In 1995 a dream team shipped a single game, and three decades later nobody has matched it — the studio behind it included.
Chrono Trigger hit 31 this year, and it remains the ceiling for Square Enix, a company whose catalog holds more genre-defining RPGs than any other living developer or publisher. Call it nostalgia if you like, but it isn’t: it’s simply what the game accomplished, read against everything that has followed in the thirty years since.
The credit Square Enix receives is deserved. Between Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and everything in between, the studio spent decades assembling the vocabulary JRPGs are still written in.
There’s room to criticize, of course. The company has lagged behind other developers in embracing changes the genre sorely needed, and at least one franchise sits dormant in a drawer when it deserves to be brought back.
Good RPGs are still coming out of the studio — that’s the whole point
The 2026 slate stands on its own. There are fresh entries in franchises that have topped the charts for years, alongside original IPs carrying the sort of weight Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest had when they first landed.
Consider Octopath Traveler. Consider the recent The Adventures of Elliot games. Nothing about that output suggests a studio on cruise control.
And the 1995 release still hasn’t been surpassed.
The problems it solved
Chrono Trigger arrived as a corrective. It identified the genre’s most irritating conventions and dispatched them one after another.
Random encounters were scrapped; enemies appeared on the map in plain view. The pacing kept moving, free of the mind-numbing filler stuffed into so many of its contemporaries.
Its story was profoundly moving, resting on characters written with enough dimension to linger long after the credits rolled. The soundtrack, meanwhile, sits among the finest in the genre — arguably among the finest in games, period.
A credits roll that reads like a genre summit
That impact wasn’t an accident. Look at the names: Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy. Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest. Yasunori Mitsuda, the Xenoblade composer. Nobuo Uematsu, the Final Fantasy composer. Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and character designer on Dragon Quest. Several other prominent JRPG creatives worked beside them.
Everything they had learned building those franchises went into a single project. The bar they set sits high enough that Square Enix’s strongest modern work still can’t reach it.
Thirty years later, you could be forgiven for expecting it to have aged poorly or lost its lustre. It hasn’t. It’s still one of the most essential turn-based JRPGs ever released, and the yardstick the rest of the genre is held against.
The same game, but it means something different now
What it symbolizes has changed, though. Back in 1995 it stood for progress and innovation — evidence that the genre was capable of moving forward.
In 2026 it stands for what emerges when creatives, rather than a committee, steer the design. Unbridled creativity, and what that gets you.
Then why is it so hard to actually play?
This is the baffling part. Outside of PC, Square Enix has never brought its greatest RPG to modern hardware. No remake. No remaster. Nothing at all.
The fanbase has spent years asking, and their dogged insistence ought to be catnip for a publisher.
At minimum, a port would handle preservation, keeping the game within reach of people who have never played it. It could accomplish more than that, too. Some developer out there might play it and decide to pour everything into a project of their own — which is more or less how Chrono Trigger came to exist in the first place.