“MAGE CAST: It’s About Time (Appendix)

La langue n’est pas une fonction du sujet parlant, elle est le produit que l’individu enregistre passivement. … La parole est au contraire un acte individuel de volonté et d’intelligence.

-Ferdinand de Saussure

 “The following is a contributor post by the Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage.”

‘[Written] language is not a function of the speaking subject; it is a passively recorded product. On the contrary, speech is an individual act of will and intelligence.’

I’m not sure that de Saussure was intending to make a distinction between writing and speaking on the basis of their comparative ease or difficulty (an early structuralist, he did at least think that writing was a sort of idealised abstraction of language as it’s used in speech), but I’ve always found one much harder than the other. I think there are a few reasons; certainly writing gives one the advantage of being able to pause, to think, to pop back and edit or make cuts or additions, but more broadly I’ve just always found it easier to find the words I’m looking for if I’m talking with my finger-sticks and not my mouth-hole. This bit of text that you’re reading now comes from me, and reaches you as a (hopefully) reasonably coherent arrangement of words which you’re (hopefully) reading in an order that makes sense and on which basis you’re able to understand the meaning, but it was stitched together in patchwork, with some of the words even in this sentence being much newer than others. I’ll have been to the end, back to the middle, moved some things around at the beginning, and then probably just tweaking a few things all over the place by the time this gets to you. In fact, I’m writing this introductory paragraph after having already drafted four more paragraphs which won’t make themselves known to you until a little bit later.

The point is that speaking is hard compared to what I usually do. I can’t do any of the stuff I’ve just run through if I’m communicating aloud, and perhaps this is why I’ve always been much more comfortable using, to reclaim Saussure’s gently disparaging phrase, a passively recorded product when I want to express my thoughts rather than do it in the manner that requires more presence, will, and intelligence. (Not that I think I always get it exactly right when I try to express something in written form, or that I don’t reserve the right to change my mind on anything I say either aloud or with letters. As if by way of illustration, this parenthetical aside is one of the last additions I’m making to this piece.)

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy having speaky-talky conversations, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just not as good at them, I don’t think. I’m eternally grateful to Moses, the Well-Red Mage, for continuing to want me to talk, and making me feel as if my talking is more valuable than I’d probably judge it. He is a very good host and conversation partner (not that I really have any point of comparison against which to properly judge him, but I think I can say that anyway); I had a very good time chatting with him about Chrono Trigger for Mage Cast, and I hope I’ll get the chance to talk again before too long, but I’ll probably never be able to shake the feeling that there’s just so much more I could have said were I better at making mouth-noises intelligently.

As such, I thought I’d put together a quick appendix for the episode. Hopefully, you enjoyed listening to our conversation as it was, but perhaps a little bit of extra content will help you to enjoy it even more.

Things We Discussed and Upon Which I Wish to Expound

Red and I had a fairly lengthy co-pondering on what it means to say that something’s ‘aged well’, during the course of which I brought up Shakespeare as an example of something that doesn’t really tend to get targeted on those grounds. You might get, as we discussed, people assuming that someone’s only claiming to enjoy Shakespeare in order to appear terribly intellectual, but I think few people who are actually engaged in literary criticism would make the point that his works haven’t ‘aged well’. It ties into the broader note of how gaming discourse differs from conversations about other art forms, which we also spent some time thinking about during the episode; I’m still not sure whether this is down to some quality about games, some quality about the demographic of people who play games, or simply that I just don’t see as much conversation about things other than games, but I still think it’s reasonable to observe that gaming discussion does look different. Thoughts welcome.

Anyway, I was trying to think whether there’s any Shakespeare which markedly hasn’t aged well, by which I think I still mean roughly what I said during the episode about changing genre conventions and things but with the important addition, which perhaps doesn’t even need to be spelled out, that changing cultural paradigms over time can also have the effect of reframing subject matter. Much of Shakespeare actually still comes off reasonably progressive, if anything, but one example that sprung to mind was Shylock, the Jewish moneylender and antagonist of The Merchant of Venice. I think that character would be an absolute fan to the flames of extreme-position discussion on the internet: you’d get the ‘Shylock deserved worse than he got and is the worst human being ever conceived!’ crowd versus the ‘Shylock was right, and is also totally an anti-Semitic caricature’ gang. I think it’d lead to some nasty interactions, and Shylock’s characterisation (as the villain, ruthless and merciless, despite being kind of justified in his upset at not being repaid what he’s owed) is something that we perhaps write off as being a stereotype or trope of the time, but then saying that it was ‘a product of its time’ is basically the same as saying ‘it’s not aged well’ in a cultural sense.

I suppose I ought also to say a little more about Philosophiraga, while I’m here! I’m really, really excited for it to finally become a thing; the idea started ages ago now, but as a totally different format touching on broadly the same concept of brief introductions to philosophical ideas and relating them to games. It’s now shaping up towards production, with a few episodes outlined; the first ‘set’ of episodes will be on morality, with the plan being to break down BIG TOPICS into around four episodes at a time. For example, in the ‘morality’ BIG TOPIC we’ve got three different theories of what it means to be moral, plus a fourth episode on something called meta-ethics which is a bit different but is still part of that field of philosophy. We won’t be arguing for or against any ideas – if you’ve ever taken an introductory philosophy class, it’ll hopefully be a bit like that in the sense that we’ll be bringing up things that philosophy has explored, explaining a little bit about what they are and why people came up with them, and then just sort of letting you think about them (with some helpful gaming context, of course). It’s not gonna be any use if you’re trying to brush up for your master’s degree, but I’m hoping it’ll be an accessible and enjoyable introduction to some of these very cool concepts.

Things We Did Not Discuss and Which I Wish to Append

Something I thought would come up during the episode, but which we simply didn’t have time to get to because of all the other terrifically insightful things we spent a lot of time saying, was the influence of Chrono Trigger on games which came after. I’ve played a lot of games made after 1995, which means I’ve played a lot of games which might potentially have been influenced by Chrono Trigger.

Interestingly, though, there aren’t that many Triggerisms that I feel I can identify as having passed on into convention. There’s New Game Plus, which I think it was the first to name (and it makes a lot of sense in a game all about doing things over a little differently), and perhaps there are small lessons it taught in its visual, sound, or gameplay design (certainly the ATB stuck around for a little while afterwards, and Red suggested that its influence lives on in the action RPGs of today).

I was trying to think of other timey-wimey games in the lead-up to the episode, thinking that perhaps one of the most obvious points of influence would probably be time travel, which I can’t imagine Trigger was the first to do but which it certainly did more extensively and more betterly than anything that had come before. I think it may well have done it more gooderish than anything that’s come after, too. One of the only games I could think of which explored a time-travel narrative and worked player choice in different times into the gameplay and the story to even a remotely similar extent – I mean, the Prince of Persia PS2 trilogy features time manipulation during gameplay, but I’m talking about games where your actions really ripple through different periods of time in a thorough and overarching sort of way – is an early PS2 title called Shadow of Memories (Shadow of Destiny if you’re in America, I believe), which… is nowhere near as good as Chrono Trigger. It does have the vocal talents of Charles Martinet, though, so there’s that.

Shadow of Memories is worth bringing up, I think, because it really hasn’t aged well visually but still manages to do a couple of things that I think are genuinely pretty cool. It perhaps doesn’t work in the whole ‘do almost anything in any era and it’ll affect all the others’ thing to quite the same degree, but it does make use of some ‘do something ages ago to affect the present’ puzzles not dissimilar to Trigger (I’m thinking mostly of the ‘give a man’s ancestors some beef so he’ll be a nicer and better-adjusted person 400 years later’ sidequest). My favourite, perhaps, is when protagonist Eike Kusch (he’s definitely supposed to be German, so it really ought to be ‘Eye-kuh Koosh’, but the VO insists he’s ‘Ike Kussh’) needs to avoid being murdered by a killer hiding behind a tree. Rather than, say, not stand near the tree when he’s going to be murdered, Eike goes back a couple of centuries, saves a woman from some thugs, befriends her family (who own the land), then does some favours for their groundskeeper in return for the tree never getting planted. So the killer’s not got a tree to hide behind anymore! Aha! Safe forever!

Somehow, while I was thinking about all this, I totally blanked on Majora’s Mask, which is perhaps the next-best timey-wimey game after Chrono Trigger. I think there’s a difference between ‘redo the same time period with knowledge and resources gained in previous loops’ and ‘visit different time periods to affect others’, but I still wonder whether the influence of Trigger was in the developers’ minds when thinking about how to make time travel work in Majora (and to a lesser extent Ocarina of Time).

Another small point I wanted to make was that I found the separation of EXP and TP really interesting. Experience points, which are what raise characters’ levels, leak to party members who aren’t in the actively battling three-person lineup, so you can use the same three-party members for all your battles and the others will still level up; tech points, on the other hand, are only awarded to those who actually participate. Tech points are what you need in order to unlock techs – magic and abilities which do damage, heal, or do other cool things, so they’re super important. I like this balance of encouraging the player to make use of all party members in order to find out what moves are at their disposal while also preventing the need to grind too frequently.

We also didn’t really get the chance to talk all that much about characters and story, since we were focusing more on gameplay and the overall experience and phenomenon that is Chrono Trigger. There could happily be entire essays (in fact, I’m pretty much 100% that there already are entire essays) on each of the game’s fantastic characters and its spectacular narrative, but a couple of words on the topic from someone who’s only just experienced them for the first time:

they’re pretty good

I mean, it’s hard to even decide which characters and which things I ought to say something about, since there’s just so much good stuff that working out which good stuffs to comment on is a whole endeavour in itself.

So I think Frog is great. Frog’s whole arc is awesome, going not from ‘I’m weak’ to ‘I’m strong’ but from ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone’ to ‘I will use my strength for purposes that matter’. So that’s great. Robo, too, has a wonderful development, and his participation in helping Fiona grow her forest is one of my favourite character moments in the whole thing.

(My party, for the record, was usually Crono, Ayla (for her ability to steal good stuff and for the epic Falcon Strike dual tech), and either Frog or Marle for some healings.)

My next favourite character… might actually be Lavos. Is that weird? I suppose Lavos isn’t really a character so much as it is a narrative device, but Chrono Trigger reframes its antagonists’ position on two major occasions, I think, which really made the story feel effective.

At first you’re led to think that Magus is the cause of the destruction, the maker of the apocalyptic thing which is Lavos, but it turns out that things aren’t that simple; then it seems that perhaps Lavos is generically I WANNA EAT THE WORLD; then it emerges that Lavos is, in the strict rather than in the current-pop-culture sense, somewhat Lovecraftian in that it doesn’t really have much in the way of intention. It simply emerges, perhaps conscious or perhaps not, and shapes the world it finds itself surrounded by so that it can ultimately consume that world. That’s… like, terrifying. Way worse than I’M A DEADLY ALIEN RAHHRR. Another of my favourite moments is losing to Lavos, which I think I did immediately after gaining access to the End of Time and being able to go straight to the Day of Lavos in 1999, and the resulting cutscene ending with those words: In the end, the future refused to change. Chilling. Powerful.

Also, the beginning is fantastic. We did touch on this a bit, but no exposition, just ‘Good morning, Crono’ – and the memorable simplicity of that means that repetitions, or variations, which come up later in the game really resonate. As I said, though, I think the trial is the moment when I realised Chrono Trigger was something set apart from other games that might superficially be alike to it.

Things I Said Which I Wish to Amend or Consider at Greater Length

I generally wish I’d talked a little more slowly and with a bit more microphone etiquette (keeping my face a consistent distance from my mic and all that sort of thing), but that’s just a general lesson about doing speaky stuff, which I’m new to and which I’ll have to work on for future thingies.

On fate (or destiny), and the Entity: I haven’t really thought through the idea that the Entity might be the player. I think the Entity is definitely metaphysical in that it’s beyond the universe in which the game immediately takes place, but whether it’s metatextual in that it exists outside of the game’s fiction entirely I’ve no idea. I do think that the juxtaposition, however, between destiny (which, arguably, is what the Entity is facilitating by ensuring that the party is able to be in critical places at critical times) and self-definition is interesting. There are a lot of instances wherein characters actively opt to go against what their ‘fate’ seems to be – just look at the fact that of the seven player characters, four (Robo, Marle, Frog, and Magus) choose new names for themselves and redefine how the world perceives them in ways that might originate from sad or nefarious motivations but wind up allowing them to define themselves as new, greater individuals.

Magus is perhaps the most interesting case, though, as I don’t think he allows himself to be authentically himself until after the ending, and he’s been concealing things since the very beginning: as Janus, he hid his magical power; as Magus, he tried to embrace something unique to his identity but wound up assuming the role of leader of the fiends, becoming an archetype rather than an individual; as the Prophet, he’s disguised entirely; as Magus-in-the-party, he still can’t let go of his assumed identities enough to form connections in the form of double techs (and needs outside interference in the form of special items in order to make use of triple techs).

This feels like it could become another entire essay, so I’ll leave it at ‘I think this is an interesting topic’ for now rather than explore it fully.

I said during the episode that I was going to stop short of calling Chrono Trigger ‘great’, because of the connotations of the word. I wasn’t sure, when I was considering the question in those very short moments one allows oneself between hearing a question and feeling compelled to answer it whether one has formulated an answer one feels happy with or not, but now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the episode, and on my experience with the game, I feel confident saying that Chrono Trigger is a great game. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I do not know whether I’ve ever played a game which I can say with certainty is better in any meaningful sense. Chrono Trigger may well be the best game I have ever played. (Not saying that it definitely is, but that it could be.) There are other games I like more, but I would find it very difficult to argue for a game which markedly surpasses Chrono Trigger in objective (or, to use a less loaded term, ‘reliably-agreeable-upon’) qualities.

I also said that I didn’t have the ‘Chrono Swigger’ pun prepared, and that’s true, but I did actually have a plan going into recording to try to work in as many similar wordplays as I could. I ended up not doing it because it just seemed too much – I thought it’d be hilarious just wearing Red down by not letting up the entire episode, but ultimately decided against it. Still, here’s a (very small) selection of some of the ones I regret will now never make it to air:

Ayla’s hot. You can tell in that fur bikini that she has a great Chrono Figure.

Chrono Cross should have been called Chrono 2: Chrono Bigger.

Imagine AA Milne’s Chrono Tigger. Just Lavos ending the world and Pooh going ‘oh, bother’.

The frontman of Irish pop-rock band U2 really likes Chrono Trigger. He calls it Bono Trigger.

Wrapping Up

The nature of… well, certainly my mind, probably everyone else’s too, is that I’ll always think things that I’ve done could have been better, weren’t complete, weren’t expressed well enough. This piece has been something of an attempt to address that, but I’m sure I’ll continue to think of other things I wish I’d said until well into the future!

I think the points I’ve covered are most of the things I definitely wanted to get out there as an addendum to the episode, a bit of supplementary content that hopefully isn’t necessary in order to enjoy the podcast but might give you a chance to explore its subject matter a little bit further. I very much hope you did enjoy the episode, but please do let me know if you have any feedback about anything I said or even just the way I come across in your earholes. It’s all useful.

Equally, if you’re excited for Philosophiraga, do let me know – if there’s anything you think would make for a good topic, I’m all ears. Thanks for listening, and for reading, and I’ll see you again soon.

Or… you’ll hear me.

I dunno.

Something.

Though he’s been known by many names across the vast and peculiar landscape of the Internet, every iteration of The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage has shared an urge to look far too closely at tiny details and extrapolate huge, important-seeming conclusions. These days, in addition to Mage duties, he can be found discussing gaming and other pop culture (and occasionally sharing some of his own musical and fictional creations) at the Overthinker Y blog and on Twitter.

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