I had a strange and horrible nightmare last night that revealed several things about myself.

In the dream, I was playing a portable game. It could have been any console. Something like an action RPG with 2D graphics and puzzle elements. I ended up beating the game after what felt like an eternity of seeking treasure and fighting giant tortoises with cannons on their backs (I’m already considering the game possibilities of this) only to be taken back to my village and being offered a magnificent reward: a weapon I could later use by continuing the completed game, so essentially I could keep my prior equipment and do more long quests. In spirit, it sounds like a strange hybrid between Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Monster Hunter Freedom 2.

Anyway, the nightmare happened when I was trying to choose which of the legendary weapons of the village I wanted to have. As I was scrolling through them, I got a preview of that the weapon looked like, but nothing on its stats! Its attack power, special abilities and buffs were nowhere on the screen! And I looked around for some button that would give me the info of the weapon before I chose it, but I couldn’t spot any info on the screen, and was terrified to press any button out of fear that I would accidentally select the weapon when I wasn’t ready.

Then I accidentally pressed the back/cancel button, and suddenly the gifting ceremony was over! I was outside, and I didn’t have any of the weapons! I ran around the village trying to find where the ancient weapons were stored and see if I could still have one, but to no avail. Panicked, I tried to remember where I had last saved my game and whether it would be feasable to simply restart my console and try working back up to that point.

In my desperation, I woke myself up and lay there in stupor, thinking that timeless phrase again: “Oh my god, I’m so glad that was just a dream.”

And then I had to think to myself, “Only a game designer would have a nightmare about bad design choices in a screen for selecting a weapon.”

I must be insane.

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When you think of casual games, the first thing that comes to your mind is not Final Fantasy. In fact, usually you’re nowhere near the RPG genre when you’re thinking about casual play. You might consider a shooter or a puzzle game long before you even consider the remote possibility of a casual RPG, and then when you actually stop to contemplate it for a moment, you stop, laugh, and say “Nah, that won’t happen.”

But how little informed we all are!

As a matter of fact, there’s been a few attempts at casual role-playing games in the past. One of the most noteworthy is a PC game by WildTangent (makers of Lumines and Runescape) called Fate. They declare it an “Enthusiast”game (same category as Runescape, an MMO) on their website, but in truth it’s much more a casual game in spirit than a hardcore one. You can play Fate for ten minutes or ten hours, and the result is pretty much still the same experience. And it’s just as addictive as Peggle, so you might end up working it for hours on end and somehow get no sense of accomplishment but all the sense of enjoyment.

There’s been other experiments in the casual/hardcore mix market for RPGs recently in even AAA titles–at least, what I perceive to be triple A. Not only triple A, but the very game we’d never expect to be a casual game. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (which I have to say I enjoy immensely) is very much a traditional RPG in the sense that it has a long, spanning story mode that has cutscenes and choices and menus and running around collecting lumber to build flower wagons. But Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts team therein that was responsible for this amalgam of a game decided to put casual elements into gameplay and allow short, playable bursts of fun for two to five minutes at a time like any good portable game should, and I applaud any PSP title for achieving this standard instead of being a ported PS2 title. This effect is achieved through Missions, a mysterious menu option never before seen in any Final Fantasy game.

It works beautifully–you choose a mission from the Missions menu, complete it, and usually you’ll get another mission to do until you run out of them and need to seek out more through the regular story mode. Missions consist of running around a map and seeking a particular enemy while fighting baddies of differing skill levels (depending on the mission) and picking up treasure chests along the way. You can only access Missions while at a save point, making the transition between missions and saving seamless, quick and effective. It takes about two minutes to run one, and they’re addictive, despite their repetitiveness. There’s just something about Crisis Core‘s seamless battlesystem that makes those two minutes gloriously fun. It might be the fact that in running them, you level up and acquire enhanced items and materia that beef your character and you can use through regular story mode, making yourself vastly more powerful and advantaged. Even so, the game is still challenging, and you have Hard Mode to run through after you complete it once.

Using these kinds of elements in gameplay, Square Enix has toed in on a very different market in a very different way. Remaking Final Fantasy IV for the DS is lovely, I’ll admit, but the truth is that Final Fantasy was never meant to be a portable game. It’s always been a sit-your-ass-down-and-play-that-thing-for-hours game. Seeing a Final Fantasy that has mixes of both gameplay styles makes me content, especially since I’ve noticed from watching the industry that developers think hardcore games are waning. Both elements in a big title like Final Fantasy show that there’s rooms for both styles in the industry, and there’s no reason developers should stop trusting that the epics will sell to the mainstream audience.

In that light, give both games a try. Fate is a fairly low-hardware-specs game and Crisis Core needs only a PSP to work. They’re good fun and I’ve enjoyed both in their own right. When casual games are disguised as RPGs, some interesting things are probably on the horizon. What will Final Fantasy XIII bring? We can only guess.

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Over ten years ago, Japan’s greatest developers gathered together at Squaresoft’s home base and collaborated on what has arguably been one of if not the greatest RPG of all time. The name of this game was “Chrono Trigger.”

I find it hard nowadays to find any gamer who hasn’t heard of Chrono Trigger–though that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It is a lot harder, however, to find a gamer who hasn’t heard of Final Fantasy VII–and all the games of the same name that come after the fearsome 7. So why is it that a game that was supposed to be the ultimate RPG has been outshined by other RPGs which some would argue are not as excellent? While Chrono Trigger was far from a sleeper title, other games seem to be considered on a higher tier.

I’m not going to pretend I don’t believe Final Fantasy VII is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that it is my second favorite RPG, trumping Chrono Trigger (my favorite is Earthbound, and I have my reasons). But I think Chrono Trigger deserves just as much credit as any Final Fantasy.

Brenda Brathwaite mentioned to one of my classmates about a week ago that he should start up a blog and write about how Chrono Trigger is under-appreciated compared to many other RPGs (particularly the Final Fantasies). So, of course, I decided to do it instead. I hope she’s impressed by my initiative to steal other people’s opportunities.

Anyway, back to Chrono Trigger. The game was a unique blend of RPG battles placed all throughout the game walk map, so throughout the entire game it seemed as if the transition between exploration and battle was seamless. This was further put forth by the fact that every character set (graciously designed by the great Akira Toriyama, creator of the beloved Dragon Ball series and lead artist for the Dragon Quest series) not only had individual animations for running, walking, laughing, jumping, crouching, thinking, and being shocked (among other unique artistic details), but also animations for drawing their weapons and attacking. So, as opposed to Final Fantasy VI in which Cecil’s battle character set is much more lush and richly detailed than his walking set, the characters are constantly presented to you in the exact same level of detail and quality. I appreciate this as both a gamer and a designer–I’m sure I’m not the only person who experienced the double-take syndrome in Final Fantasy X when the main character, Tidus, looked completely different in his walking and battle animation from what he looked like in his close-up, detailed facial animations, and even further removed from what he looked like in the game’s highly detailed FMV scenes.

Chrono Trigger had an immersive, beautiful storyline that rivals that of any other great role-playing game, with moments that touch most any player that’s taken the time to invest him or her self in these characters. There’s time travel, changing the past to change the future, secrets, hidden dungeons and sidequests. It’s an RPG in spirit and execution–so why isn’t it as huge?

One of the major contributors to the dismissal of Chrono Trigger is the fact that this game was released in August of 1995, a year prior to the release of the Nintendo 64, and a mere two years before the epic release of Final Fantasy VII in 1997. It was a game created once the full potential of the SNES was established, and that is mostly the reason the game in itself was so successful–the best of the best were working on a console they were extremely comfortable with.

The ironic thing is that even when the same Chrono Trigger team moved to make yet another game and this time went for the power of PlayStation, their game was still miraculous yet underappreciated. Named Chrono Cross, the game seemed to have no correlation with the first of the series at first until you started finding the ties between them. The way the games are set up, they are each a unique experience that can be played completely by themselves, and yet when played together they provide for a much richer and more exciting, mindblowing universe.

Between Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger was the curiously named Radical Dreamers for the Super Famicom (SNES) which I affectionately refer to as “Chrono Cross 0.1″. The game is pretty much an interactive novel with a few images thrown into the mix–something wholly uncommon on any console. It’s not very long, but when played and related to Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, people’s minds tend to turn inside out from shock of how the stories intertwine. The unfortunate fact behind Radical Dreamers is that, despite its exciting premise and innovative design, it wasn’t released in North America (my suspicions being that the Japanese developers believed gamers in North America wouldn’t want to play a game where you have to read). The end result is that most North American gamers who want to play Radical Dreamers will be unable to actually get their hands on a legal copy of the game they can interact with, as most North American gamers cannot read Japanese. Most of these gamers end up downloading an illegal ROM of the game and using a patch to translate it to English, under the premise that, “Well, Square isn’t going to make any money off Radical Dreamers anyway.” This is one of the points that lead people to want to classify Radical Dreamers as abandonware, and therefore technically legal to download.

How does this story end? Well, Squaresoft purchased the title “Chrono Break” in December of 2001, bringing things full circle with the promise of a trilogy for the Chrono series. Die hard fans of the game rejoiced, but the excitement was short-lived as no further development of the game ever came, and the project seems to have been shut down. Square Enix (Squaresoft’s new frowny face) has inherited the title, but no comments have been made on plans for the game, leading most people (myself included) to believe that Square simply is not going to give us what we actually want. Much like the FF7 remake idea which Square Enix seems to have no plans to go through with–and which, I may add, would guarantee them an easy surplus of revenue when considering the original sold over 5 million units within the first year (in PlayStation One days!), and a modern remake would likely end selling just as well–Square Enix is focused on things other than what fans are asking for.

I think that’s kind of a shame, really. If there’s a demand out there for something that’s as large as Chrono Break or Final Fantasy VII, why aren’t game developers working to try to meet it with gusto? This is, after all, an industry, and supply and demand make up a large part of its systematic function.

In the end, Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross stand out bright in the RPG world, but due to circumstances beyond the developers’ control, it seems they’ve been outshone by others that now dominate the genre like giants. Final Fantasy XII, which has been mostly agreed upon to be a rather tedious game, has sold over 2 million copies now, and no-one needs to ask whether the fact that the title reads “Final Fantasy” has anything to do with it. Albeit, I am one of those two million people and I bought Final Fantasy X-2. I think I can’t talk when it comes to favoritism.

In the end, though, I think the Chrono series deserved more than it got. Maybe if Square Enix decides to actually go forward and make Chrono Break, we’d see some justice served for Trigger and Cross. Maybe Square would even go so far as to release an anthology. The future’s still open for possibility, Square. We’re hoping.

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