Chrono Trigger is a role-playing game developed and published by Square for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1995. Created by the "Dream Team" of Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama, it follows a group of friends who travel through time to prevent a global catastrophe — and remains one of the most acclaimed RPGs ever made.
Chrono Trigger was developed and published by Square for the Super Famicom and SNES, releasing in Japan in March 1995. The project brought together three of the most influential figures in Japanese game and manga history: Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest designer Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama. Their collaboration, dubbed the "Dream Team," produced a game that synthesised the best of each creator's craft.
The story begins at a millennial fair and quickly escalates: a teleportation accident sends protagonist Crono and his friends across multiple eras — prehistoric 65,000,000 BC, medieval 600 AD, a ruined future 2300 AD, and several points between. The goal is to prevent Lavos, a planet-consuming parasite, from destroying the world in 1999. The game's thirteen distinct endings — each reached through different combinations of choices and actions — were revolutionary for a linear RPG, giving players genuine agency over how the story concluded.
Chrono Trigger's Active Time Battle system placed enemies visibly on the map rather than in random encounters, and introduced dual and triple techs — combination attacks that required specific characters in the party and created some of the game's most spectacular moments. The system rewarded experimentation and made party composition a meaningful strategic choice rather than a pure numbers game.
Chrono Trigger is ranked #40 on Rolling Stone's 2025 list of the 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time. Yasunori Mitsuda's score, Toriyama's character designs, and a story that used time travel to give every era of the game's world narrative weight made it a landmark of Japanese RPG design that continues to influence the genre thirty years later.