Material Requiring Translation
The following documents need to be translated to achieve a greater understanding of the Chrono series. If you would like to volunteer, please contact chronocompendium@gmail.com. Your work will be invaluable in helping us crack the last few mysteries whose answers have been forever barred from Western audiences.
- Priority List
We're prioritizing the items below in this order. If you feel like volunteering, definitely start at the top if you can!
- Chrono Trigger V-Jump Player's Guide Interview
- Chrono Trigger Prerelease Coverage
- Chrono Cross V-Jump Interview Video
- Mitsuda interviews from Más allá del Tiempo
- Chrono Trigger OAV Manga
- Chrono Trigger Prerelease (Undecipherable Text from Earlier Builds)
- Youtube Another Eden and FF Interviews
Contents
Chrono Trigger Prerelease
Script
- Translated Text (CTP) (undecipherable portions from earlier builds); note that RyogaMasaki probably has translated this as well as will ever be possible at this point.
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger OAV Manga
It's around ~160 pages and intended for a young reading level, so perhaps it won't be as difficult to translate as other stuff. If possible, a scanlation would be mind-blowingly awesome.
- V-Jump Chrono Trigger Nuumamonja Manga (ZIP, ~247 MB)
NOTE: EVERYTHING THROUGH GATE 3 HAS BEEN TRANSLATED AT THIS TIME (PAGES 26-27.JPG). IF YOU'D LIKE TO HELP, START WITH 28, AND THANKS!
Chrono Trigger V-Jump Player's Guide
This guide is a goldmine of interviews and special features, including some early character sketches by Toriyama (see Official Art) for those.
Chrono Trigger Prerelease Coverage
Includes material on Chrono Cross, as well. We're hoping for something unique in here. The translations will be kept on that page. We've looked over most of them with Google Lens, but there a few untranslated interviews that would be great to have (look for "Priority" in the text, or anything that says "Interview").
Chrono Cross
Chrono Break or Other Interviews
Mas alla del Tiempo
The book Más allá del Tiempo was published in 2015 and later translated to French, containing interviews with Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda:
The Kato interview has been translated:
2015 - Masato Kato, by Mariela Gonzalez
The Mitsuda interview has not been translated to English. If any Spanish-speaking of French-speaking Chrono fans can provide the Mitsuda interview, it would be hugely appreciated.
Youtube Interviews
We also need someone to watch these and provide the gist of any portions that talk about the Chrono series. A Japanese fansite that tracks interviews confirms they do, but the Chrono content is unknown.
- FFXI もぎたてヴァナディール!第45回 (テスト放送付き) - there's some discussion on the battle system of Chrono Trigger towards the last quarter of the interview; hard to parse any new information.
Another Eden Stream
Masato Kato discusses Chrono Break in this one; see here. Using OpenAI's Whisper and DeepL, it appears the team We haven't had an actual translation by a volunteer, but I've used the OpenAI Whisper transcription tool to get what I can out of it. The raw text is below; here are my conclusions from feeding it into DeepL:
- There's some discussion of Chrono Trigger in the first half of the video, where (Kato?) discusses having writer's block for developing the story for roughly a year after the project was started, and resisting being fired from the project.
- He started brainstorming ideas for a new Chrono game shortly after Cross's release around 2000, with the idea that it would be a PS2-era game.
- It really is intended to be titled "Break", not "Brake", as he was imagining a story about time literally breaking somehow (DeepL says, "And the title was something like, 'That's when it all goes to shit.'")
- Preproduction was in session around 2000/2001 (including the registration of the trademark).
- Final Fantasy Dimensions II ended up recycling the main scenario of the story!
There's some mention of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross afterwards, but it seems mostly inconsequential. The raw transcription is below. We're hoping someone will translate this snippet fully; see this link.
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