Nathanicus Gamer Book Review: Boss Fight Books’ Chrono Trigger

Nathanicus Gamer Book Review: Boss Fight Books’ Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams

Score: 4/5

When it comes to video games as artistic systems, Chrono Trigger is kino (not to be confused with Ayla’s homonymously named partner). It is as close as 16 bits of stimulated simulated experience can get to literature. The game involves a motley crew of vividly memorable characters battling the ancient alien Lavos. Lavos is a somewhat insectoid, tri-digital space-time traveler hooked up to radiciform devices and flanked by vegetal pods that lives inside a giant, spawning parasitic porcupine with a somewhat phallic head. One supposes it was meant to be every bit as xenomorphic as it is. Not only does Lavos leech life from the planet in a grand cosmic conspiracy of predation, he deranges the world’s timeline while he’s at it. He is a true cosmic horror that must be battled in time and space.

The Chrono Trigger book reads like a personal journey through the game, a player’s autobiographical account of his journey through the game, and is clearly the work of an author who’s quite emotionally invested in the title. Williams’ broad knowledge of literary references and keen attention to detail leave no subtlety missed. The narrative is interspersed with usually appropriate references, many of which are of such a scale of importance it becomes clear the author associates the game with significance, even grandeur. One of the most enjoyable facets of the book—in addition to the clever turns of phrase peppered throughout—is the extensive network of connections he draws both within and without the game’s narrative. For instance, he notes that the fiery Lucca (who has a literal fire affinity in the battle system) is the one who brings the spark of life to the robot whose true name is Prometheus, which may be à propos (or “Atropos”) of the CT story but is ironic with respect to the ancient story of the mythical Prometheus who stole fire from Olympus and brought it to terra firma. This is solid writing in the service of classical gaming. In a sense, it likens the oeuvre of 20 Century game designers to that of the authors of great works of classical literature. In CT’s case, that is arguably well-deserved.

Williams is also notable for his command of the Japanese language and immersion in the culture. He speaks with some authority on subjects like the original Japanese strategy guide, and the book was cosigned with a Foreword by a CT Japanese-to-English translator, Ted Woolsey, who also lends an important and revelatory interview.

While we don’t have time to explore the entire story, let us focus on a dyad of moments that serve as local maxima, at the very least. The first being the techno-magical Kingdom of Zeal, which Williams correctly likens to the Swiftian Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels. As the bells and sitar of the song “Corridors of Time” gracefully pirouettes in sonic waves to the listener’s inner ear, the player gets the distinct pleasure of exploring the floating Kingdom of Zeal. This exploration culminates in a fateful meeting with the Queen of Zeal, who is driven mad by her lust for power and interactions with the Lovecraftian Lavos. She summons and tries to harness a slumbering Lavos using the aptly-named (in a surprising expression of self-awareness) Mammon Machine. Their ambition being their downfall, Zeal and its people along with it, quite literally fall from grace, as was entirely predictable.

In the middle of the story, the quite unusual narrative arc takes the bizarre direction of killing off the main character. As best I can recall, this was the first game to kill the main character during the middle game. The previously linear game breaks into an untidy non-linear superposition of narrative vectors that all sum up to the slaying of Lavos, and the eventual collapse of the bracketing timelines into set of discrete particles arranged linearly yet again. At the zenith of the game’s tension, the story sprouts and emits its spores in all directions, only for them to land in one place like a coordinated airborne assault. There are, of course, multiple endings at this point, but they are all resolutions of the fundamental problem of the parasitic and existentially-threatening Big Other on our home-world. In terms of gameplay, what this means for the player is a choice of playing some subset of side quests involving tidying up the world’s messes from pre-history to post-apocalypse until one is ready to face the ultimate ultimum.

This situation that gives rise to the game’s very title is reminiscent of another quite familiar account. Crono is killed by the Eldritch horror Lavos. Crono must then be resurrected with the aid of the “pure (temporal) potential” of the eponymous Chrono Trigger. This is not at all unlike the story of Jesus Christ, in some respects. The parallels aren’t mutedly subtle. Christ dies on the cross at Golgotha for the remission of the world’s sins. He was slain by invaders aided by his fellows in his tribe’s claimed ancestral lands. It is a plan of universal salvation. Crono also dies at the hands of an extraterrestrial invader aided by Zealous humans in an attempt to save the world. But while the Christ is resurrected by the mystical power of God’s plan, having fulfilled His purpose in carrying sins into the abyss, Crono’s journey from the abyss requires the active agency of his friends and allies, and the player. We must restore our fallen savior from the clutches of death, that he might fulfill his purpose in a glorious second act. Crono needs our compassion as much as we need his.

It is this recursive structure of saving our savior to besaved that is narratively rich and complex. The book explores this great moment in gaming history, though in its own literary terms. Its foci are on how out of sync this is with Aristotelian literary structure and how risky this is as an act of video game storytelling.

Unfortunately, at times Williams descends into a post-structuralist analysis of not only the game in itself, as an object, but of the Eurocentric cultural history that informs fantasy and its interaction with Japanese notions of deracinated and somewhat generic fantasy archetypes, as well as insinuations about their chivalric but less than egalitarian attitude towards females, and how this interprets characters and their models. This adds little to a deeper understanding of the game as a system and as an expression. This is misguided because CT is so intensely compelling as a standalone complex of narrative concepts and gameplay elements that there is no need to go so far afield to have more to say on the subject.

Well-written and entertaining, thorough and highly informative at times, but also unfocused and somewhat disorganized chronologically (not unlike the game, though). I give it four time eggs out of five.