Issue 4.7: From Seconds to Epochs, Part 2

Chrono Trigger, Fate, and the Conundrums of Time Travel (Or, "The Ballad of Queen Zeal")

Game & Word Volume 4, Issue 7: Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022

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Table of Contents

1. Summary & Housekeeping

2. Feature: “From Seconds to Epochs, Part 2” (~36-minute read)

3. Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

4. Further Reading

5. Game & Word-of-Mouth

6. Footnotes

Summary:

Today,

Housekeeping:

Game & Word is currently playing Fallen London, the first in a phenomenal three-game series, set in an alternate-history Victorian London that’s been dragged into the underworld by bats. Yes, you read that correctly. And believe it or not, that’s among the least weird things about these games!

This is an open invitation to play Fallen London with me and your fellow readers. Intimidated by video games? No fear! Literally anyone who wants to play this game, can play this game. Here’s why:

1. It’s free—actually free, none of the “free to download but actually requires in-app purchases to actually play” racket that’s standard in “free” games.

2. It’s a web game—no need to download or install a separate app. Just open your browser, go to https://fallenlondon.com, create a free account, and start playing. Getting started takes two minutes at most, and logging in/resuming your game takes even less.

3. It’s accessible—Fallen London is entirely text-based, narrative-driven, and asynchronous (not timed). Playing and enjoying it requires no prior gaming proficiency or technical skill, you can’t lose, and you can progress at your own pace. It’s akin to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, but on the web and with more dry, British gallows humor.

As a bonus, if you play with us, you can partake in a bunch of fun multiplayer stuff like trading items, practicing skills, dueling, and (wait for it…) going for tea, as well as some cool seasonal activities like sending Neathmas cards.

After you get started, send me a message! My current¹ username is WhereIsMyTea. Then post your username, discuss the lore, and update us on your character’s escapades on Game & Word’s FREE Subscriber Chat:

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Feature: From Seconds to Epochs, Part 2

👾🤔🤷 CONFUSED? ➡ NEW GAMING GLOSSARY! 📚💬🧑‍🎓

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🚨🚨🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 

This post is one big, ginormous WALKING SPOILER for Chrono Trigger. Seriously, you really should experience this story firsthand. You don’t need to be “good” at games to play, and it’s readily accessible on PC and mobile. If you’ve yet to play it, and would like to play it someday, I cannot recommend highly enough that you experience Chrono Trigger before reading this article!

⚖️⚖️⚖️ ETHICS DISCLOSURE ⚖️⚖️⚖️

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Ok,

Temporal Tempests

Crono and Friends’ time-hopping adventures will eventually send them everywhere from humanity’s earliest days (65,000,000 B.C.), to its soul-crushingly bleak hour of death (2300 A.D.), and many more eons in between, trying to figure out how to stop Lavos from destroying everything when it awakens from its very long slumber in 1999 A.D.

But even as they look, seek, discover, and make progress, our heroes still have no idea what Lavos even is or where it came from, never mind what sorts of weaknesses it may have. That all changes about 1/3 into the plot, when our heroes enter a Time Gate leading to a small cave in the year 12,000 B.C.

They emerge from the cave, onto a battered planet in the grips of a viciously frigid Ice Age. Neverending blizzards blanket mountains, pine trees, and indeed every inch of ground in a thick coat of ice. There is no sun, only pummeling winds, endless snow, and frostbite. An ominous, jagged mountain of black rock floats in the air, as if by magic, tethered to the ground by a gigantic chain. This is a land lethal to all but the toughest, hardiest, and most tenacious lifeforms.

But… what’s that in the distance? It’s a building, nothing like anything the gang’s seen anywhere else, at any time. It’s a small, white, domed building, with a few tall antenna-like poles sticking up, topped with some sort of glowing material, that shines in different colors. Just a few feet from each of the building’s four corners, rests a similar building, but much smaller. These smaller additions appear inaccessible, though they’re also topped with the same glowing material as the main structure.

And the interior of the structure is even more captivating than the exterior! Its gilded walls and columns, intricate floor patterns, and sturdy floor tiling betray a highly prosperous and advanced civilization. Intricate golden statues, set in reliefs carved from the gilded walls, depict a strange creature, or construct, or possibly a deity—and evoke an unsettling feeling on the observer. Indeed, the entire structure is as uncanny as it is astonishing, and feels familiar and alien in equal measure.

Nervously, our heroes step onto the building’s center tile, engraved with a complex circular pattern. The strange sigil starts glowing, before a beam of light shoots up from the floor, past the ceiling, through the glowing material covering the structure, and all the way past the clouds, in to the sky.

When the beam subsides, Crono & Co. are still standing on that strange circular sigil, and the platform it rests on. The rest of the structure is gone, however. But there isn’t a stinging blizzard or howling winds battering our heroes—no, the sun is out! There’s grass, not snow, on the ground, and in the distance, they spot even more beautiful white buildings like the one they’d just been in. After looking around some more, they finally realize—they’re floating high above the clouds!

<PICTURE OF ZEAL>

As it turns out, that domed structure on the surface was some sort of teleporter bridge to what appears to be a literal heavenly kingdom.

Four huge land masses float in the sky high above the clouds, as if by magic,² complete with lakes of pristine water that flow over the edge and towards the surface as spectacular waterfalls, yet never seem to deplete the water source. Magnificent buildings with spires of gold and ivory shimmer in the undying sunlight.

Shielded by their elevation, nestled high above the neverending blizzard that ravages the land beneath the clouds, the denizens of this enchanting realm live idyllic lives of neverending sleep, leisure, and study. They wile away their days exploring their dreams and contemplating philosophical koans, as all their basic needs are met by a seemingly infinite energy source, the same one that keeps them flying above the clouds.

“This is the Eternal Kingdom of Zeal, where dreams can come true,” says a citizen, before dropping this possibly-rhetorical-and-not-at-all-ominous query:

“…But at what price?”

At what price, indeed…

Surely, you’ve heard, read, seen, and played enough stories to know that seemingly perfect, utopian societies always harbor a horrifying, ugly, and/or sinister secret just beneath the surface. Zeal is no exception. And yes, it pays a heavy price in the end.

What price, you say? Well, let’s find out, shall we?

Citizen Zeal

But first, some background. Again, if you have a PhD in Chrono lore, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

Crono and the Gang first arrived at Zeal via a Time Gate in 65,000,000 B.C., the prehistoric era, where humans—having just barely learned to walk on two legs—eke out a tough existence of being constantly hunted and terrorized by a more advanced and far more belligerent civilization of bipedal reptilian lizard creatures called “Reptites.” Basically, sentient dinosaurs.

Crono’s adventures in the timestream eventually bring him to this era, and eventually helps unite the disparate human tribes under the leadership of Ayla, who also joins the party. After one reptite raid too many, Ayla and Crono decide to make a stand by storming the reptite stronghold: the Tyrano Lair.

There, at the top of the fortress, overlooking a caldera of molten lava, Crono, Ayla and Friends battle Azala, the reptite leader, in a riveting and climactic battle to determine, once and for all, whether reptites or “apes” (as Azala derisively calls humans) will inherit the world.

Obviously, Crono defeats Azala and her fearsome pet T-Rex, the “Black Tyrano.” But really, he might as well not have bothered. Why? Well, let me bring your attention to this ominous red star that looms in the sky throughout the battle:

Hmm… why would that star be red, you might ask? Well… what is red usually associated with? Still stumped? Ok, remember who Crono is battling: dinosaurs. Ok, then, one last hint: remember in which year this battle takes place (65M B.C.).

Ok, fine. It crashes into the planet. That’s ok, I didn’t see it coming, either.

This singular moment is quite possibly the most significant and consequential event in the entire Chrono chronology (try saying that quickly ten times!). It set off a veritable cascade of dominos tumbling millions of years into the futures of multiple different timelines, arguably enabled the game’s events to happen at all, and birthed a million metaphysical flame wars and armchair philosophical dissertation posts in Chrono fansites and forums worldwide.

It’s impossible to detail all the reasons why this event was so consequential without turning this piece itself into an armchair philosopher's dissertation,³ so I’ll stick to the two most relevant to this analysis. They’re both related, so pay attention.

The first reason: much like with the space rock that hit our planet 65 million years ago, the impact throws a bunch of soot into the atmosphere that blocks out the sun, ushering in a very long Ice Age that’s still going strong in 12,000 B.C.! Yikes. Even Azala warns as much, practically reveling in humanity’s imminent suffering as she draws her last breath:

“Soon, stones of fire will rain down. Flames shall scorch the land. The burned-out plains will slowly freeze, ushering in a long, cruel ice age.

Mwa, ha ha...what a treat! You will wish you went along with us!”
~Azala, Chrono Trigger

(Oh, and to add insult to injury, the flaming rock crashes right on top of the Tyrano Lair.)

Anyway, so thanks to this space rock’s impact, the planet is fated to remain a frigid snow-cone for several dozen millennia. Obviously, this isn’t ideal for a budding human race that just decisively defeated the far-more-advanced race of bipedal lizards that was slowly hunting them to extinction. And after a while, humanity does kinda get sick of the cold, darkness, and lack of food, and thinks up a plan to improve their lot. It’s actually quite simple:

Live above the dark clouds, stinging cold, and howling winds!

Um… ok. But, like… how do a bunch of primitive humans—who, remember, have just barely left the stone age—intend to live in the sky?

That brings us to the second reason why this impact is so momentous: that space rock wasn’t actually a space rock. It was Lavos itself.

Whooooooaaaaaah.

For such a powerful antagonist that looms as large as it does over the plot of Chrono Trigger (and, to a lesser extent, its more contentious sequel, Chrono Cross), the lore tells us remarkably little about Lavos. Fitting, considering it’s so alien to the planet and its denizens that it’s literally an alien. Hell, “Lavos” isn’t even its real name (which remains unknown)—that’s just what humans named it. But here’s what we do know:

1. It comes from somewhere deep in space, wandering the endless cosmic void in search of a planet to latch onto.

2. Upon crashing onto a planet, it burrows deep into its core and starts hibernating, slowly growing while absorbing the planet’s energy (as well as the energy of all the planet’s lifeforms), much like a parasite would to its host. Fitting, considering Lavos itself looks like a giant space tick.

3. After growing enough (which can take millions of years), Lavos awakens from dormancy, rises back to the surface, and unleashes its power on the world, decimating all sentient life, and harvesting all the energy in sight (this is what’s fated to happen in 1999 A.D., should Crono and his buddies fail in their quest).

4. Lavos, nearing the end of its lifecycle, reproduces and births Lavos spawn. These baby Lavoses will, one day, also take to the stars to find planets of their own to drain and destroy, And so the cycle continues.

Lavos has another curious trait, which the game just barely refrains from saying outright, but its sequel straight-up confirms:

5. Lavos, slumbering deep within the planet, pulls all the evolutionary strings on the planet, and in fact, has been guiding the evolution of humanity from monosyllabic cave dwellers to highly intelligent thinkers, magicians, inventors, and scientists.⁴

Wait, what was the second descriptor on that list? Magicians? As in… magic? My, aren’t you astute! Though I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising… after all, it wouldn’t be an RPG (and a JRPG, no less!) without some form of magic!

Anyway, Lavos doesn’t only bring destruction to the world: it also brings magic. This raises a rather uncomfortable philosophical quandary, but we’re not ready to discuss it yet, so just put a pin on it for the time being. For now, just remember: following the impact in 65,000,000 B.C., magic is now a thing. And at some point between then and 12,000 B.C., humans figure out how to use it.

So, there’s your short answer to the above long answer: it was magic. Humans built Zeal using magic.

If you’re feeling a little annoyed, I understand. I’m not a fan of using “magic” (or “tech,” or “phlebonium,” or whatever) to handwave physical impossibilities. More often than not, it smacks of amateurish, inexperienced worldbuilding and lazy storytelling. But in Chrono Trigger, magic being the source of Zeal’s power actually serves a very important narrative and heuristic purpose, which—again—we’ll get to in due time.

Anyway.

So, magic enables ancient humans to raise entire continents into the sky and keep them there, where they are free to live a better, easier life than on the frozen surface. These continents house a glorious civilization of art, culture, science, and magic, known as Zeal (which may or may not have already existed on the surface—the lore is very vague on this. If anyone has any thoughts, do drop ‘em in the comments!).

We don’t know exactly how long Zeal’s been blissfully hovering above the tempest by the time our heroes stop by, but going by its moniker of “The Eternal Kingdom,” this land of magic and science must have been coasting above the world for a VERY long time.

But despite Zeal’s cities of dreaming mystics and brilliant scientists projecting an aura of harmony and perfection, it soon becomes clear that not all is right in the floating kingdom. In fact, this is a realm about to be devoured by an existential crisis entirely of its own making.

Remember how I mentioned how magic powering Zeal served a narrative purpose? Well, listen up.

For untold eons, Zeal and its denizens drew magical power from a relic called the Sun Stone, said to contain all the energy of the sun, available for any magician to tap into. It was the power of the Sun Stone that kept Zeal afloat and running.

But at some point, the Kingdom was faced with two ominous portents.

One: the Kingdom’s Three Sages (basically a council of the three most powerful wizards in Zeal) observe that the Sun Stone’s energy is depleting more rapidly than the sun can replenish it. This, as you can imagine, is a problem, because Zeal relies on the Sun Stone’s power for everything.

Two: but there may yet be hope! For the Sages have also discovered a new fount of energy, emanating from the lowest point of the ocean floor. This energy is more plentiful and more potent than that of the Sun Stone, and could well sustain the Kingdom forever.

Responding to these two developments, the Queen of Zeal—obviously (if not very subtly) named “Queen Zeal”—orders the design and construction of a machine to harvest this new energy source, which she calls “The Mammon Machine.”⁵

Upon coming online, the difference in power is immediately felt. Zeal is propelled to new heights of progress, to the point where the secret of immortality feels within arm’s reach. Non-coincidentally, the activation of the Mammon Machine also marks the start of Queen Zeal’s rapid descent into stark-raving, megalomaniacal insanity, crippling paranoia, and an increasingly unquenchable thirst for power.

Eventually, the Queen becomes so power-hungry that she commissions a palace to be built on the ocean floor, so that she can house the Mammon Machine even closer to Zeal’s new, mysterious energy source, so as to harvest even more power for herself.

Oh, and at some point before or during all this—again, the lore is frustratingly coy on specifics—humans unable to wield magic are expelled from Zeal. The magical denizens of Zeal start calling themselves “The Enlightened Ones,” because elites are insufferable, pompous snobs regardless of timeline or universe.

Meanwhile, the non-magical humans, dubbed “The Earthbound Ones,” are reduced to living in caves dotting the frozen surface, living a miserable existence subsisting on scraps and occasional gifts from sympathetic Enlightened Ones, and performing slave labor building Queen Zeal’s ever-more grandiosely insane projects, like the aforementioned “Ocean Palace.”

Still with me? Ok, good. Lovely ruler, this Queen Zeal, isn’t she? There’s a reason she’s one of gaming’s most iconic villains. Her obligatory pre-final battle speech is deliciously hammy, too.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Anyway…

By the time Crono and Friends arrive in Zeal and poke around enough to realize something’s amiss (which doesn’t take long), enough people of influence in Zeal are concerned enough at what’s happening to appeal to Crono for help.

These include the three Sages (who built the Mammon Machine in the first place) who worry about triggering an unpredictable and possibly catastrophic reaction by bringing the Machine so close to the energy source; as well as Schala, Princess of Zeal—the single most tragic figure in the Chrono saga—who is highly suspicious of this new energy “source,” appalled at the worsening treatment and exploitation of the Earthbound Ones, and extremely alarmed at the rapid deterioration of the Queen’s sanity and the danger it presents to the people of Zeal.

But alas, Schala is powerless to stand up to her mother, due to the iron grip the Mammon Machine gives her on the levers of power.

And our gang doesn’t have much time, either, because the Ocean Palace is almost complete. In fact, the Queen has already ordered the Mammon Machine to be moved there! So of course, it follows that it’s up to our heroes to stop her.

Oh, wait. I forgot to mention what exactly this new “energy source” is. My bad. Anyway, it’s Lavos. If you had an inkling that’s the reason Queen Zeal becomes increasingly stark-raving mad the more she taps into this energy, well, now you know for sure.

Anyway… Oh no, Lavos!!! That infernal Mammon Machine’s going to awaken Lavos! Onward, Crono! Let’s put an end to this madness!⁶

SIDE QUEST: Environmental Storytelling (Before It Was Cool)

The race to infiltrate the Ocean Palace and stop Queen Zeal from activating the Mammon Machine is one of the tensest sequences in the game, and marks a distinct tonal shift in the narrative from “mostly lighthearted with a few dark moments” to “mostly dark and foreboding with a few lighthearted moments.” And the game deploys a few subtle, but very well-timed and executed developer tricks that help sell the player on the urgency of Crono’s task, as well as what’s at stake (which is: everything).

For one, there are far more enemies in the Ocean Palace than in any previous dungeon, and they pack a far nastier punch, which considerably increases the challenge beyond anything the game’s thrown at the player so far. In game developer lingo, this is known as a “difficulty spike,” and is a great way to signal to the player that the kiddie gloves have come off and he’d better plug in his big boy controller, because things are about to get real.

The Ocean Palace is also a long dungeon, which serves two purposes. First, an unusually long and difficult dungeon almost always precedes a major boss fight, which itself almost always precedes a major plot point. The more the player advances, the more the game primes and pumps her up for the imminent showdown and the shocking twist that follows.

Second, if a player enters a dungeon unprepared or underequipped for the challenge inside, she can always exit the dungeon, re-stock at a nearby town, grind for experience, and re-enter the dungeon. Usually, there’s nothing wrong with this. But if you’re building up to a major story point, this can totally kill the pacing, break immersion, and take the “punch” out of the big story reveal you worked so hard on perfect.

But if the player’s advanced far enough into a really long dungeon, then exiting will require a LOT of backtracking, followed by a LOT of replaying the same dungeon and fighting the same enemies to get back to where she was. This highly disincentivizes turning back by making the dungeon feel like a “point of no return” which raises the tension and stakes for the upcoming boss fight, both narratively and mechanically.

(Of course, some games can literally enforce this “point of no return” by preventing the player from leaving the dungeon until she’s completed it, but this is a very risky design choice—if the level designer isn’t careful about placing enough health packs, rest areas, or other ways to recoup strength, the player can get “softlocked,” or trapped in the dungeon with no way out, unable to progress, and with no choice but to restart her entire game from the very beginning.

Obviously, this is indicative of an inexperienced designer, and thus something you’d generally want to avoid. But that’s neither here nor there.)

But my favorite trick that Square used for this sequence is called a “background music override.” Usually, in RPGs, there are separate music tracks for combat sequences and for “overworld” sequences (when the player’s casually exploring the world). This is mainly to get players into a different state of mind, one that gets them excited about bashing monsters’ heads in.

But in the Ocean Palace, this isn’t the case. The regular background music for the dungeon keeps playing throughout the entire dungeon, even during the battle sequences. The track doesn’t even restart after a battle starts or finishes. And the Ocean Palace’s background music is an ominous, sinister, and foreboding clash of grating electronic notes, somber and low-octave piano, warlike brass, and dissonantly gentle woodwinds that really sets the tone for this sequence, lending it the gravitas it deserves.

The technique’s very effective here, partly due to how sparingly it’s employed throughout Chrono Trigger—not even the game’s final dungeon does this!

Put together, these little development tricks show how easy it can be to use gameplay mechanics, level design, and subtle environmental cues to reinforce the story a game tells!

Long story short: they fail. No, really, they fail. The Mammon Machine goes into overdrive (thanks to Crono), reality itself destabilizes in and around the Ocean Palace, and Lavos awakens from its slumber.

Understandably peeved at the insufferable humans who just interrupted its nap, Lavos retaliates by raining hellfire onto the Kingdom of Zeal, causing it to fall from the sky and crash to the ocean (surprise!), warping the three Sages to different eras, and killing Crono.

Yes, Crono dies in this sequence. After Lavos awakens, you fight him, as you would any other boss. But Lavos, being an all-powerful eldritch monstrosity, quickly makes mincemeat out of Crono and his friends. Before Lavos can strike the finishing flow, our protagonist sacrifices himself so that Schala can warp everyone else to safety.

And the cherry on top? Magic is now gone from the world. Well, at least for humans. The few “Enlightened Ones” who survived the (literal) fall of Zeal find that their powers are gone, and thus they have no choice but to work together with the Earthbound ones to rebuild civilization anew. Fortunately, for the first time in eons, the winds have stopped blowing and the sky has cleared, allowing the sun to shine right on through to the surface. A new age for humanity has begun.

…Oh, ok, alright. You want to know if Crono comes back. Well, the answer is: yes, as long as the player completes a long and convoluted side quest. But, strangely for a game of this era, doing so is not required to defeat Lavos and beat the game.

That’s right. You can finish Chrono Trigger without its namesake protagonist. I’m telling you, this game was a pioneer on multiple levels!

But just for the sake of simplicity, and also because it’s what happens in the canonical ending, let’s just assume the Gang does bring Crono back. I won’t explain why. This article’s long enough as it is. Better to just play the game.

ANYWAY.

Now, let’s talk about time stuff!

Slaying the Gods that Made You Slay Them

So, as we’ve just seen, the Zeal sequence throws a lot of heavy lore and exposition at the player. And while it answers some of the questions the player has, it mostly leaves her asking more questions. These deeper questions remain mostly obtuse and unanswered,⁷ leaving it up to the player to draw her own conclusions. This is why Chrono fan sites and wikis are such deep rabbit holes, and likely a big reason why the game is still so beloved after two and a half decades.

Let’s start with tackling the most obvious such question: the conundrum presented by Lavos being the guiding force behind humanity’s evolution.

This means that Lavos doesn’t just destroy humanity, but in a way, creates it as well. True, humanity already existed by the time Lavos crashed into the planet in 65,000,000 B.C., but remember, these were very primitive creatures who—while certainly tenacious and resourceful—still mostly used bones as tools and spoke caveman-ish “ooga-booga” talk.

Tellingly, the reptites, particularly Azala, feel nothing but disgust and contempt towards the puny “apes,” even after Crono and Ayla wipe the floor with them. If Crono and Ayla hadn’t whooped them so decisively, or if Lavos hadn’t crash-landed on the Tyrano Lair, the reptites—not the humans—would’ve ruled the world.

This isn’t speculation, by the way. If the player is strong enough to defeat Lavos before confronting Azala at the Tyrano Lair,⁸ an alternate ending plays which shows Guardia in 1,000 A.D., populated entirely by reptites.⁹

But even putting the impact aside, the game heavily suggests, and its sequel confirms, that humans have Lavos to thank for their sentience, advanced intelligence, and cultural evolution. Humans also learned to use magic after unearthing a shard of Lavos, circa 3,000,000 B.C.,¹⁰ which directly led to the rise (and eventual fall) of Zeal—arguably the pinnacle of human civilization until the ultra-advanced technological elysium that fell to Lavos in 1999 A.D.

So, did Lavos intentionally guide the evolution of humanity to the point that a handful of exceptional humans would eventually rise up and successfully challenge the monster’s seemingly pre-destined reign of destruction? Or did Lavos merely miscalculate, underestimate humanity, or get a bit too greedy?¹¹ As Lavos is literally an alien that we know next to nothing about, your guess is as good as anyone’s, really.

But on humanity’s side—is it ethical (or even just fair) to murder a sentient being (one of arguably greater sentience, at that) that was responsible for granting you sentience? Sure, this being does eventually murder you, but for all we know, it’s just acting out its lifecycle (in other words, it’s just doing what Lavos does). And it did give you a good 65 million years to enjoy your sentient existence. If Lavos is merely acting according to its natural instinct for survival—destructive and parasitical as said instinct is—does the act of destroying it constitute interference in the natural order of things?

Again, ambiguity is the name of the game¹² here, so one can only speculate. I do have some thoughts, however. One of them involves one of our playable characters, Robo, a sentient robot who was given the code name “Prometheus” at his time of manufacture. I doubt this name is coincidental, especially when you take the Frozen Flame—the Chrono-verse’s origin of magic—into account. Let us also not forget that robots, being literally artificial life, are the ultimate manifestation of mankind’s mastery over the divine.¹³

Like the mythical Prometheus stealing fire from the gods for the betterment of humanity, did humanity steal “fire” from Lavos (who is so utterly powerful, advanced, and incomprehensible that it as well be a god), only to grow so powerful as to slay the very “god” that gave them that power, to begin with?

Neitzche, eat your heart out.

Fated by Fate?

After the Ocean Palace incident, Chrono Trigger “opens up,” so to speak. Until that point, the game follows a fairly linear narrative (ironic, considering the focus on time travel, for which breaking linearity is kind of the point). But after that, the player is free to embark on any number of side quests to resurrect Crono, obtain the game’s strongest weapons/armor, massive stat boosts, pursue alternate endings, and/or fill in each character’s backstory.

She can also enter the final dungeon, leading to the final showdown against Queen Zeal, the upgraded Mammon Machine, and (finally) Lavos.

Or, she could literally cut to the chase and jump to 1999 A.D., immediately squaring off against Lavos—no need to battle sinister machanical abominations or megalomaniacal monarchs.

She can do any of this in any order she pleases, since by this point in the game, our heroes have a flying time machine at their disposal. It’s a remarkable amount of freedom for a game from the mid-90s.

One of these sidequests involves defeating a skeleton cyclops in 600 A.D. that has literally devoured an entire forest, turning it into a desert. After defeating the pile of dry bones, Robo—the sentient robot from 2300 A.D.—volunteers to reforest the area, a job that will take literal centuries.

Fortunately, since robots don’t have biological expiration dates, and since the heroes have a time machine (as mentioned), they can simply skip to 1000 A.D., after the job is done, and meet up with Robo, who’ll be there waiting for them.

After their reunion, the gang spends a night in the woods, reminiscing and waxing philosophical around a campfire.

<PIC OF CAMPFIRE>

One of the questions they broach is, “is everything pre-destined?” Robo floats the theory that the planet itself is some sort of sentient higher power (a genius loci, or an “entity,” as Robo calls it), and that it’s actually guiding the heroes to defeat Lavos in an act of self-preservation against its future destruction.¹⁴

All this talk about pre-destiny clearly troubles Lucca, who barely speaks throughout the conversation. Then, after everyone else is asleep, she gets up, and opens a Time Gate to when she was a little girl. Specifically, to the day when her mother lost both her legs during a tragic malfunction of one of Taban’s wonky inventions.

Understandably, the event traumatized Lucca, who felt (and, as a kid, probably was) powerless to do anything but watch her mother get horribly mangled by an unfeeling machine. It spurred her to become the best scientist and inventor that she could be, so that none of her inventions would ever cause such great harm to anyone else.

In this sequence, the player gets to help Lucca attempt to change the events of this fateful day. It’s a timed puzzle, where the player must press a certain combination of buttons to shut the machine off before it’s too late. The kicker? The player only gets one shot at this. Whether she succeeds or fails has no bearing on the plot, but both outcomes raise different—and equally troubling—questions about the nature of time and destiny that the party was just philosophizing about.

If Lucca fails to prevent the accident, the question becomes: what if everything really is pre-destined? What if this “entity” really is calling all the shots? After all, Lucca had a chance to change the course of one of the worst days of her life—by directly acting on the malfunctioning machine, with all her adult faculties, and knowing precisely how the accident would play out—and she still couldn’t do it.

And let’s not forget the game’s haunting “Game Over” sequence, with its famously chilling stinger:

“BUT… THE FUTURE REFUSED TO CHANGE.”

Remember how I mentioned that Chrono Trigger neatly sidesteps (most of) the paradoxes and pitfalls that ensnare stories about time travel? This is primarily how it does so.

Marle temporarily vanishing from existence, Crono dying and coming back to life, and Magus warping from 12,000 B.C. to 600 A.D. to wage war on humanity thanks to Crono’s intervention in the Ocean Palace—which only happened because Crono fought against Magus in 600 A.D. warping him to 12,000 B.C., thus allowing him to interfere in the Ocean Palace to begin with—among other mind-bending plot points…

All of this is possible, without creating reality-breaking time paradoxes, because this is the way it was always meant to happen. Crono defeats Lavos (or… you know, doesn’t) because he was always going to defeat Lavos. Call it destiny, fate, God, the “entity,” or whatever, it all leads to the same conclusion: the future has already been written, and nothing we can do will change it. Not even if we have time travel at our disposal.¹⁵

If Lucca succeeds in saving her mother, on the other hand, it raises a thorny ethical dilemma. Namely: everyone experiences trauma and tragedy in their lives. So why should Lucca get to change her past to sidestep her trauma, if nobody else gets that same opportunity? What’s so special about her that fate essentially grants her a do-over? What about all the other people who’ve suffered tragedy and would love getting a chance to do things differently?

Sure, you can say that Lucca, unlike everyone else, knows how to travel through time. But if you discount the pre-destiny hypothesis we just discussed (and if you’re able to re-write your past, and thus your future, you’d necessarily have to discount fate), then Lucca’s mastery of time travel is far from a given. In fact, it was a comedy of errors that involved not only Lucca, but also Crono and Marle, being at the right place and the right time to piece together the breadcrumbs that led to their discovery of time travel.

You could even say it all happened by chance. And if all this is up to chance, then Lucca’s serendipitous discovery of a powerful technology that allows her to re-do her past is going to sound like a cruel, cosmic joke to every other living soul who didn’t get to use time travel to undo their mistakes.

And these two opposite outcomes get to the heart and soul of the philosophical tug-of-war acting behind the scenes of every story involving time travel: is time destined to unfold a certain way, or are we actually in charge of our own destinies?

We’ll continue digging our teeth into this quandary next week, as we join Crono and the Gang for their ultimate showdown with Lavos, as well as some of the (literal) wrinkles that Chrono Cross introduces to the Chrono timeline. See you then!

~Jay

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Food for Talk: Discussion Prompts

While you wait for the next issue, I invite you to mull over the following discussion prompts. Please reply to this email with your answers, or post them in the comments—I'd love to hear your thoughts!

1. What do you think: is choice an illusion and are our lives pre-destined, or is the future a blank page that we have the power to fill out?

2. Assuming there’s no such thing as “fate,” is Crono & Co. slaying Lavos comparable to deicide?

3. Is fate a total narrative cop-out, or a workable (if imperfect) solution to the problems time travel brings to a story?

Also, don’t forget to join the Game & Word subscriber chat! I’ll be posting a new thread later today:

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Games Featured:

• Chrono Trigger, developed and published by SquareSoft (now Square Enix) — Steam | iOS | Android

• Chrono Cross, developed and published by SquareSoft (now Square Enix) — Physical: Nintendo Switch | Digital: Steam | Xbox | Nintendo Switch | PlayStation

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Tags

#narrative #storytelling #physics #philosophy #metaphysics #spirituality

#TempusLudos

#ChronoTrigger

Footnotes

1. Don’t ask me how many usernames I’ve created (and totally did not the login credentials for) in this game.

2. Well… it is by magic, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

3. Well… even more so than it already is.

4. Why? Because apparently, Lavos finds sentient lifeforms make for a more filling meal. And Lavos integrates the DNA from the lifeforms it consumes into its own, further augmenting its power… look, I told you this was complicated!

5. Again, not a genre (or a studio, for that matter) known for subtlety.

6. Literally and figuratively speaking.

7. Or, if you play Chrono Cross, become even more obtuse and borderline incomprehensible without a philosophy doctorate.

8. The player is free to travel to 1999 A.D. and fight Lavos at practically any time in the game after they discover time travel.

9. If you’re wondering, “wait a minute—but didn’t Lavos wipe out the reptites by landing on them?”, then yes, you’re absolutely right. While Chrono Trigger, for the most part, handles time travel very well, it’s not perfect.

That said, this apparent contradiction is (somewhat) explained in the sequel, Chrono Cross. But diving into that game’s metaphysical/temporal labyrinth would not only take a whole other issue, but a whole separate newsletter. So for now, we’ll settle for merely acknowledging this plot time hole.

10. The “Frozen Flame,” which is the primary plot driver/MacGuffin for the first half of Chrono Cross.

11. Remember, more sentience means more energy for Lavos to feast on.

12. Pun intended.

13. Besides, everyone knows that technology is actually magic.

14. If it sounds kind of far-fetched… do you have any other ideas as to how this whole story can play out without triggering any paradoxes? Also, keep in mind Robo’s been alone with his thoughts for 400 years—he’s had a VERY long time to think about all of this!

15. Now, I know this seems like a major cop-out, but honestly, it’s not much worse than any of the other ways creators hand-wave the contradictions and paradoxes that time travel inevitably introduces to their stories, up to and including simply shrugging and saying “You know… it’s magic science!”. Besides, Chrono Cross does call this conceit into question… hooooo boy, does it… but let’s just keep it simple for now.