I still can't grasp the fixation on making a novel of Chrono Trigger, especially when the game's story can hardly be considered an epic or anything. Plus doesn't most of the enjoyment come from the fact that it's a fun video game?
I can understand how silly it sounds to write a novel based on a video game. Twenty years ago I might have felt the same way. That attitude changed when Final Fantasy IV (II in the U.S.) came out. That game more than any other before it demonstrated to me that the video-game medium could actually tell an engrossing story. It wasn't just about the gameplay, though it was very very good. FF IV could have easily been just another dungeon crawler and still sold plenty of copies, but Squaresoft put heart into it by making us actually care about the characters. We didn't just have Paladin, Dragoon, White Mage, Black Mage, etc. We had Cecil, Kain, Rosa, and Rydia, and more than a few other memorable characters. What Chrono Trigger did four years later was take that same formula and make an even more memorable experience, arguably the most memorable experience of its kind even by today's standards.
So why write a novel? For all of the storytelling strides gaming has made over the years, I've come to understand that as a storytelling device games are still limited. To maintain the player's interest they have to be fast-paced and always giving the player something to do, so detail and believability are often eschewed. A novel can be both fast-paced and believable, if written well enough, and can slow down when it needs to. Certainly, Chrono Trigger was enjoyable from a gameplay standpoint, but its story is what really stands out. What would that story look like if the limiting video-game conventions were taken out? (Such as Crono being a mute, or the Conservation of Time Theorem limiting the party to three members?) That is the question I am exploring here. And I am not the first to try.
Romana, your attitude strikes me as the same kind of attitude held by the current executives of Square/Enix: “It's just a video-game. What's the big deal? Move on. (and buy our next game)” It's the attitude that has prevented the production of a third installment of the series, or looking at the story through a different medium, like film. It is a difficult thing to explain in a post, but Chrono Trigger has transcended the medium it was originally told in. With the skeleton of canon, fans of various disciplines, from artists to composers to writers, have been steadily giving the story its true shape. What Chrono Trigger truly is is a modern fairy-tale full of memorable characters and incredible adventures. That may not have been the original intent of Squaresoft, but that is what's happened. I'm trying to take all of the bits and pieces people have made over the years to discover the complete picture of that fairy-tale, and redefine the story on those terms. Chrono Trigger
is an epic, it just hasn't been fully realized yet because the original game was a limited storytelling device.
