
It was interesting seeing the entertainment of my generation dissected in a fairly readable fashion by writers who were clearly fans of the games themselves. One title from a sister series I wish they had taken a
crack at is Chrono Trigger, my love affair with which is documented elsewhere, and which I've recently gotten my girlfriend addicted to through a bit of geek evangelism. So in that same spirit, I figured I'd try to do a similar analysis for Chrono Trigger. Spoilers will ensue, but if you haven't played the game at any point during the last 14 years in which it's seen release on the Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Nintendo DS, drastic measures will probably be necessary to motivate you. For the uninitiated who need a recap, you could start with the game's Wikipedia article, although I'll explain most of the important points as I go.


This idea reaches its culmination in a variety of "what-if" scenarios that make up the game's endings. Your heroes are technically capable of doing what it takes to save the world at almost any point in the game's story, and the point at which you decide to do so and short-circuit the game's plot decides what ending you'll get. As a result of your meddling in time you can end up changing the family history of one of your main characters, cause humans to no longer be the dominant species on the planet, or set off a battle to the death between two of your potential protagonists.

In The Last Question, Isaac Asimov makes the point that all human civilization is doomed to eventually die: unless entropy could somehow be reversed, all the usable energy in the universe will eventually be spent and humanity will die out. Humanity's lifespan is limited by the amount of available energy in the universe making the death of the human race inevitable. If Crono and company could go far enough into the future they might always find be able to find a post apocalyptic state where humanity has died out. Still, intervening in the events connected to Lavos could buy the human race millions or billions of years, at the risk of endangering the lifetimes of Crono and his friends. From a utilitarian standpoint, the trade-off is clearly worth it, but does it past the test of Hobbes' self-interested morality?
When Crono and his friends make the decision to save the future, they're fugitives from the law in their own time—Crono as a result of a false kidnapping charge, Lucca for breaking him out of prison, and Marle for abandoning her kingdom for the sake of her friends. Although they could ignore the coming crisis and simply live out their lives, they have very little to lose in terms of their connections to the present. As far as their connections to other time periods are concerned, at that point, they could either live out their lives in the past, which they already learned might prevent them from being born in the future if they alter events, or they could live in the post-apocalyptic future they're trying to prevent. In a sense, their quest to save the world is also about finding a world for themselves that they could live in. Both because they're unwilling to accept a timeline in which their world is destroyed, and because nothing else in their lives shows any promise at that point.
From the point of view of pure self-interest, their most viable way to improve their lives might be to find a point in time where their actions couldn't erase their own existences and in which they could live out their lives without interference. Much like the specter of global warming or environmental disaster centuries off in the future, it's hard to argue for why anyone would devote their lives to preventing a far off calamity at their personal expense, other than feelings of self-righteousness or a strong psychological need to know the future will be viable for much longer than you and your children's children will be around. In the end their motives probably aren't purely selfish, or purely noble, they're leaving behind one world to try to fix another.



Are Magus's actions defensible from a utilitarian standpoint? Possibly, if only because his actions had the potential to cause more good than harm, even if his own motives were essentially driven by a selfish desire for revenge, and offset by his sadism and cruelty in dealing with those less powerful than himself. Whether or not Magus's crimes outweigh his potential for good is a choice that's left up to the player. Frog can either kill him and avenge his friend, or let him live, in which case Magus offers his services to the group in trying to save the world.

Magus approaches pure nihilism at some points in the game. In one ending he states: "If history is to change, let it change. If the world is to be destroyed, so be it. If my fate is to be destroyed, I must simply laugh." But in spite of his apparent resignation to futility, he follows it up by saying "I'm coming, Lavos." Similarly, after telling Crono's friends that all who oppose Lavos meet certain doom, he chooses to join them in their quest regardless. Faced with confronting a being who represents the very source of his own power, he considers it an impossible task but chooses to try anyway.
The game gives you the option to kill him or not because either choice is understandable in a sense—after you finally hear Magus's story, you know enough about him to decide for yourself whether or not it excuses his actions and whether or not making Frog whole, achieving revenge, or having the help of a powerful wizard in saving the world is more important. The choice as presented to the player isn't even whether or not to kill him or have him join your party: it's simply whether to kill him or not. If Frog refuses to take Magus's life and abandons his quest for revenge, Frog simply walks away, and Magus soon chases after him to offer his assistance. The player has to decide whether they feel more sympathy for improving Frog's situation or Magus's, and to determine whether Magus's campaign of revenge can be forgiven, and whether the consequences of Frog achieving his revenge are worth it.
Going back to the different views of ethics, how would the famous thinkers of the past have weighed this modern fable? Plato believed that revenge should not be executed for the sake of achieving justice but to prevent offenses from recurring, which would make Lavos a fitting target for revenge but Magus an unworthy one. Aristotle similarly believed that revenge had to be exercised in moderation against appropriate targets, while Christian philosophers would say that undertaking revenge was the domain of governments and God, and best left to a higher power, whereas acting in defense of others would be acceptable. John Stuart Mill might argue that killing Magus would only be worthwhile if the good done by it outweighs the evil, and that unless you could claim that turning Frog back into a human outweighs taking a life, the sacrifice would not be worth it. And Immanuel Kant might simply argue that every evil action deserves a proportionate consequence, and that Magus ultimately deserves to die for his actions in ending the lives of others.
Ultimately however, the only opinion that matters in the game is the player's, and the game both sets up the moral challenge and allows the player to resolve it as they see fit. The player fills in a story in a few ways, making choices to affect the plot, and naming each of the game's characters, although as previously stated, with only three exceptions, the characters have an underlying identity and name behind the one you give them, your ability to make them your own is necessarily limited.
Chrono Trigger ends with a bit of self-interpretation: the initial explanation presented for your ability to travel through time is that Lavos's energy creates distortions in time that your party is able to use. At the end, the characters suggest that it may be a different phenemenon, that you may be experiencing the planet watching its life flash before its eyes after it was destroyed by Lavos, based on the fact that all the time periods you visit are a reflection on important events connected to Lavos and the fate of the planet. In the game the desire to travel through time is really just a desire to fix your mistakes and correct what went wrong, and by the end of the game you have a chance to set a number of events right and help repair the lives of each of your main characters. Crono and his friends come to face with death several times, sometimes being forced to accept it, and sometimes being able to overturn it.
Chrono Trigger is a game that's enjoyable both to play and to reflect on, it isn't simply all nuggets of philosophy to chew on or an enjoyable transient experience that shines purely in the moment, but a little of both. It's a well-executed game that manages to get a number of things right at the same time, and I'd still point to it as the best example of its particular class of game that there is.

Chrono Trigger is a game that's enjoyable both to play and to reflect on, it isn't simply all nuggets of philosophy to chew on or an enjoyable transient experience that shines purely in the moment, but a little of both. It's a well-executed game that manages to get a number of things right at the same time, and I'd still point to it as the best example of its particular class of game that there is.
For those who want more, this author has come up with an existentialist reading of Chrono Trigger that looks in depth at the whole plot of the game, not just the main characters and their motivations.
No comments:
Post a Comment