The Magical Shorthand of Chrono Trigger’s Storytelling

If you play through Chrono Trigger as an adult and revisit the story and its graphical presentation, you’ll notice a few oddities that seems either miraculous or absurd. The developers were working with a visual shorthand that communicated to us intuitively rather than literally, and this extends even into the literary devices in the storytelling. The end result is a game that leaves an astonishing amount out of the storytelling, things which we might only notice with repeated playthroughs, with cooler, more mature heads.

The first and most striking to me is the complete lack of horses or chocobos or any kind of beast of burden that could carry a mounted knight or pull a heavy load. Without any such animals, no castles can be built, or any form of larger architecture. Long distance journeys are unreasonably ambitious on foot. Combat is relegated to whatever can be accomplished on foot. And yet we see the castle is built, and the people are traveling from one town to another—on foot across Zenan bridge—to reach the Millennial Fair as truly sad music plays. The world is built without load bearing animals, and its people travel long distances on foot. Its knights defend Zenan Bridge on foot. Even Cyrus battles the Frog King on foot. No horses or any equivalent are shown to exist in this world, a presumably medieval world that should depend on them or something equivalent like a chocobo. It isn’t until the future that a race car is shown to help people travel across land.

I have received pushback on this point in the form of, what about the boat in 1000 AD, the Dragon Tank, and the Black Omen? The boat is not a load bearing animal that aids construction of castles or carries knights into combat or helps people walk on land--so what about it? The dragon tank is unmanned, propelling itself forward without passengers and casting its own magic. The Black Omen is a flying object from another time period that was built--again--without load bearing animals required to create such a thing. Really magical and having no impact at all on the relative technological advancement of the people below it. None of these are the horses or donkeys or chocobos that 600 AD or 1000 AD would need. The game explicitly shows the knights fighting on foot and people walking to the Millennial Fair from another town on foot, rendering the implied existence of these animals dubious upon serious inspection. Chrono Trigger shows us a radically different world if we take it at face value, but when we played it as kids, we assumed what made sense to us and carried on. And of course, you can continue reading your own impression into the game if you choose; it doesn't impact the dramatic beats of the plot.

Crono and his team deliver food to the starving army at Zenan Bridge, presumably enough to save the army from starvation. His team has three people, and they feed an army. While Crono is compared to Jesus often enough, this isn’t strictly possible. What had to happen was Crono and his team escorted a “baggage train” that would be used to feed the army, a lengthy chain of wagons with potentially a hundred people cooking, cleaning, and carrying supplies for the soldiers. This is how real medieval armies were fed. No three people could ever transport food of any meaningful amount to an army.

Further back in time, the technologically superior reptites attack humans—with their bare hands. They carry no weapons. Their attack animations show them doing something silly with their hands. Strange. But we’re meant to assume that these reptites have the capacity to innovate and to build incredible buildings that tower overhead. Their doors open at the press of a button, among other things. They couldn’t innovate weapons or—again—ride a load bearing animal. None of this could play out as it does on screen. We assumed what made sense to us in our heads, and followed the story beats as the music and drama guided our thoughts.
This extends into the literature, the writing of the story itself. Magus defeats his mother at the end of the Black Omen, and following her defeat, she dies in a blast of light, presumably from either Lavos or as part of her own death animation. But she is dead, and Magus is responsible, and yet he says nothing at this turn of events. It’s an icy cold way of letting us know that he’s not a warm, expressive person. But no person in any context would go through this without commentary, without development of thoughts through dialogue. This is the shorthand at work again, Magus’s icy demeanor manifest through the developers’ magic trick of showing less and letting us fill in the blanks.
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We understand these things intuitively while playing the game, and so we accept and appreciate the game’s shorthand communication style. Only with sober retrospection is this magic trick obvious. Should the game ever be remade, these things would be obvious to a fault. Plenty of SNES games had horses and chocobos and characters who expressed their feelings at the deaths of loved ones; there’s no technical reason Chrono Trigger couldn’t have done it. But there’s some magic in how the art and drama of the game caused us to overlook these gaps when we first played the game decades ago.