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reetings all, this is zombie Derrick, back and kicking after more hours logged in the Hell House.

You may remember last time, when I fucking died playing through Union Bond’s Titanic so you didn’t have to. That game was one of the worst experiences of my former life. Since I stepped into the shadows of the Hell House, things had been pretty easy.

Then I found Chrono Trigger.

Mind you, I am not talking about the overrated-but-I-played-it-twelve-times-anyway Super Famicom game. Nor am I talking about the script-so-dry-I-thought-Sky-Render-wrote-it “retanslation” project.

No, I am talking about something much more sinister: Chrono Trigger on the Famicom.

I knew it existed. I knew Sky League, the private dumper, said it was a chunk of shit. I knew the developers never beat it and no owner made it past the fight with Zombor.

But I never knew it could be this fucking bad.

Titanic hardened me, and I will never find another game to make me cry blood out my ears and shit feces out my eye sockets, but Chrono Trigger came close. I do not care how much of a fan boy you are or how much you think you enjoy bad games — this ROM is a 16-megabit black hole which will implode your hard disk.

A failure of the human spirit

While Kotaku and others may have lavished laurels on the effort Shenzhen Nanjing Technology put into Final Fantasy VII, make no mistake: there is nothing to praise about this mess.

First off, while going from a 3D first-generation PlayStation RPG to a Famicom cart may be impressive, going from a Super Famicom to a Famicom cart is much less so.

A Famicom version of Chrono Trigger could have worked. Stick in two map engines, one for the world map and one for area maps. Have a simple copy of the battle system, but without all the movement. Pack the script down a little. Trim out a couple sub quests. You are practically there!

And it was from this point that Nanjing did not simply drop the ball: it dropped it on a baby’s head and ran a bulldozer over both.

You see, Chrono Trigger on Famicom was never finished. Not even by the developers. The game ends when you fight Magus, who appears here as Mowang. Oh yeah, guess who fights him. Go on, guess. Ka’erru, or the closest one can get to Kaeru in Chinese. I can almost hear furious masturbation of fan boys.

Crono finds Marle in the “Millenial Fair.” Lucca and Taban build a transporter. The game has a Manoria Cathedral. Crono “escapes” from prison. There are domes in the future. There is no Johnny. There is an End of Time. There is a Spekkio — with only one form. There is a legendary hero. There is no Toma. There is Kaeru in a hole. There is a Masamune. There are three stupid henchmen to fight and there is a Maou.

Anything not listed should be assumed to be absent from this game.

Wait, zombie Derrick never mentioned Lavos did he? Oh, that’s right, he didn’t.

Can you guess why?

There is no Lavos. Only Zool.

Actually, Zool would have been pretty cool. The presence of a Chupa-Chups-sponsored intergalactic ninja may have lent this mess some life-saving pizzazz.

Follow me down, down, down

This game begins crumbling after the second line of text, when Crono talks. Players who once bawled over his muteness will understand why the creators never gave Crono a voice — he’s a fucker.

Crono heads to the “Millenial Fair,” a platform with four stock NPCs, one of whom blatantly tells you she’s the princess and asks you to go look for her pendant. After he gives it to her, he follows her up to where Lucca has built a teleporter. The machine zaps her back in time.

Once back in Guardia 600AD — actually, “Jia’er 600 AD,” because Chinese is awesome for romanizing names — Crono is ambushed by several dangerous looking Nidorans, Zubats and other forest-dwelling Pokémon. After battling past several Pokémasters, Crono arrives in Guardia Gym, where he is welcomed in by a Marle, who then vanishes. Lucca shows up and guesses it’s because Marle’s ancestor has gone missing. The two head to Manoria Cathedral.

This was the part of the game that most closely followed the Super Famicom original.

“Ka’erru” joins Crono, and together they continue to battle dangerous Pokémon in the cathedral until they find Yakra. Behind Yakra are two lavish guest rooms with the real queen and chancellor.

With all right in the world, everyone heads back to Guardia 1,000 AD to visit Crono’s mom and the King, who throws Crono in jail without trial. Lucca shows up, and together she and Crono fight all the Mew-twos the Guardian king has hired to impersonate prison guards.

Everyone escapes off to the future, where the game becomes impossible. The robots, jacked from the Super Famicom and downsampled, can only be hit for 10 damage at level 40 with the Masamune. Want to try Lighting magic? Well, in theory you shouldn’t have any magic, since you haven’t seen Spekkio. But let’s forget that part, because Crono is now an adept Wind magic user. Luminaire is out of the question. In fact, no one has any spells capable of hitting more than one enemy.

In the basement by the store room, Crono and company catch a video of Lavos smashing into the planet in 1999 AD. Wait, didn’t he break out then? Ah, who cares. It’s close enough. Hey, maybe Belthasar, who isn’t even in this game, took his time machine back to 65,000 BC and used his Sony handycam to video tape Lavos landing. Then he shot back to the future and put it on the computer where Crono would find it. Then he decided to become an hero and fucking delete himself.

Makes sense to me.

After picking up Robo and fighting some more Pokémon, the crew ends up in the End of Time, from whence they teleport to Mystic Village in 1,000 AD. Mystic Village make Guardia look like a fucking ghetto. The mystics have fully-furnished houses with televisions, wall scrolls, tatami mats, Super Famicom systems and all the Pokéballs the programmers could fit onto the screen.

Clear through a cave and you end up back by Taban’s house. From there, zap back to 600 AD to see Guardia is a mess and looking for the hero. Take some food to the soldiers and fight Zombor.

This is the farthest any other play has ever reached. That’s because at this point, you will have logged roughly 300 hours without cheating.

Find the hero. Find Ka’erru. Go get the Masamune. Take it to Melchior. Head back to 65,000 BC — your only trip there. Ayla will give you some rocks, and then Azala steals your Gate Key. Go get it back and say a permanent goodbye to Ayla. Robo, by the way, is unusable through all this.

Take the Dreamstone to Melchior. Fix the Masamune. Take it to Ka’erru. Follow the path Crono has been stopping you from taking for the last 87 hours. This will lead to Mowang’s castle. The castle is really tiny: two rooms, where you fight Flea and Slash, and a main room where you fight Ozzie. I forgot to note their Chinese names, and fuck you if you want me to replay to find them.

Winding down

When you reach Mowang, he says he waited a long time for your arrival. Crono says he wants to fight Mowang to change the future. Mowang says he also came to this time to change the future. He decided to kill humans in this time since it was their desire for power that caused the planet to get wrecked. Lavos is never mentioned … He says if you are all bent on fighting him, then he’ll show you his power.

This fight is not beatable, even at level 99. Even with the best equipment. Equipment so good the developers never even coded a way to get it. The player is forced to use Crono, Marle and Frog. Mowang’s Dark spell, which he can use an unlimited number of times, will instantly kill both Marle and Frog. Two hits will kill Crono.

Even with extensive hacking, it does not matter. Mowang will attack a second time, now with an attack which kills even Crono in one hit. It took an insane amount of raw memory hacking to break the game in a way that would make Mowang beatable. Even at level 99 and with an infinite supply of Power Tabs, the second form is not beatable. No one has ever reported reaching Mowang, let alone beating him. Rumors from those in the industry say even the developers never beat him.

Since inventory is the only hackable data in memory, the way I beat him was to hack in 99 Magic Tabs. I used all 99 on Crono. I repeated this until Crono’s Magic rating was over 1,500, then did the same for Marle. Your normal magic at level 99 is about 200. This lets you kill Mowang in about seven hits of your biggest spell. There is no point in doing the same for Frog, because none of his attacks can do more than -18 damage to Mowang. After that, I tried the fight nine times until I got lucky.

I present readers with the first look at what happens when Mowang dies.

That’s right, dies. He does not summon Lavos. There is no vortex. You do not end up in 65,000 BC. The game just ends.

Mowang says that to fight such strong guys was great, and that he can rest easy knowing you are so strong. With his death, Lavos will be unsealed and he worries whether or not the future can really be changed. His castle crumbles and everyone leaves. They all head back to Guardia Castle in 1,000 AD where Marle tells her dad she wants to marry Crono. King Guardia suggests doing it on the kingdom’s 1,000th anniversary in three days.

In the epilogue, it says Crono and Marle lived happily ever after as king and queen of Guardia, Robo vanished and Lucca was sad.

The end.

An engine from the team behind Mario Air

Now that you don’t have to play the game, it’s time I explain why I just saved you the trouble.

Random encounters occur every five steps. The average encounter takes about 3 to 5 minutes to win — if you win. It is sharply longer once you reach 2,300 AD. You must walk over each section of map no less than five times, with the exception of Mowang’s castle, which you only enter once.

Hold on, it gets worse.

The active combat system was a major part of Chrono Trigger. However, it did something important: while you were picking items, or targeting an enemy, the game waited. This Famicom remake waits for nothing. The lack of pause combined with laggy menu navigation and revival items stored on the third inventory page means Mowang can attack two to three times for each chance you get to revive an ally.

His second form can deal 800 damage to any character, who have a max of 300 HP at level 99. Now remember that save states do not work, and you cannot resume fighting him in his second form, and that this form has roughly 7,000 HP while you can deal, at best, 70 damage per attack.

Sound fun? It’s not.

The music is also painfully ported to a very bad sound driver. Gil Galad has made an NSF for anyone who likes suffering, but I will sum up the sound: imagine listening to Chrono Trigger melodies played by an Atari 2600, accompanied by two “drone” instruments which are nothing more than line noise.

They call me Gato ♪
I was in the fair ♪
But now I’m not ♪
‘Cause the game’s fucking bare ♪

Like I said, fun times.

Items are priced so extraordinarily high that you can never afford most until the very end of the game, when fights award an average 2,800GP. Of course, by that point there are no more shops.

Throughout the course of the game, I was never able to find a treasure chest. The weapons are all pretty useless, and aside from those and some HP- and MP-restoring items, there is nothing to pick up in this game and no systems to mention.

The dungeons with the highest encounter rates are the most mercilessly designed. The yard full of mutants between the first two domes in 2,300 AD is only one screen. However, due to all the random walls and barricades and dead ends, it took me roughly 50 minutes to cross despite cheating with the best weapons and using the fast forward key.

You will not beat this game, and if you do, you will wish you had not.

I feel kind of sick having wasted as many hours as I did to beat this game. The programmers put in far less effort than I did. The graphics are entirely stolen from other games. The engines are entirely stolen from other Nanjing games. The story was completely broken.

Chrono Trigger on Famicom is a disaster of the highest order. I advise you not touch it, even with a playful curiosity. Look at the screen shots, read the text and punch yourself in the face if you still think this might be “fun.”

And with that, I will go out to start digging a new hole. My former grave has now been polluted by the bio-hazard that is this game.

I wish I could say “The black wind howls,” or that I will shortly perish. But this chunk of shit never even advanced far enough through the Chrono storyline for either of those lines to be relevant.

Say … Biohazard … now there is a game I have been meaning to look at …

Other posts of interest

• And you thought FF7 was big? …
• Shenzhen Nanjing Technology cart catalog …
• Struggling with a very mythical pirate …
• ROM hacking totally fails to evolve …