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The story
A thread on the Nandemo Jikkyo G (Live Game Commentary) board about the 1995 RPG *Chrono Trigger* asked, “Isn’t it amazing how well-crafted this time-leap story was for that era?” The discussion quickly expanded into comparisons with Doraemon’s time-paradox episode, *The Girl Who Leapt Through Time*, and *Back to the Future*, before spiraling into a full-blown debate over the “true originator” of time-travel fiction — going all the way back to H.G. Wells’ *The Time Machine* and even Dickens’ *A Christmas Carol*. At the same time, some pushed back, arguing that *Final Fantasy V* and *Romancing SaGa 2* are more playable and enjoyable today, showing that opinions on Chrono Trigger itself were far from unanimous.
What people said
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Back to the Future
There've been plenty of stories dealing with time, but only the truly well-crafted ones get remembered by name.
Chrono Trigger is one of them.
Final Fantasy I did it first, though.
People meme on the whole "it's just like Doraemon" angle, but that episode was actually a remarkably well-made story — it nailed a time paradox in just 10 pages, simply enough for elementary schoolers to follow.
Re: #10
What's this guy's deal?
It might've just been amazing relative to what else was out at the time.
Something like FF5 is still playable today, but most other Super Famicom games are a tough sell now.
The original is obviously that one — The Time Machine.
FF5, Romancing SaGa 2 — those are "dried squid" games (the kind that get better the more you chew on them).
Part of it is that Shonen Jump was pushing it hard, too.
When you're told it's "Akira Toriyama plus FF," of course people bite.
And the music was just too good.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nIMqy96sObo
What do you mean…?
Dhaos, whose motive overlaps with the final boss of Kamen Rider BLACK RX. (Dhaos is the villain of Tales of Phantasia)
There were stories about going back in time before that too, but they never really sold.
And here comes the obligatory Dickens' A Christmas Carol mention.
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Time Machine (1895)
Can't believe a novel that entertaining existed that far back.
A Christmas Carol is amazing.
2. Change something in the past, and the future branches off — the present doesn't change.
3. Whatever you did in the past was already baked into the present all along.
Time-travel stories basically fall into these three patterns, right?
The Peripheral on Prime Video is the pattern where the enemy is in the future.
Dragon Ball is surprisingly pattern 2.
Chrono Cross?
You mean time travel?
When I mentioned I game on my days off, some guy just went on and on about the meta shifts in Dragon Quest Walk — it freaked me out a bit.
He's probably just trying hard to relate to you.
I mean, it's basically an old man's nostalgia game at this point.
Probably nobody in this very thread actually played it in real time, right?
I played it back then.
Most of the guys in my class at the time were playing it too.
Both RPGs and light novels trace back to 1960s fantasy novels, after all.
I think Lucca rebuilds him — Lucca becomes the origin point for the new Robo.
The future he's supposed to return to just gets rewritten into a peaceful one where the world isn't destroyed.
Robo's whole reason for existing disappears, and he gets scrapped as some creepy leftover robot.
Background and key points of this discussion
Chrono Trigger was released in 1995 for the Super Famicom, and the thread’s praise centers on the fact that it paired a headline creative team — Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama, and Hironobu Sakaguchi — with mechanics like multiple endings and New Game+ that were rare for the time, and the thread cites this as the reason for its reputation. Meanwhile, the hunt for the “true originator” of time-travel fiction never really settled: commenters brought up Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843), predating H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) by half a century, and opinions crossed back and forth. Opinions on the game itself were also split — some argued Final Fantasy V and Romancing SaGa 2 hold up better and are more fun today, while others defended Chrono Trigger for how far ahead of its time its craftsmanship was. One thing easy to misread here: the thread’s real point wasn’t that Chrono Trigger was the first time-travel work ever — it was surprise that a game from that era was built with that much care. The debate over who “started it all” was just a tangent that branched off from there.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5channel (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Thesis] Isn’t it amazing that Chrono Trigger pulled off a time-leap story back in that era.“
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