Anime Roulette #6: Chrono Trigger

Logically, Role Playing Games should make for excellent anime adaptations. I mean, come on: an enormous quest to save the world, epic battles, gorgeous fantasy settings (or sci-fi, if you're like Star Ocean or Xenosaga), they certainly would appear to have all the necessary elements to make a great movie or TV Show. But alas, reality does not always follow logic - anime adaptations of RPGs may have a better track record than anime adaptations of fighting games (though that really isn't saying much), but not by a whole lot. We have some great things, like Persona 4, but overall the landscape is exceptionally bleak. The Xenosaga TV series is a goddamn mess. The Fire Emblem OVA sounds like it was written by a 7 year old. And Final Fantasy? Well shit, it has over 20 years of anime adaptations, and most of them are pretty fucking terrible!

Yes friends, that's supposed to be a chocobo.

Somewhere in this depressing bulk of RPG adaptations lies Chrono Trigger. If you've never heard of Chrono Trigger, you're seriously missing out - it's not only considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time, but is often brought up as a contender for one of the greatest video games ever made. It's a goddamn incredible tale of a boy who travels back and forth through time to not only fix the conflicts of various historical eras, but eventually save the world from a gigantic alien parasite (trust me, it's cooler than my description would suggest). I could easily spend an entire blog post describing how great this game is,  but for the sake of brevity, I'll just say: buy it, emulate it, do whatever you want, just find some way to play it, alright?

The game was an immediate success both in Japan and the US, so in 1996, just one year after its release, Production IG decided to make a Chrono Trigger anime. It had all the potential to be a blockbuster: Chrono Trigger itself already has all the elements of a classic fantasy tale, and Production IG was hot off the runaway success of the first Ghost in the Shell movie. So did it become a blockbuster? Oh my god, not even fucking close.

Unlike most of the other shows I've written about for Anime Roulette, this one is actually on YouTube, so by all means, before reading the rest of this entry, watch it for yourself:

So, let's get the obvious out of the way. Chrono Trigger probably took me about 30 hours to beat, and that includes the seven side quests at the end. This anime is, in total...16 minutes. Yeah, they're not even going to attempt to tell the entire story. But hey! That's alright! There are so many great portions of the game they could animate! The escape from Guardia Castle, the fall of Zeal, the siege of the Tyrano Lair, my god, I could go on and on! What they decided on in the end was...The Millennial Fair?

As I said in my Final Fantasy XV post, The Millennial Fair is the first area of the game, where you're introduced to the characters and get the opportunity to play some fun little mini games. Ultimately, it's a well constructed tutorial, and that's all it's trying to be. In the context of the game, it works, but really, it's the least Chrono Trigger aspect of Chrono Trigger, and so it's ironic that this is what the creators of a Chrono Trigger OVA decide to focus on.

But it's not just about the Millennial Fair. You see, two minutes in, the sun goes down, the humans go to sleep, and...the monsters come out and take over the fair. Yes, the entire OVA is going to focus on the goddamn wacky hijinks of a group of monsters at The Millennial Fair that goes on when the humans aren't around - basically, it's the plot of a shitty early 2000s Dreamworks animated film.

This is what Colonel Kurtz saw at the end of Apocalypse Now.

Honestly though, that's giving it a little too much credit. To say this movie has a plot is almost a flat out lie - things just kind of happen one after the other without much rhyme or reason. And none of it is entertaining. A group of monsters argue about a dance contest, because WACKY!!!

Another group of monsters has a drinking contest, again because WACKY! Though I must give it credit, that scene does have the closest thing this movie has to a funny joke - the little white monster pulls out an SNES controller and starts button mashing the A button in an attempt to get the other monster to win. It works because that's what you do in the game itself, so at least I know these guys have played the game. Though that begs the question - if they played the game, why the hell did they choose to turn it into this?

The last half of the movie focuses primarily on Gato, he has metal joints, beat him up and you win silver points. Though I should point out he's actually called Gonzalez here, because that was his original name in the Japanese release. Anyway, some of the monsters draw on him when he's turned off, then later he goes crazy and running around, and ends up setting a bunch of things on fire, because, can you guess why?

Arson is WACKY AS FUCK.

This is kind of how it all ends. After all the destruction, Gato passes out in the middle of the square. And then, in what's without question the most insulting scene in the entire film, the main characters from the game look out in him, ostensibly in confusion, though we can't actually see because we're shown them from the back. This is the only trace of any of Chrono Trigger's main characters, and they're on screen for 30 seconds and don't say one word.

I'm not going to mince words here: I fucking hated this movie. A 16 minute short film should not have made me as angry as I feel now, but somehow Chrono Trigger did it. It is actually impressive how many things they got wrong - the jokes were atrocious, the tone was insulting, the focus was nowhere close to where it should have been, the animation was ass - really, the only thing I can commend this movie on is it's music, and that's solely because they just took the cracks from the game and inserted them wholesale. Yasunori Mitsuda can do no wrong, but even his score wasn't enough to make this bearable.

This is a movie I can honestly recommend to nobody. Fans of the game are obviously going to feel insulted watching this - anyone who appreciates comedy is best served elsewhere - maybe, maybe if you've got a really young child, the kind of child who thinks Minions is the bestest movie ever, then maybe they'll like watching all the monsters scream things and run around. But if you have a kid like that, really, you owe it to them to expand their horizons - for the fuck's sake, show them My Neighbor Totoro if they haven't already seen it. For everyone else: STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM THIS MOVIE. I can honestly say this is one of the worst things I have ever seen, and as someone who's seen Battlefield Earth multiple times - hell, as someone who does bad anime panels at multiple conventions every year, that's not an honor I throw around lightly.