The holy grail of game collecting is, quite arguably, Chrono Trigger for Super Nintendo. Complete-in-box, you’ll be paying hundreds of dollars on EBay; for a sealed copy, you may pay over a thousand. Even without a box and manual, a Chrono Trigger cartridge can run well over a hundred. The price is warranted, for the demand is there. Even when we look past the trans-historical intrigue of the story-line spanning prehistoric pasts and dizzying technocratic futures, even when we look beyond the endearing banter of the characters and the silky-smooth combat system and the enchanting trill of the soundtrack, Chrono Trigger sparks, perhaps most palpably, a strikingly vivid nostalgia. Just as the characters in the game jump through time, so too does CT shuttle us back to childhood, when we were most capable of complete immersion—often from waking to slumber—in a video game and the luxuriant world it conjured on our television screen. The Chrono Trigger cartridge is itself a teleporter to the past. But, as TV and movies recurrently warn us, there is no time travel without risk: If you do put down the admirable amount of cash necessary to secure a sealed or near-mint copy of Chrono Trigger, be prepared to face the temptation toward unlimbering the cartridge from its casing, husking it in your old weather-beaten SNES, and firing it up once again. With this possibility in mind, I would recommend the diligent collector pick up a relatively cheaper, possibly even disc-only copy of the Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy II re-release for the PlayStation 1. Herein you can sublimate quite satisfactorily your urge to re-experience the epic expedition of Crono, Marle and Lucca—and also your youth, too—without sundering the value of a bona fide collector’s item.
