Chrono Trigger shipped in March 1995 in Japan and August 1995 in North America. It never got a PAL release on the SNES, so Australians who played it at the time either imported, had a chipped console, or waited until the DS port in 2008. None of these were reasonable but plenty of people did all three.
What it is
A 30-hour JRPG about a boy named Crono who accidentally invents time travel at a millennium festival, recruits a party that includes a princess, an inventor, a cavewoman, a frog-knight, and a sentient robot, and uses it to prevent the destruction of the world by an entity called Lavos in the year 1999. The narrative spans 65 million years and ends with thirteen different possible conclusions depending on when in the story you trigger the final battle.
Why it matters
Chrono Trigger is the JRPG made by the "Dream Team", Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (creator of Dragon Quest), Akira Toriyama (character designer for Dragon Ball), with music by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu. That confluence of talent under one studio's roof never happened again at Square or anywhere else, and the game has the unrushed confidence of people working at the top of their craft.
It also did things genre orthodoxy said couldn't work. Battles happen on the field map, not on a transition screen. Random encounters were largely eliminated. Multi-character "Dual Tech" and "Triple Tech" combos let you choreograph attacks across the party. New Game Plus, now a standard JRPG fitting, was invented here, in part because thirteen endings demanded a structure that let you replay efficiently to reach them.
The catalogue position
It is one of three or four games people cite when arguing for the SNES library's primacy. The others on that list (Final Fantasy VI, Super Metroid, Earthbound, A Link to the Past) are also Nintendo platform-defining works. The fact Chrono Trigger sits naturally in that company is the highest compliment.
Worth playing in 2026?
Strongly yes. The DS port (2008) added two extra dungeons and a slightly tighter translation. The Steam port (2018) is a competent enough emulation. Original SNES cartridges in Australia run AU$200+ for loose, much more for boxed CIB, the import barrier kept supply low here. The DS port is the practical pick.