Chrono Trigger is 30, but its music hasn’t aged a day

Chrono Trigger launched on the Super Nintendo on March 11, 1995, making it 30 years old. It’s still a revolutionary role-playing game now for many of the same reasons it was back then: Its time-jumping plot had you forging alliances with robots from the future and people from prehistory (yet it actually made sense), and the ramifications of changing time periods were suitably profound and often sad. It had multiple endings, and zippy turn-based combat, but its most enduring quality, to me, is its music.

While I recommend that everyone who enjoys modern RPGs (especially fans of Sea of Stars) play Chrono Trigger, listening to the soundtrack is the next best thing. Despite covering multiple time periods, each track (even the battle theme) transitions surprisingly seamlessly into the next, making it easy to do front-to-back listens without skips. Yasunori Mitsuda, you knocked it out of the park.

Mitsuda worked on sound effects for SquareSoft titles in the ’90s, and eventually grew frustrated as he wanted to make music for games. In a lesson for us all that we control our own destinies, he approached supervisor Hironobu Sakaguchi and threatened to quit unless he could score the game, according to a 2008 1Up interview. He got the gig, and Chris Kohler’s book “Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life” revealed that the project took a toll on Mitsuda’s health. He was eventually hospitalized for stomach ulcers, and Nobuo Uematsu joined the project to help out.

The final Chrono Trigger soundtrack seemed to take full advantage of the gaming hardware of the time, just as the game’s scope and graphics did. If you want to listen to the music without digging out your game cartridge (or launching the Steam version), it’s available to stream on practically any music streaming service, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. If you’re looking for music that Mitsuda has composed more recently, listen for his work in the fantastic Delicious in Dungeon anime streaming on Netflix.