If you ask most gamers what the best game Square Enix has ever produced is, chances are you’ll get one of the Final Fantasy games as your answer (with Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy X being common answers). If the person being asked this question doesn’t name one of the legendary fantasy epics though, chances are they will respond "Chrono Trigger" with a huge grin on their face. Those who have played Chrono Trigger will likely respond with a smile of their own, a nod, and a fist bump. While Final Fantasy has been the flagship franchise of the company for years, for many gamers Square Enix's masterpiece is Chrono Trigger, a time travel RPG with multiple endings, an intuitive battle system, and character designs by Dragon Ball Z creator Akira Toriyama. The game was release in 1995 for the Super Nintendo. While it wasn’t a breakout success in either Japan or America at first, word-of-mouth kept the game selling consistently enough that it was frequently revisited by the company and eventually become one of their best-selling titles.
In 2001 the game was re-released for the Sony PlayStation as part of Final Fantasy Chronicles. This edition not only brought the game to a new audience, it received new anime cutscenes to further illustrate Toriyama’s excellent character designs. While these animated sequences were a nice touch, it did make fans wonder what a full-blown anime of Chrono Trigger would look like. What were the chances of Square Enix comissioning an anime of Chrono Trigger? Turns out, an anime of the game DID in fact exist…it’s just not at all what fans would expect or want.
The V Jump Festival OVA
The Chrono Trigger OVA has no official title and would likely only be recognizable thanks to the inclusion of some memorable background characters in the game and from a few musical cues that were used. The story takes place before the opening of the festival at the beginning of the game, where the stages and booths are being set up. When night comes around though monsters and robots get into a conflict and nearly destroy everything that was built. When the morning comes the town people look at the results of the chaos from the night before.
And that’s basically all that happens in this thing. You only get a brief glimpse of Chrono from behind his head and Lucca’s robot. Otherwise, the main characters are the random monsters you kill in the forest, which tends to disappoint viewers who take the time to view it. At 16 minutes long there isn’t much of a story and even the creation of the short is a bit of a mystery. It was created for the V Jump Fesitval in 1996 to help promote the video game. Considering that the game came out the year before and has little to do with this OVA makes that goal a dubious one, and the short has not been well received by fans since.
Is It Worth Watching?
Since the short was made as a promotional piece and has little market value, Square Enix has not done much to preserve to re-release the short. It was initially released as a promo tape of some sort, but while I was able to verify the tapes existence I was unable to figure out how viewers initially got ahold of it. While it might have made for an interesting extra on one of the various re-releases of the game, the studio doesn’t seem interested in revisiting it, putting it at risk of becoming lost media.
The good news is that the short WAS fansubbed years ago and has circulated on the internet since then! Since the copyright has not been fought to preserve, we’ve included the short above if you want to take an additional 16 minutes of your day to quickly watch it. As you can see, there’s not much to say about it.
It’s a cute enough short I suppose, but it doesn’t have much to do with Chrono Trigger the game, and while some fans might find the existence of this OVA interesting, most would probably rather see a regular anime using the animation techniques found in re-releases of the game.
Maybe one day Square Enix will dust off the short and give it a proper re-release with some behind-the-scenes interviews on how it all came to be. I certainly would find it interesting to hear why the choices were made that resulted not only in the short looking the way it does but why it was released a full year after the game was already on store shelves. Those potentially interesting questions aside though, there’s really not much to say about this one. It exists, that much we can say for sure. The value of that existence is likely pretty debatable for fans of the series though. Well, that is to say, it’s likely pretty debatable for fans of Chrono Trigger who know it exists.