I absolutely adore Chrono Trigger! It is both my favourite Super Nintendo game and my favourite Square Enix RPG!
Square Enix excels at crafting RPGs featuring epic main story arcs riddled with plot twists and numerous nonlinear side quests, hidden extra playable characters, and alternative endings--and I believe that this is most evident with Chrono Trigger! (I consider the revelation of Magus' origin and true motivation to be one of the greatest plot twists of any video game, bringing unexpected depth and complexity to what at first seemed to be a fairly stock, one dimensional villain!)
More so than any other video game about time travel that I have actually played, Chrono Trigger cleverly uses time travel in manner that spans numerous disparate chronological eras to blend together several familiar sub-genres within the broader fantasy and science-fiction umbrella and moreover allows the player to travel through those eras in a non-linear fashion that incorporates significant cause-and-effect scenarios! (Contrast that to how time travel is usually treated in other video games, such as the admittedly-quite-fun-but-extremely-linear-and-simplistic Turtles in Time: Here's the prehistoric level! Now here's the old west level! Now here's the futuristic level!)
Furthermore, on top of all that: Chrono Trigger also had a fantastically varied combat system that allowed the party to grow together rather than independently as if in a vacuum, learning special character specific team-work moves to a degree that surpasses that of any other RPG I have played!
All the above makes Chrono Trigger a rather unique and thoroughly enjoyable, fresh experience for numerous play-throughs! I cannot recommend this game enough for fans of nineties styled JRPGs, especially those intrigued by stories about time travel!
And yet, despite my love for Chrono Trigger: I have yet to give its sequel, Chrono Cross, a try! It just so happened to come out after I started my undergraduate degree and thus put video games aside to concentrate on my studies, and as such it passed completely under my radar! Even now, I only casually play older games every now and then out of nostalgia. I'll eventually get around to it though...
