Heh. The two games in the Final Fantasy Chronicles collection--Final Fantasy IV--which was released in neutered form as Final Fantasy II here ages ago--and Chrono Trigger are from the SNES era of videogames. Yes, Chrono Trigger was graphically brilliant when it was released, and it still looks very nice. Final Fantasy IV also looked fantastic at the time.

But let's be realistic. They still look and feel like 16-bit titles. Yes, the spiffy new FMV in both of the games is nice, although the Chrono Trigger FMV feels rather chunky. But the games themselves are straight from the SNES. Those of you looking for a graphical feast should definitely look elsewhere; you won't find what you're looking for here.

However, the music in both titles has aged surprisingly gracefully. I can still hum every single song in Final Fantasy IV--okay, so I'm biased--and the game still stands out as some of the best videogame music ever. You won't confuse it with anything else, but at the time Square resolved to push the capabilities of the SNES and the result sounds nice, even years later. The tunes in Chrono Trigger are of similar excellent quality, and while I can remember all of them as well, they never quite had the same impact on me. That doesn't make its music any less solid, however. Neither game has CD audio, obviously, but they're as close as any non-CD game has ever gotten.

And when it comes down to a collection like this, one that cannot rely on blazing new technology to prove its point, it all comes down to gameplay. Do the two titles here have enough to keep gamers entranced? Absolutely. Even with the annoying loading times in Chrono Trigger, both games are still just as much fun to play today as they were then.

Let me take you back to a time long ago, when I was but a wee lad. I had played Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy before, and while both games were very exciting, they didn't have a certain charm about them. The faceless Light Warriors did nothing for me, and Lancelot and Gwaelin's love felt shallow, a mere device to move the game along.

Then along came the SNES, and with it Final Fantasy II. With its complex characters, real-time battle system and massive world, I was hooked. And I wasn't the only one--a group of us at school would meet each day and tell each other of our exploits. It was a fantastic experience. When Chrono Trigger came out, a similar experience occured, although the group had grown apart some. It never held the charm for me that FF2 did, but it still rocked our world for a number of months.

Well, Final Fantasy IV is everything Final Fantasy II was and more. One of the major flaws in the original game was the horrendous translation. We overlooked it in our youth, but coming back to it now the game reads like some sort of pidgin English. Square's complete retranslation of the game, however, is worth the price of admission alone. It almost (but not quite) made me forget the awful work on Final Fantasy V.

In addition to a better translation of the game, detailing the exploits of Cecil and Rosa and the rest of the gang much better, Final Fantasy IV is a port of the 'hardtype' version. This means that many characters have new abilities--the Dark Knight's wave sword attack, Tellah's 'remember', and so on. The enemies are tougher, items are harder to come by, and so on, making the game considerably more challenging.

For those who never played Final Fantasy II, imagine Final Fantasy VII without the 3D graphics and you'll get an idea of its expanse. It takes place in three separate worlds, has enough major characters to make your head spin, but never loses sight of the story at its centre--redemption.

Chrono Trigger's translation to the PSX is less dramatic, even if the game is every bit as solid as Final Fantasy IV. Its core innovation was the fact that you could see the enemies on the screen before you fight them, and can often avoid them. The translation is nearly identical to the original, as far as I can tell, and other than extended load times the game plays identically as well. However, an Extras mode has been added, which lets you see all sorts of interesting things about the game--characters, music, and so on. It uses a save file to get its data, which is cool; as you progress, more things unlock.

Both games are epic. My very first game of Final Fantasy II clocked in at around sixty hours, and while I can't imagine taking that long nowadays, it's still a lengthy game. Chrono Trigger, while not quite as long, will still take you well over a hard weekend to beat. There's a lot to do and see in both games, and even a few sidequests in each title to keep the completists occupied. Chrono Trigger also has a scad of alternate endings, each obtainable in different ways, and a New Game + mode that has had more than one fan of the game going through two or three times.

Each game has a wildly different difficulty curve. To be honest, Chrono Trigger is almost too easy, with only a few difficult sequences in the entire game--admittedly, a few of those sequences were meant to be lost. Any veteran RPGer should be able to bounce through CT without too many troubles, and newcomers to the genre shouldn't have much difficulty either. A few of the boss battles can get a little hairy, but judicious use of double and triple techs will definitely pull you out of the hole.

Final Fantasy IV is another matter entirely. Some of the boss fights are much more challenging than they were back on my SNES. I still have frightened memories of battles on the last long walk of the game--you know what I'm talking about if you've beaten it--and some of the early battles in this harder version made me feel the same way. Don't let the game's age fool you. If you're not careful, it will bend you over and spank you silly.

Both games originally used SNES controllers, which map unsurprisingly well to the standard PSX control pad. The control schemes are easy to pick up and use, and both games have a bevy of options to make your experience easier--you can turn off the fully real-time battles in Chrono Trigger, for example. We'll think you're cheating, though. The actual play experience is nearly identical to that which I remember on my SNES, and you have to go looking for differences--the whole Mode 7 thing, for one, and a little jitter in both games. Chrono Trigger also has a disturbing amount of load time, which surprised me; I had heard horror stories about Final Fantasy IV's load times from its original Japanese release, but I couldn't find a hint of them in Chronicles. CT's pauses can grow annoying at times, especially for those of us who played it without the loads, but it's not unbearable.

PS2: And it's made even more bearable by using the Fast disc speed option on the PS2. Final Fantasy IV's loads go from trivial to moreso; Chrono Trigger goes from annoying to less so. It doesn't completely remedy CT's problems, but it definitely makes it more bearable. Don't bother with the graphics smoothing option on either of the titles; there be no 3D here, and you'll only make the sprites look uglier.

Forget for a moment that Chrono Trigger has nothing to do with Final Fantasy IV--Final Fantasy Chronicles is one of the finest collections to ever come out. With a much-improved version of Final Fantasy IV, they already had me hooked--the addition of Chrono Trigger only makes the deal sweeter. While many modern-day gamers may scoff at the looks of these two games, sit them down for a few hours and watch as they dive deep into the respective worlds of Cecil and Crono. There's a lot to love here, and any sensible fan of the genre would do well to pick up the collection.