Much has already been analyzed about this game, and often it becomes quite subjective as people draw upon their own data sets and anecdotes. What Chrono Trigger is echoing however, is a tale as old as time. If you don't believe anything I say just google my claims or search Wikipedia and you'll see everything can be confirmed. I apologize for the huge amount of information here but I think many of you will find it fascinating.
The more one studies mythology and ancient history, the more chrono triggers message becomes clear. I initially played the game when I was in the first grade, but the true message of Chrono Trigger only makes sense later in life after assembling the various pieces to see a hidden message that weaves many secret teachings found around the world. And luckily I've studied world mythology, the esogeric and the occult for countless hours to connect dots where others overlooked or where simply ignorant of the data itself.
What we have to understand, is the Japanese are very intelligent and technically proficient and often hide complex concepts in their fiction, various mythological beings are always woven into these fictions like Final Fantasy. And upon watching lots of Japanese Media common themes also begin to form. For instance the notion of a false royal family like in Guardia in 600 AD is mirrored in another game, Guardian Heroes for Sega Saturn, this likely draws upon an ancient conspiracy like the Merovingians, the claim being that a false line inserted itself far in the past and are imposters or impersonators. And when Chrono trigger made the false line reptilian in 600AD, it tapped into to the annunaki conspiracy, the belief that our leaders are reptilian alien imposters, called the annunaki which is derived from Sumerian myth were they were considered sky gods who later in Babylonian myth became gods of the underworld (that alone is a discussion left for my book if anyone is interested or you will have to study mountains of data with no clear direction).
Mythology and history also tend to blend together, so when you study the royal lineages around the world, literally almost 99% of them claim to come from the gods in the ancient past beyond recorded history and in about 80-90% of them there is a connection to a reptilian, serpentine, fish or dragon hybrid (all of these are also often synonymous concepts that vary in use by culture). In Mesoptamia the Sumerian king list claims the line of kings descended from the heavens and deities like the skygod Anu are sometimes depicted with snake like features and whos heavenly throne is guarded by a snake deity, while the god of magic and the freshwater Enki is the creator of humans and saves them from the flood, he is depicted as half carp half human and creates 7 sages or demi gods who are half fish half human and teach humankind the arts of civilization. In Chinese mythology Fuxi and Nuwa create mankind and are listed as the origin of the royal family while in depictions they have serpent tails. In Greece the first king and founder of Athens is Cecrops who is said to have a serpentine lower half. In Tibet Nyatri Tsenpo is an ancient proginetor of the royal line who came from heaven and had webbed hands and he blinked differently. In Hindusim, Matsya is an avatar of Vishnu with a lower body of a fish who helps Manu (parellel to the Hebrew Noah) survive a flood with 7 sages. Even though Buddhism is a separate religion many ideas blend in that area, so Hinduism Buddha is also considered a later Avatar of Hindu god Vishnu and Buddha if we recall is also a prince of the royal line. In Vietnam the Hùng kings are said to be descended from a dragon king of the sea and a fairy. In the Cook Islands the first human Avatea (also a god of light) was a hybrid being who was half fish half human. The dogon tribe of Africa say the nommos were half fish half humans who descended from the sky and taught mankind the arts of civilization. There are some who believe Cain from the bible is a demigod or like in gnosticsm, a product of the serpent, and thus Cain being the first born son is said to have founded the first city of mankind and later spawned the line of earthly kings. Even Jesus is alluded to a serpent in John 3:14 where he is alluded to the nehushtan, a snake on a cross that Moses used to heal people in the desert (think hospitals and hermes symbol the caduceus) which is odd considering every other snake symbolism is considered evil, why have the son of god as something associated with being bad when hes supposed to be the ultimate form of good. For modern believers its a difficult passage to swallow and ironically comes right before the biggest quote of all which is John 3:16. The name of the snake on the cross interestingly is shārāp which is a fiery flying serpent. Hmmm Sounds like a dragon. The other thing to consider is Jesus is claimed to be of the Royal line of David. And an interesting side note a Seraph which is a type of angel literally means burning one which is odd since hell is supposed to burn not heaven. But this pattern is found all over the world.
The battle over whether the snake is good or bad goes back millenium. This is because there was an ancient schism far in the past over snake cults. Snake cults with snakes hung to crosses, and trees goes back all the way to africa and the origin of mankind. This schism is most clear when one compares India and Persian/Zorastrian myth where the asuras and devas (loosely translated as gods/angels and devils/demons) roles are reversed in each culture and each demonized the others religion (possibly for political purposes or purhaps out of ignorance). As time progresses and information is recorded much like computers, data can become corrupted, especially with mistranslations and regime change, migrating populations and changes in language which explains these divergent beliefs with similar origins.
To understand the snake, you have to study many cultures myths about them. They are often linked to immortality and time. In ancient Greece and Rome the god of of time was Khronos/Chronos and kind of merged with the similar sounding titan king Cronus (Roman saturn) but Khronos is depicted as a snake whos consort was the serptine goddess of inevitability known as Ananke. The snake coiled around the world egg and it cracked open and created everything we see. In Mesopotamian myth Tiamats body is cleaved in half and becomes the world, in Norse myth its Ymir, in Hinduism its Purusha.
Its no surprise to me that some of the writing team for Chrono Trigger was also in Xenogears, another game knee deep in religious and esoteric concepts and was also a game with a murky and ambiguous poetic like message with obscure esoteric knowledge to various mystic traditions.
Much has already been compared in terms of Lavos, Cthulhu, and Saturn/Chronos from Roman/Greek mythology and Satan from Christianity all of whome are enchained deep beneath the earth or ocean. The truth is, they all draw upon the same mythemes because all of these concepts are the conceptual mutations of the Mesopotamian myth of Tiamat, an ancient dragon of chaos and destruction deep in the abyssal ocean, who is slain by Marduk (early forerunner of Christ, this aligns with the hero of a thousand faces motif and the hero vs the dragon found throughout the worlds myths). So when one makes comparisons of one or the other, technically they are both right because they belong to a family of concepts on a branching tree but are different shades of the same idea through thr cultural lens of different societies.
Remember the assertion of HP lovecraft in the call of Cthulhu, was that people have been worshipping Cthulhu since the dawn of time, everywhere around the world he saw the same statue all pronounced similarly but with different spelling. Thats because what he is relaying isn't fictional like he even publicly claims, its actually true if you study world myth so he hid the information too. Clear comparisons of Cthulhu include the Greek Typhon, Finnish Urko Turso, Hawaiian Kanaloa (god of magic) , Slavic god Veles (god of magic) as just a few examples.
Remember in Chrono Trigger about the origins of Zeal and people who could perform Magic? A piece of the shell of lavos was merged with those from Zeal and was passed on down the line. And the mammon machine was harnessing the energy from Lavos (lesson=money is evil and created by lavos). Thus the teacher of magic is lavos himself, much like comparitive ancient myth.
The prehistoric period in chrono trigger is interesting because Ayla is also blonde, and the progenitor of the royal line like Marle and Leene who are also blonde. The reptilians summoned lavos who gave humans magic so reptilians are thrown in there somehow but turn it into a battle of ancient evolution rather than directly linking to reptilian ancestors. Ayla is of the clan of the cave bear. Interestingly King Arthurs name means Bear Man or Bear King in various languages.
What the Japanese are getting at, is something similar to breath of fire, another game by squaresoft that also echoes the tales of the ancient dragon lineage. In breath of fire II, *spoiler* you go through the whole game assuming the church is good and the dragons are bad but you find out the final boss is zombie jesus basically and the church were the bad guys, for a little kid this blew my mind when I was young because the thought never entered my mind. This sort of plot twist also happens in chrono trigger with Magus, you go through the game assuming hes bad but its revealed hes actually battling lavos too. So the game is suggesting much like how the two religions have the same roots, they battle each other but should really team up and combat true evil and not each other.
This message is also probably popular because dragons are evil in the west but are often considered good or holy in the east so they are trying to set the record straight about the ancient inquisition of the dragon lineage which has been forgotten and wasn't taught in the west. These games are essentially a form of propoganda basically saying the west is flawed and its reign has destroyed the planet and thus we await the christ hero to initiate the apocalypse and transform the world with the second coming. FF7 really ran with the eco gaia consciousness vibes and remember Avalanche are basically eco terrorists battling an evil power company while the Christ hero is named Cloud (age of aquarius reference?) and is blonde like every other DBZ hero who is "super sayan" or super human.
In the 90's gnosticsm was really popular in Japan, like the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion which influenced Xenogears. Most religions require blind faith in a book, prophet and skygod but gnosticsm was a personal journey to find the divine and was not something told to you by someone else. Gnosticsm also featured a reversal of roles which explained the origin of evil where evil was oldest and more powerful and the force of good as an underdog in a cruel world which is different than the western view of an all powerful benevolent god who allows evil for some weird reason to test us or something. Gnosticsm aligns with Greek myth where the world is often said to be born of chaos and in Zorastrian/Zurvanism myth Zurvan the god of time creates evil first and good comes later but eventually will win in time. Rather than just a book you read and believed in, a video game was something you played and experienced as a character in a simulated reality usually based somewhat on reality itself. In Chrono Trigger and Grandia for example you start the game in your room at your parents house which probably mirrored the real life of the average player. Thus this game in a way is a sort of gnostic bible, much like how Neo battles the machines in the Matrix which is also knee deep in gnostic symbolism, chrono trigger tells a similar tale. As the character progresses in the game it culminates in a final battle of good vs evil and the fate of the world which mirrors ancient myth and religion like in Zorastrianism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Norse mythology which all have an end of the world climatic battle at the end of time. Remember most early books and media copied the themes in the bible because it was the most popular book at the time like Dantes Inferno or even Don Quixote. So this is a theme you see in the story of every hero, even in say something like a Bruce Lee film. But the bible just copied concepts from earlier traditions.
Also to explain the Muhammed/Magus connection in Chrono Trigger we have to talk about another theme found in JRPGs. So if we look at Final Fantasy the characters Biggs and Wedge are from Star wars and are in almost every game, and theres usually an empire and you are a member of a ragtag team of rebels (FF6, FF7) if you play FF7 its pretty obvious Wutai is Japan and Juno is America. So basically the Japanese saw Star wars and loved how one mans terrorist is anothers freedom fighter and ran with it conceptually. Yes the empire was bazed on Nazi Germany but from the Japanese perspective America was just another Empire so Luke is just Marduk slaying Tiamat. In moxern politics the US is basically doing a new crusade against the middle east so today we have a conflict of empire building and resource exploitation often based on old beliefs and geopolitical ties at the root of the issue.
But what Chrono trigger is trying to say, is that Lavos or the devil runs the world from the shadows, which is what many religions say, like Hinduism says this world is Maya or the illusion, Gnosticsm believes this world was created by the evil demiurge, and Christianity believes Satan is the "god of this world" and earthly pleasures and many Christians think the people in power are Satanists. So when Lavos emerges from the depths of the ocean to nuke the earth, this isn't much different than the dragon rising out of the sea in the book of Revelations in Christianity, thus Lavos has obviously been alluded to Satan.
So for the grand reveal the game flips everything on its head, and thats why at the very end of the game you find out Lavos is an ancient alien astronaut and the shell was a type of space ship. Its the ultimate plot twist thats never explained, but you gotta understand these were hot topics back then, just watch the show outer limits and you'll understand an aspect of the 90s psyche.
Chrono trigger just remixed everything into a single game and blended a lot of concepts together.
