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That character’s the blank slate on which you’re supposed to impress your own personality, and Chrono follows that tradition nicely. The thing about RPGs, particularly RPGs from the 16-bit era, is that the silent protagonist serves more or less as a proxy for the player. In the case of the beloved party member’s heroic sacrifice, Chrono Trigger does two things: it kills off the protagonist, and it does it when the player is expecting the story to end but then forces em to play on through the fallout of the protagonist’s death.Ĭhrono at the moment of his death. I’ll agree with that assessment, but I’d point out that Chrono Trigger is a game that revels in JRPG tropes and then tries to subvert them in mildly surprising ways. Anyone familiar with Final Fantasy VII will probably get that this story device can offer a good player punch, particularly when it’s done to a party member, but they’ll also point out that it’s pretty heavily used.
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That’s a lot of thoughts and feels that I didn’t really have the time or ability to communicate to my student when she brought up her dream, so all I was able to tell her was that I have dreams like that too, and I think they’re really good ones.Ĭhrono Trigger comes into this because, like many large scale adventure stories in the RPG genre, it features a heroic sacrifice by a beloved character. They always precipitate a little moment of renewed grief, but the brief resurrection is worth it. Waking up is a case of reality literally settling back in, and I often have a moment of disorientation as I remind myself that that person I dreamt about isn’t alive anymore. Those dreams are some of my favorites, because they invariably leave me feeling a little wistful after they’re over. For me they’re always a little bittersweet, because typically I know in my dreams that there’s something weird about being around this person (maybe I even know that they’re dead, but the fact that they’re with me is still joyful). It reminded me of many dreams that I’ve had about family who’ve passed. I couldn’t help smiling when she told me about this dream, because it was so odd, and it was about her grandmother, who passed away a couple weeks ago. It was a strange dream, apparently, because it involved my student’s grandmother telling her that she should eat a placenta, because those things are very healthy. The other day, one of my students came to me in the morning and told me that she had had a dream about her grandmother the previous night.
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