Can you love a video game you’ve never played? A review of Chrono Trigger from Boss Fight Books.
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Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb and I want to help you love video games even more than you already do. It’s a tall order, I understand, but for someone as short as I am, I welcome any challenge that makes me feel tall. Today I’m continuing my mission to review all of the Boss Fight Books releases. There’s a link to BossFightBooks.com below in case you are not familiar with this publisher. The short version: they publish books about video games, with each book being an in-depth exploration of a single game. Such a proposition scratches all of my nerdy itches.
Today’s book: Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams. I’ve never played Chrono Trigger. But I loved this book. What? How is that possible?
It’s true. I’ve never played Chrono Trigger outside a few short sessions during my youth (all play sessions that involve me are short), but those sessions were so short and so long ago that memories have congealed with every other 16-bit RPG of my youth. Chrono Trigger may as well be Secret of Mana may as well be Final Fantasy VI may as well be Illusion of Gaia.
And I actually believe that it’s the obligation of the reviewer to be familiar with the source material when reviewing a piece of criticism. In other words, I should have played Chrono Trigger before reviewing a book called Chrono Trigger. But I also think it’s a fun exercise to see what I can get from the criticism while being willfully ignorant. So I’m having fun here. I won’t be concerned with how well this book treats its source material.
So, knowing that, how was I able to love this book, and possibly the video game, without much knowledge of the video game?
The short answer to my love of a game I’ve never played is that this book is academic. It’s more academic than any of the other three Boss Fight Books I’ve read and reviewed so far. As the author carries us through the plot of the game, he embraces opportunities to explore things that aren’t unique to this video game.
For example, during an observation about the characters being homogenous in terms of skin color, Williams digs into the history of race representation from both a cultural standpoint and from a technical standpoint. So, both from the perspective of a single-color monorace representing the “default human” and from the perspective that maybe mid-90s software limitations prevented skin color variety (the later perspective is one that the author quickly debunks by reminding us that Earthbound, released one year earlier, contained human characters of different colors, so software can’t be the only limitation here).
This chapter, called “Straight? White? Male?” can actually be read as a stand-alone essay; the context of Chrono Trigger isn’t important. Rather, Chrono Trigger is a catalyst. And while this sort of commentary could veer into a simple critique on sexism and race–a critique that’s important, of course–it doesn’t. It instead gives us additional context; an aesthetic commonly called “nationalitylessness” which is an attempt to remove the “cultural odor” of Japan from international products. I’m not going to attempt to explain this idea here as I will surely misspeak on it. Michael P. Williams lived and taught in Japan, so just know that he handles this potential difficult conversation with the appropriate respectfulness.
Throughout the book, the author repeats this technique of using the game as a jumping off point to discuss larger issues. Another great example is the chapter titled “Neuga, Ziena, Zieber, Zom” which talks about the difficulties with translating games. He also talks a bit about strategy guides not being given enough credit as companions to the game, at least here in the US. An entire chapter is dedicated to this. Again, not something unique to Chrono Trigger, but something very interesting and worth learning about.
At first, I felt out of place when reading Chrono Trigger. I was honestly a bit disappointed because I wasn’t given the same humor or self reflection that I’d come to love about the Metal Gear Solid, Shadow of the Colossus, and Earthbound books. But then I fell into what this book is doing. Simply put: it’s teaching. I discovered that I like learning something non-game related with video games as the impetus to that knowledge. School would have been way more fun if I learned about inertia by way of Sonic the Hedgehog or if Street Fighter II was used to teach me automotive repair…that last one didn’t make sense.
Please like, subscribe, and click the Bell icon to make sure you don’t miss future videos. If you are still watching this video, you obviously like it, right? So, it only makes sense to share it. Up next in this Boss Fight Books series: ZZT. A game I’ve never even heard of. Hopefully, I’ll learn something.
Thank you for watching.
Mentioned
- https://bossfightbooks.com
- Michael P. Williams on Twitter: https://twitter.com/theunfakempw
The following are YouTube videos licensed under CC BY 3.0
Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
