The votes are in, they’ve all been tallied and Japan has reached a verdict: Chrono Trigger is the best game of the current era.
This conclusion was reached via a poll conducted by Weekly Famitsu where readers were asked to weighed in on which game from this era they believed topped all the others. According to the results, a total of 7,100 readers participated in the vote.
To clarify, “this era” refers to the Heisei era which started the day after the death of the Emperor Hirohito, when his son, Akihito, acceded to the throne on Jan. 8, 1989. The next era, Reiwa, which will start with the ascension of a new emporer, starts May 1. So, in essence, we’re basically looking at games over a 30-year period.
And needless to say, Chrono Trigger is definitely worthy of the honor.
Coming out for the Super Famicom/Nintendo in 1995, Chrono Trigger was a collaboration between Square and Enix, resulting in the unison between some of the most prolific actors in the gaming world at the time (or ever, really), such as Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, Nobuo Uematsu and Akira Toriyama. And with its stellar, well, just about everything, it managed to work its way into the hearts of generations of gamers, whether they played the original on the SNES, the “definitive version” on the 3DS, or later ports for PC, PlayStation and mobile devices.
As for the other games which rounded out the top three? Zelda: Breath of the Wild came in second and Nier: Automata was third.
All in all, there isn’t much you could complain about with the results. One might argue that at least one of them shouldn’t be considered part of this top three, but surely if the list was expanded to the top 10 then at least two of these games would appear on most people’s list.
Maybe the recent achievement will encourage Square Enix to bring Chrono Trigger to the Switch? It would be nice, if only for the sake of having a port that’s readily accessible. If so, all I ask is that this port turn out better than the last.
