Sentences written about this title, gathered by type from the Japanese and English Wikipedia articles (as of 2026-8-30).
The game's development team included three designers that Square dubbed the "Dream Team": Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Square's Final Fantasy series; Yuji Horii, creator of Enix's Dragon Quest series; and Akira Toriyama, character designer of Dragon Quest and author of the Dragon Ball manga series.
Traveling to the United States to research computer graphics, the three, that Square dubbed the "Dream Team", decided to create something that "no one had done before".
Toriyama's editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, later credited the concept to a fusion of "Dragon Quest plus Final Fantasy", and arranged for Enix to lend Yuji Horii to Squaresoft for development.
While Mitsuda later held that the title piece was "rough around the edges", he maintains that it had "significant influence on [his] life as a composer".
A medley of Music from Chrono Trigger made of one of the four suites of the "Symphonic Fantasies" concerts in September 2009 which was produced by the creators of the Symphonic Game Music Concert series, conducted by Arnie Roth.
"Frog's Theme" and "Robo's Theme" were among the video game music performed during the 2020 Summer Olympics opening ceremony.
An unfinished build of the game dated November 17, 1994, it contains unused music tracks, locations, and other features changed or removed from the final release—such as a dungeon named "Singing Mountain" and its eponymous tune.
Composer Yasunori Mitsuda was pleased with the project, exclaiming "finally!" after receiving the news from Square Enix and maintaining, "it's still a very deep, very high-quality game even when you play it today.
These new dungeons met with mixed reviews; GameSpot called them "frustrating" and "repetitive", while IGN noted that "the extra quests in the game connect extremely well.
It was a nominee for "Best RPG for the Nintendo DS" in IGNs 2008 video game awards.
Square Enix released six major updates to address the complaints, thus improving its overall reception; Alex Donaldson of VG247, commenting on the improvements, wrote that "Square Enix took the criticism to heart and over the course of a string of hefty patches have slowly turned this into something that actually could be argued as the best version of Chrono Trigger."
It has placed highly on all six of multimedia website IGNs "top 100 games of all time" lists—4th in 2002, 6th in early 2005, 13th in late 2005, 2nd in 2006, 18th in 2007, and 2nd in 2008.
GameSpot included Chrono Trigger in "The Greatest Games of All Time" list released in April 2006, and it also appeared as 28th on an "All Time Top 100" list in a poll conducted by Japanese magazine Famitsu the same year.
In 2012, it came 32nd place on GamesRadars "100 best games of all time" list, and 1st place on its "Best JRPGs" list.
In 2023, Time Extension included the game on their "Best JRPGs of All Time" list.
Regarded by writer and director Masato Kato as an effort to "redo Radical Dreamers properly", Chrono Cross borrowed certain themes, scenarios, characters, and settings from Dreamers.
Director Takashi Tokita mentioned "Chrono Trigger 2" in a 2003 interview which has not been translated to English.
During a Cubed³ interview on February 1, 2007, Square Enix's Senior Vice President Hiromichi Tanaka said that although no sequel is currently planned, some sort of sequel is still possible if the Chrono Cross developers can be reunited.
The February 2008 issue of Game Informer ranked the Chrono series eighth among the "Top Ten Sequels in Demand", naming the games "steadfast legacies in the Square Enix catalogue" and asking, "what's the damn holdup?!
In Electronic Gaming Monthly's June 2008 "Retro Issue", writer Jeremy Parish cited Chrono as the franchise video game fans would be most thrilled to see a sequel to.
In July 2010, Obsidian Entertainment designer Feargus Urquhart, replying to an interview question about what franchises he would like to work on, said that "if [he] could come across everything that [he] played", he would choose a Chrono Trigger game.
Urquhart said: "You make RPGs, we make RPGs, it would be great to see what we could do together.
Yoshinori Kitase stated that he used the time travel mechanics of Chrono Trigger as a starting point for that of Final Fantasy XIII-2.
As of 2019, cumulative shipments of the Chrono series (Chrono Trigger / Chrono Cross) had reached more than 5,500,000 copies.
The person who oversaw the scenario as a whole was Masato Kato. Senior management at the time raised the idea of crediting the scenario to the 3 planners listed above, but directors Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita stepped in to stop it, so Kato's name remained under story plan.
Chrono Trigger was the second best-selling game of 1995 in Japan, and the various incarnations of the game have shipped more than 5 million copies worldwide.
By March 2003, the game's SNES and PS1 iterations had shipped copies worldwide, including 2.36 million in Japan and 290,000 abroad.
The original SNES version had sold 2.5 million copies by 2006.
Chrono Trigger DS sold 790,000 copies worldwide, as of March 2009, including 490,000 in Japan, 240,000 in North America and 60,000 in Europe.
Excluding the PC version, the game had shipped over 3.5 million copies worldwide by February 2018.
As of March 2025, all versions together have shipped more than 5 million copies worldwide.
Chrono Cross shipped 1.5 million copies and was widely praised by critics.
Chrono Trigger was the second best-selling game of 1995 in Japan, and the various incarnations of the game have shipped more than 5 million copies worldwide.
Reviewers criticized Chronicles for its lengthy load times and an absence of new in-game features.
The Nintendo DS version of Chrono Trigger was the 22nd best-selling game of 2008 in Japan.
In contrast to the critical acclaim of Chrono Triggers original SNES release, the 2018 Windows port of Chrono Trigger was critically panned.
It ended the year as the second best-selling game of 1995 in Japan, below Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation.
Chrono Cross shipped 1.5 million copies and was widely praised by critics.
A port by Tose for the PlayStation was released only in Japan in 1999, which was later repackaged with a Final Fantasy IV port as Final Fantasy Chronicles (2001) exclusively in North America.
In response, Square Enix provided various UI updates and several other improvements including adding an original graphics option based on the game's original version, fixing glitches introduced, and adding a true 16:9 widescreen presentation for the first time, to address the aforementioned complaints.
In total, five major updates were released—the first on April 10, 2018, and the last on August 3, 2018—all of which have substantially improved its overall reception.
The game was a best-seller in Japan, where two million copies were sold in only two months.
Chrono Trigger inspired several related releases; the first were three games released for the Satellaview on July 31, 1995.
In the first May Famitsu of 2009, Chrono Trigger placed 14th out of 50 in a vote of most-wanted sequels by the magazine's readers.
Chrono Trigger was scored primarily by Yasunori Mitsuda, with contributions from veteran Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu and one track by Noriko Matsueda.
Nintendo of America censored certain dialogue, including references to breastfeeding, consumption of alcohol, and religion.
Nintendo Power twentieth anniversary issue named it the fifth best Super NES game.
After the cease and desist was issued, an incomplete version of the game was leaked in May 2009, though due to the early state of the game, playability was limited.
The February 2008 issue of Game Informer ranked the Chrono series eighth among the "Top Ten Sequels in Demand", naming the games "steadfast legacies in the Square Enix catalogue" and asking, "what's the damn holdup?!
In Electronic Gaming Monthly's June 2008 "Retro Issue", writer Jeremy Parish cited Chrono as the franchise video game fans would be most thrilled to see a sequel to.
Originally the name "Chrono Trigger" had been attached to a project by Hiromichi Tanaka, who is also the producer of Chrono Cross, to "recreate the Toriyama world".
In addition, the 4 bonus BGM tracks by the outside composers mentioned above have been replaced with different ones.
Square intended to license the work under the Mana franchise and gave it the working title Maru Island; Hiromichi Tanaka (the future producer of Chrono Cross) monitored Toriyama's early designs.
An unfinished build of the game dated November 17, 1994, it contains unused music tracks, locations, and other features changed or removed from the final release—such as a dungeon named "Singing Mountain" and its eponymous tune.
The team hoped to release it on Nintendo's planned Super Famicom Disk Drive; when Nintendo canceled the project, Square reoriented the game for release on a Super Famicom cartridge and rebranded it as Chrono Trigger.
In response, Square Enix provided various UI updates and several other improvements including adding an original graphics option based on the game's original version, fixing glitches introduced, and adding a true 16:9 widescreen presentation for the first time, to address the aforementioned complaints.
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