I posted the following in a topic on GameFAQs, but since it's more than two sentences long you know no one is going to read it. So, not wanting my twenty minutes to go to waste, I thought I'd post it here for some more thoughtful consideration. The accusation was that Chrono Trigger suffers from lack of character development. This is my rebuttal of that premise. Perhaps you have some opinions of your own.
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Chrono Trigger’s character development is more subtle and definitely left more to the imagination than perhaps some people are used to, but the development is absolutely there. To call these characters flat is like saying Howl’s Moving Castle was a straightforward movie. It was that...provided you have no sense of imagination. Likewise for Chrono Trigger. The unassuming hints and cues sprinkled throughout the game are more than enough for either a mature or an imaginative mind to nurture to good fruition.
Character development does not solely depend on an audience being beat over the head with an Obvious Mallet. When Lucca is revealed not to like frogs, you can take that at face-value as a meaningless piece of trivia, or you can try to use it to interpret her personality. Frog-aversion does not occur in a vacuum. You, the player, can draw on your knowledge of archetypes and cultures to flesh out Lucca’s personality more than the canon explicitly allows, by filling in some of the gaps with your own experiences. That’s called intuition.
If you want an example of an RPG with relatively weak character development, The Secret of Mana is noteworthy. Despite having a story nearly as good as Chrono Trigger’s, most of the characters, good and evil, PC and NPC alike, simply had no opportunity to express their identity in the course of events. A few of them turned out nicely, like The Boss and Geshtar and Thanatos, but most everyone else was devoid of personality in their actions and dialogue. What distinguishes games like Chrono Trigger, where character development is mostly left to the imagination, from games like The Secret of Mana, where there simply isn’t much character development to speak of, is the illustrations of the characters via dialogue that interprets the events of the plot in their own words. SoM reads like a history text; CT reads like a historical novel. That’s the difference.
I think the flattest character in Chrono Trigger is Robo. He is too much of a stereotype to stand out as a unique character. But nevertheless, it isn’t to say that he doesn’t have his moments. His simple line “Good morning,” after being repaired from his encounter with the other RY robots is one example. The lines tells us about the culture from which he came. He also mentions that no one has ever asked him about his plans for the future. This too speaks to Robo’s identity.
Ayla is probably the most underestimated character in the game in terms of depth of development. If you can get past her incredibly hackneyed dialogue—which isn’t easy, and I admit that some people can’t—it becomes apparent that every scene in the game in which she features speaks volumes on her, from the way she wipes out those Reptites the first time you see her, all the way to her last-ditch attempt to save Azala before the red star crashes, and everything in between. Consider her line “Ayla fight while alive! Win and live. Lose and die. Rule of life. No change rule.” This is one of the game’s better attempts at philosophy. Ayla comes from a simpler era, before our social taboos and psychological inhibitions started preempting our most straightforward observations. From her exposure in the game thanks to moments like this, Ayla comes off as forthright, vivacious, provocative…and all of these general attributes have the in-game specifics to back them up.
I grant that the character development in Chrono Trigger is much less overt than that of a game like Final Fantasy VI. However, it is mistake to assume that the styles of subtlety and intimation amounts to a lack of meaningful character depth. Those who make such an assumption are beneath the depth of the material…it speaks more to their simplicity than to that of the game’s. Much like those Magic Eye 3D books, if you don’t know how to look at these characters, you’re not going to see their dazzling personality.
