Chrono Trigger is coming to the DS this holiday season, and we should all be happy. If it were any other game, Square-Enix would be lambasted for bringing such a quick-and-dirty full-priced port (plus the typical five-dollar "Square tax") to its brainwashed fans, but this is Chrono Trigger. Since the game has basically been out of print for 13 years, and available only as a gimped PS1 port for seven of those years, it's a treat to finally get a legal, playable version of Chrono Trigger without a dead save battery and sans loading times. I don't know what pushed me through the Final Fantasy Chronicles version of the game, but I'm going to go ahead and blame September 11th.
One of the nicer bits of news about Chrono Trigger DS is that the soundtrack--one of the best out there, technically and musically--has actually survived the transition to Nintendo's handheld console; this is no small feat, what with Square-Enix's GBA remakes sounding disappointingly tinny and crunchy. You can credit the greatness of Chrono Trigger's soundtrack to the SNES sound chip--which certainly was a great tool--but Yasunori Mitsuda deserves most of the acclaim for putting together one hell of a soundtrack. And it was his first!
But in the past few years, it seems like Mitsuda has been slumming by working exclusively on forgettable DS RPGs. This is something the needs to change.
Mitsuda's early career with Square resulted in some of the best soundtracks to ever come out of the medium, even if the quality of the games themselves were suspect. After composing the music for Trigger, he worked on three high-profile projects, and perfected a style that went beyond your bog-standard "epic" RPG music. First came his work on Xenogears, which introduced the Celtic overtones his compositions would soon be known for; Mitsuda's Chrono Cross soundtrack followed a few years later, and is considered by most to be some of the greatest video game music of all time--and it's a crime against humanity that Cross never got an arrange album. His work on 2002's Xenosaga: Episode I is not as immediately Mitsuda-y as you'd expect, but it does show a composer breaking out of his safe zone and using the high budget of a failed franchise to really see what he can do with a live orchestra.
Really, I can't do justice to Mitsuda's music by explanation alone, so you should just find your favorite outlet for listening to video game soundtracks and I'm sure my awkward descriptions will begin to make sense.
And now for an award-winning segue: what doesn't make sense is Mitsuda's relative obscurity since working on Xenosaga. Don't get me wrong, he's still put out some great stuff since then; Mitsuda's original album Kirite is right up there with Chrono Cross in the "best things he's ever done" category. But I get the feeling that--if he's not burned out--Mitsuda is just a victim of Japanese video game composers not being as big of a deal as they used to be. The 90s and early 2000s featured big bad composers doing big bad things, but today, while there are quite a few good soundtracks being pumped out, the Monsters of Video Game Music don't seem to be around anymore. I think Japan's got some 'splaining to do.
Related Links
OST: Chrono Cross
The Chrono Trigger Port: Are You Excited or Disappointed?