![]() When Crono visits the Millennial Fair, he bumps into a girl in front of Leene's Bell, knocking her over and causing her to drop her pendant. With that simple introduction, we're out of Crono's house and into the main body of the game. We discover from Crono's Mom that the Millennial Fair is beginning today, and that Crono is supposed to meet his inventor friend Lucca there. Crono's Mom identifies the ringing as Leene's Bell more on that later. We get a moving overhead shot of Crono's town, followed by the ringing of a bell and Crono's Mom opening his bedroom window (cf. Our introduction to Crono and his world is extremely straightforward for a console RPG. It's enough for now to point it out and to remember that the very first image of this game, which seems superficially to be about the vast and unstoppable sweep of time, is that of a pendulum ceasing to swing. This is not the usual method of time travel in the game, but a one-time occurrence that nevertheless gives the game its title and gives meaning to this title screen. This image has special significance because, as we will learn much later at a key point in the game, a "Chrono Trigger" is a device that can literally stop time. The title then emerges alongside the pendulum. 6.11.2 SUBJECTIVITY/OBJECTIVITY AND TIMEĬhrono Trigger opens with a pendulum swinging repeatedly past the screen, gradually losing energy and finally stopping fully in frame.6.5 Fiona's Woods, Lucca's Mother and the Entity. ![]() 6.2 Marle's Reconciliation with her Father.Instead, I'm trying to show that the format, the subject matter and the intertextual nature of Chrono Trigger make it possible to read the game as a negotiation of these subjects. It's worth repeating explicitly that I'm not out to prove that complex philosophical statements were deliberately embedded in this video game. My plan is to play through Chrono Trigger yet again and to look at the statements and assumptions about existence that arise in the game, with special emphasis on Identity, Choice, Subjectivity/Objectivity, Time and Death. It's not exactly Being and Nothingness, but it's not Pac-Man, either. What's more, the very format of the console RPG creates an experience that is well-suited to exploration of existential questions Chrono Trigger, like other games of its ilk, presents the player with a complete world and asks him or her to make meaningful choices in that world - and, yes, to kill some goblins along the way. As Umberto Eco writes of Casablanca, "the clichés are having a ball" in Chrono Trigger. So for those of you who are in the know about Chrono Trigger and about Existentialism, here's the long and short: Although Chrono Trigger is by no means a heavyweight philosophical text, it has philosophical underpinnings and, more importantly, crafts a broad-ranging pastiche/satire of various pasts and futures as they are imagined in popular culture. Better to accept that and jump right in, I figure. I am writing to an almost comically tiny audience with this series, and there's nothing I can do about it. About a page into that mess, I decided that my efforts were futile. You know, when I sat down to write a series of articles about my Existentialist reading of Chrono Trigger, I initially started out with a bunch of explanatory text, background information and disclaimers. It's been archived and presented at the Chrono Compendium for safekeeping. Newton (also known as " ideas"), and was posted on his LiveJournal in six parts: Chrono Trigger - An Existentialist Reading
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