, that those fantasies and ideational experiments, as you refer to them, are mutually exclusive.

      Japan–CT’s country of origin–is a bit of a sticky wicket when it comes to female objectification. Their video games and animation have plenty of “fan service”: T & A, woman-as-object, etc. But at the same time, one is much more likely to find a video game, comic, cartoon, etc. with a strong, feminist female protagonist in Japan than in the West.

  17. I like the article, though maybe you should refer to Flea as the neutral “they” instead of “s/he.” Just get away from the gender binaries all together. Then again, if Flea prefers “he,” then using that would probably be better.

  18. villanueva
    0

    Lucca was a huge, huge, HUGE influence on my first real original character. This game was a huge influence on me in general, but it was important enough to me to see a science genius girl as one of the top-tier characters in a video game at 12 that I created a girl who wanted to be a mad scientist and rule the world, who is now a med engineer working in prosthetics…who still kinda wants to rule the world.

  19. Amber Whitaker

    I personally have never played Chrono Trigger, however, I would say, based on the information I have read, that it is not a feminist game, however, it is a much more realistic game when looking at portrayals of women in video games. My only validation is that this game, to be a true feminist game, would have to be so much more than portraying women in a variety of ways and be specifically made for that point. It does lighten my heart to know that there are games out there that are fair towards women in gaming culture however.

  20. SamanthaHayes

    This is definitely an interesting piece. I loved that you compared the United States in 1995 to the United States as it is now. Really well-done!

  21. Mo Sadek

    I haven’t actually gotten to play Chrono-Trigger, but I have played Chrono-Cross. It seems like this might be the better game though. Really interesting article. Can’t wait to play the game and re-read!

  22. Chrono Trigger was one of my favorite games growing up. Its narrative complexity made it stand head and shoulders over the typical fare of the 90s (Duke Nukem anyone?). Perhaps we could consider the impact of its Japanese production team (SQUARE, now Square-Enix) and especially Director Yoshinori Kitase. Square-Enix started off providing very fairy-tale like stories in games like the original Final Fantasy, but by the time Chrono Trigger was released they had already released the absolutely stellar Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI, as well as Secret of Mana and Breath of Fire, which also provide some good examples of strong female characters. Terra of FFVI in particular has one of the most compelling character arcs of that era of gaming, male or female.
    It’s nice to see that someone recognizes that you can have diversity in video games without making a ham-fisted show of it. Game designers can (and certainly should) include realistic portrayals of women and trans* characters, and there is not a shortage of precedents.

  23. The fact that this game took the minimal effort to have more than one female character already places it far above many other dimwitted games from the time. The fact that this game has better representation still than many games made more recently shows how unique this perspective was, even if it wasn’t perfect.

  24. K.W. Colyard

    Well, now that capstone projects and graduation are over and I’m between internships, I can finally get back here to read your comments. Thank you all so much. I’m surprised the article got this much attention, haha. I apologize for the late responses, but I’ll try to reply to as many of you as I can.

  25. Don’t ruin this game’s image with your shitty feminist perspective. Please… that is all I ask of you. Some of us grew up with these games and they’re near and dear to our hearts. These games were simply meant to be an excursion into our minds and souls. If you want to ruin a game with your political and social agenda, then look to newer games of this current generation. Do not besmirch the honor and dignity of our retro games, you foul, misguided, heathen feminist swine!

  26. Matty Dude
    1

    I was just re-playing Chrono Trigger on a plane the other day, probably the first time since it came out on the SNES. I was a high schooler then and Flea’s gender identity had completely gone over my head. What a cool thing to have come across! Glad to see I wasn’t the only person who’d noticed.

    • K.W. Colyard

      Flea’s gender was always the subject of debate among my friends and I, because, for a very long time, we had only played Chrono Cross, in which Flea makes a cameo as a secret boss. 🙂

  27. I really enjoyed this article! I’ve been itching to play this game again, mostly because I remember enjoying the characters so much. Thanks for both reminding me of how complex a cast it had for its day and for the wonderful analysis.

    • K.W. Colyard

      Thank you. I’m glad you enjoyed it. This game is one of my favorites, simply because the characters were so relatable. I hate playing games where I end up not connecting to the cast.

  28. Jeffrey MacCormack

    Nicely done! I haven’t played this game, but I love the idea of applying a modern critical lens to classic video games. Obviously this is a test that Mario, Sonic, and Starfox would miserably fail. Kudos for highlighting a game that may pass modern critical perspectives.

  29. Gritfish
    0

    ENDING SPOILERS BELOW:
    I JUST replayed chrono trigger on the vita, which had the animated cutscenes (and horrible load times). Both games do (and I totally forgot this) a twist of Metal Gear Solid proportions by selling a JRPG with a male protagonist, and then actually handing you a female party-lead: Lucca in Trigger, and then Kid in Cross. It’s something that seems to happen more in Japanese games, I feel – and MUCH less so now in the west where the main character is on every piece of promotion for a game.

    Also, I’m really torn on the last cutscene which closes with Lucca finding a baby in the forest :/ it seemed totally unnecessary and really out of place.

    It holds up as a good moment if you know how the two (or three, depending) games connect but on it’s own, I feel “Oh and Lucca gets a magic baby” would have been the weakest throwaway ending at the time. Was it?

    • K.W. Colyard

      I would say no, because that ending wasn’t there – to my knowledge – at the time. A lot of cutscenes were added with the PSX port, which came after the release of Chrono Cross. I’m fairly certain that cutscene was not in the original game, but was added to give the series more continuity.

      • Gritfish
        0

        Ohh of course. That makes much more sense. thought they were both around before cross came out.

  30. Alexandre Julio
    0

    Can’t describe how much I loved this article.
    I’ve been re-playing the game these days (I’m almost re-ending it) and observing these feministic values on it, that I haven’t perceived on the first run.
    This article describes much more perfectly what i’ve been telling all my friends about the game regarding this theme.

  31. Chrono Trigger is great. I think my favorite part of it is the fact that the sidequests are about character development, so they add to the story rather than just sending you on a fetch-quest to get better armor or whatever.

  32. From this post: “As GamerGate continues to rage on in its attempt to silence women with the nerve to speak out about marginalization, replaying classic video games is an exercise in retrospective awareness.”

    From the Link: “Its proponents and supporters claim #GamerGate is all about journalistic integrity, but a nuanced reading of the situation suggests otherwise. In simple terms, it’s best described as a long-simmering pot of male privilege, misogyny, and slut-shaming in the gamer community boiling over.”

    In the About section of the link: “Bustle is for & by women who are moving forward as fast as you are.”

    From Wikipedia’s ‘Journalism ethics and standards’ page: “One of the most controversial issues in modern reporting is media bias.”

    Holy shit, I think my irony-meter just broke.

    • Myxysptlk
      0

      That would explain why it detected irony where none exists.

  33. Gamergate claims media articles are bias. Bias media article says otherwise. That’s pretty damn ironic.

  34. Old article but wow. Great points. 🙂 My favorite game of all time.

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