Back in the day when Chrono Trigger first hit the shelves it probably did “OK” at first amongst a wash of similar titles that had leapt onto the band wagon of “oh my gosh haven't we found a great game genre”. Mind you, this lasted for quite a while and strangely enough, the reason being is that it was a bloody good genre and some bloody good games too. RPG's (and no I'm not going to say JRPG's) have since had the poor grace to get crawl under a bridge, get hammered on absinthe and sing about the glory days to whoever will listen.

Square Enix used to do it right all the time, they've since had a couple of interesting tangents and now with the never-ending Final Fantasy series, gone for game mechanics that move further and further away from the good ol' turn based RPG games we all grew up with. It's a crying shame, but then that's the industry for you. Whether this is the right move or not I leave you to decide for yourselves, but ultimately the one statement that stands out as a shining beacon of truth is that Chrono Trigger is one of the best RPG's ever. There, I've said it. It's true and while people might start borrowing their nan's best italic pen to scrawl in some response or other about some such other title that was just as good or better – that's why I said “one of the best”. There were quite a lot of RPG's that came out in that era that are worthy of such claims.

Now, putting aside those of you who sit in the dark massaging your collective egos about how advanced your intellect is for re-purchasing your archaic platform of choice to relive the good ol' days – or perhaps worse still, have never branch out into the next-gen or in fact any gen surpassing a platform that existed, at the very latest, in the 90's – it's now available for DS. Which, quite frankly is something that rates far more highly than rubbing yourself with the latest pre-release directors cut signed copy of Star Trek: The other next generation.

Yes it has a touch screen. No you don't have to use it. If you really want to go through the game as you would have originally on SNES, or for you rude boys out there PS, then you can. However, for those of you embracing the current time zone as “The Present” and dispensing nostalgia to an appropriate mental storage compartment for later perusal, you can use the touch screen or a combination of both. I personally found a use for both – go me.

So, in essence the game is about travelling through time to different eras of the same piece of land via portals; rifts in the fabric of space – or whatever you want to call them. This all happens by accident as the current princess of the kingdom pretends to be some local voluptuous peasent girl that stumbles into the path of our layabout, Sonic loving, would-be hero “Chrono” who watches her vanish through one such portal while trying out his mates teleportation device. You, being the suddenly courage filled loon, dives in after to rescue the princess from impending doom, hopefully to save the world from no-doubt impending destruction, rushing back to make a bit of mad and passionate and then kippers for breakfast. However, that whole impending doom steps in to throw anaphrodisiac into the mix.

It's all down to this being called Lavos that crash landed aeons ago, burying itself deep into the planet, draining DNA and life force while growing in power. Shortly into the future you learn that Lavos emerges to claim the planet as his own – as they tend to do. Of course, for some reason regardless of it being quite a bit into the future, you crazy kids are the ones to put a stop to it. To complete this seemingly impossible task you have to travel the ages searching for allies and weapons to defeat the monstrosity. Good luck to ya I say!

The game itself is a turn based RPG that allows you to choose whether you have free-flowing combat or take it in turns between yourselves and the enemy. For the most part, in this style of RPG, free-flowing combat helps keep a certain pace and excitement level going, but seeing as you can change this feature on the fly it's really useful to swap it over to the take-it-in-turns mode for any complicated boss encounters. While there are a few additions to the DS version, the general gameplay remains the same. They've divided the screens well so that the top screen deals with all of the action and moving around, while the bottom shows the map and has your character, save and inventory management shown. As I said before, you can use the touch screen to not only move your characters around but select the various menus also. Neither has an upside or a downside as it's down to what you feel comfortable with.

While the land might remain similar in structure, the enemies, people and places will all change, giving the game a variety and scope that tends to leave modern day RPG's way, way behind. From fighting pterodactyls in prehistory to firing off lasers in the future and everything in-between. The game progresses well, only vary rarely having you stuck on a particular mob for any length of time before realising what link you're missing.

One of the DS features is to rear pet monsters that you fight in an arena. It's an interesting addition, and not one I would've expected. They added a new dungeon sure, but to revisited the whole Chocobo style pet management wouldn't have been something I'd think up after a night snorting Red Bull and sugar. You can even battle your mates if they've got a copy themselves.

There was a delay in getting my opinion out of Chrono Trigger as it was one of “those games” that had to be played until my eyes bled mercy. It's not only the scope, or the huge variety of dungeons to visit, or even all the characters available to master, but the storyline and plot twists are just as captivating as well – which I've always thought a bonus considering some of the other titles in the same genre.

Chrono Trigger gets a massive, quantum mechanical non-paradox inducing thumbs up!