Fifteen keychains. Five hundred yen a pull. No remake in sight.
Over on X, Square Enix confirmed that Chrono Trigger is receiving a fresh collection this year — and it isn’t what fans have been begging for since the SNES era. What they’re getting instead is a run of physical gacha keychains, dubbed the One Mark Collection, rolling out across Japan.
So no, a remaster still isn’t happening. But after three decades of loving this game, you learn to accept whatever shows up.
What’s actually in the set
The lineup covers 15 types in total. All six main characters — Chrono, Marle, Lucca, Frog, Robo, Ayla and Magus — appear twice, once in a standing pose and once in an action pose.
That leaves the 15th as the mystery entry, and it turns out to be a Nu: those blue, green-haired creatures Square Enix keeps rolling out whenever Chrono Trigger comes up. Hardly a surprise, but a welcome one.
Grabbing the complete set will run you somewhere around $140 USD. Since each pull costs 500 yen, working through the entire thing won’t hurt too badly — particularly if you’re happy with a single figure per character instead of the full run.
You’ll need to be in Japan (or know someone who is)
The promotion is region-locked. The bulk of the locations sit in Kansai, though machines also turn up in Tokyo, Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto, Chubu, Chugoku and Shikoku, and Kyushu.
Every location is listed by prefecture on the official site, which is really the only sensible way to track these down. Square Enix does caution that stock differs from store to store, and that the collection could be sold at other stores not listed. Read: don’t make a two-hour drive on faith.
Ordering an import online is another route, assuming you’d sooner pay a markup than book a flight.
Why this game keeps refusing to die
Chrono Trigger occupies a permanent spot on the Mount Rushmore of JRPGs. Akira Toriyama’s designs. The open-ended freedom to slip through time. That old-school combat system. Whichever justification you pick for its greatest-of-all-time reputation, each one holds up — but the characters carry an enormous share of why it lasts.
It also belongs to a weirder family tree than most casual fans realize, one that takes in Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross. A third possible entry, Chrono Break, was floated at the company but never truly got off the ground.
The evergreen problem
And here’s the awkward bit. Timelessness cuts against Chrono Trigger.
Affection for the original runs so deep that even a merch drop counts as news — which leaves Square Enix with almost no reason to commission a sequel or a re-release while the original keeps selling on several platforms, PC included. Why fix what still moves?
Hence: keychains. Fifteen of them, a Nu among them, scattered through gacha machines from Hokkaido down to Kyushu. Someday, hopefully, we’ll get to return to this time-traveling adventure in a new form. For now, it’s 500 yen and a prayer that Frog drops.