Reading Way Too Much Into It, Part I: Chrono Trigger and the Kingdom of Lud
(warning: spoilers abound for the SNES/DS game Chrono Trigger. Crazy theories also incoming.)
Since I purchased my Nintendo 3DS, I have spent an appallingly short amount of time messing with the augmented reality games and my one game purchase (Street Fighter) when compared with the hours i’ve already wasted playing old DS games I missed out on originally. Chief among these is Chrono Trigger DS, a port of the classic role-playing game made by Square-Enix for the Super Nintendo. It has a few extra features, like touchscreen spell controls and a handful of extra dungeons, but the experience is largely unchanged from the game I spent a great deal of my youth pining for and devouring multiple times in that “live the game” way only kids and teens can appreciate. The game looks different to adult me in a few ways - lengthy battle segments seem a little more tedious and i’m apt to get confused and consult a guide when the next step in the game’s time-travel chain isn’t immediately apparent - but nothing is quite as dismaying as the way I read horrible subtext into a beloved classic of my childhood.
For those who have never played it or just need a refresher on the plot before gazing deep into the abyss, Chrono Trigger is a game revolving around the concept of time travel. After being accidentally sent to the Middle Ages by a malfunctioning invention at the Milennial Fair, Crono and his friends travel back and forth across the same continent in different time periods, trying to stop the rise of a Lovecraftian alien called Lavos that slumbers beneath the Earth in the past and has caused the world to end in the future. The game takes place over six distinct time periods, where the ever-growing cast of heroes attempt to right wrongs, stop Lavos and cause time paradoxes: Prehistory, Antiquity, The Middle Ages, Present Day, The “Day of Lavos”, and the Future. Part of the game’s charm is that none of these eras are actually visited in chronological order: the party is able to zip back and forth between eras by using one-way Gates, and later a flying device called the Epoch that’s the equivalent of that airship you get in every Final Fantasy game that FINALLY lets you explore the entire map. At the end of the game, the group travels to 1999 AD, and armed with the knowledge and tools they’ve earned throughout the way (and a couple dozen hours of grinding levels) they slay Lavos as it emerges from the Earth and save history.
Funny thing is, though, the technology that allows you to travel through time actually ends up being responsible for all the world’s ills. If not for your meddling in the Prehistoric era, Lavos would never have crashed into the Earth; if not for the technological need of the Kingdom of Zeal in Antiquity, Lavos would never have been raised from its crater at the bottom of the sea, and if not for you fulfilling a nasty time paradox in the Middle Ages, the wizard Magus would have been able to stop Lavos from awakening. The anti-technology bent throughout Chrono Trigger isn’t just a theme, from an artistic perspective it seems the central conceit of the game’s narrative, repeating endlessly throughout history as a lesson never learned. In Chrono Trigger, periods of technological advancement coincide with periods of misery and ruin. Compare and contrast the very distant future with the very dim past: In the post-apocalyptic future you visit a century after Lavos’ awakening, people huddle in highly advanced arcologies clothed in rags and scraps. They have devices called Enertrons that keep them alive and healthy - but these sterile machines can do nothing for their gnawing, all too-human hunger. Furthermore, look at the color palette – a smorgasboard of every shade of gray and brown 16-bit graphics can render. Meanwhile, Prehistory has a vibrant landscape of jungle greens and volcanic reds, and your characters spend almost as much time feasting and dancing with the neanderthal natives as they do fighting evil. Prehistory is where some of the happiest characters in the entire game reside, in tribal communities without any technology more advanced than a club and fire. Only the evil reptile people have dwellings above the level of tents. Prehistory is also a Creationist’s wet-dream of humans living alongside dinosaurs while traveling from village to village on the backs of pterodactyls, but I digress.
The worst example of the Luddite philosophy in Chrono Trigger happens to be in the segment of the game I’m playing through right now (that inspired me to blog about it): the “Antiquity” era. Throughout 12,000 BC, somehow considered antiquity, Lavos and the Earth sleep through an Ice Age while the majestic (and evil) forgotten Kingdom of Zeal floats around the stratosphere (think of it as Atlantis in the air). The citizens of Zeal are such an exaggerated portrait of bourgeoisie elitists, the first time you encounter one of their palaces you discover everyone living inside it is studying the “magic” of sleep, meaning they literally lay in bed around the clock. They’re afforded this lifestyle not due to their own hard work but to two factors: a limitless supply of energy and a massive exploited class of workers. The wonders of Zeal are powered by a device called the Mammon Machine, designed to draw energy from the dormant form of Lavos sleeping Cthulhu-esque beneath the sea. It’s mentioned that ever since Queen Zeal fully endorsed the machine’s creation, a veritable Great Revolution occurred in the Kingdom: the Queen herself becomes “less human….less compassionate,” and dissenters like the Trotsky-esque Sage Melchior are exiled to the aptly named Mountain of Woe to eat each other. Their magical ability also gives the Zealots (heh) the social darwinist justification to enslave their Luddite brothers, the “Earthbound Ones” to slavery and hard labor in conditions that honestly make the Enertron sound kinda awesome. You’d think that these awful, repressive slavers would get some impressive comeuppance from your heroes, right? Well, not really. Lavos does eventually blow up in Zeal’s face and send the whole thing into the sea, but the fall of Zeal completely destroys life for the haves and the have-nots, sending the world into a dark age….EXCEPT of course for Queen Zeal and her closest sycophants, who ride the whole thing out in their secret underwater base and show up later in an airship to torment your party. Let this be a lesson – the super-rich NEVER get what’s coming to them.
This has really run over what I’m used to in length and content, but I just wanted to throw out one final bit of Luddite symbolism: Lavos, the game’s ultimate expression of evil, is an entity comprised of fire - the word even means “big fire” in Ayla the cavewoman’s made up language. Magic that uses Fire, the element of destruction, can only be learned and used by one member of your party - your friend and girl scientist Lucca, the builder of the time machine that sets the game’s disastrous historical chain in motion. In Chrono Trigger’s universe, the engine that powers her magic is not one of exploration or discovery but malevolence. And what does Lucca get for her devotion to the advancement of human knowledge? A distant father, a crippled mother, and a mute guy and a talking frog for friends.
I’m taking my chances with the dinosaur-riding cavepeople.
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