Some time during the lifetime of the Game Boy Advance people realised that making remakes of classic computer games from previous eras for handheld systems was an excellent idea: handhelds were beginning to match (or exceed) the capabilities of the consoles the games had been originally released on, so games which would look dated on a current-generation home console would look comparatively cutting-edge on a handheld, nostalgic fans would jump at the chance to replay their childhood favourites in a convenient portable format, and those too young to remember the games' original incarnations (or who simply missed them at the time) get the joy of experiencing lost classics all over again for the first time. Happily, this trend has continued on the Nintendo DS, and the latest gem to get a new dual screen lease of life is Chrono Trigger, Square-Enix's well-regarded time travel escapade.

Chrono Trigger is to Japanese CRPGs what Planescape: Torment is to Western CRPGs: a critically acclaimed work that pushes the boundaries of the format and has spent a criminal amount of time out of print. Nonetheless, I was slightly concerned about trying it: I hadn't enjoyed the DS port of Final Fantasy III, and JRPGs do tend to come crammed with features that make it difficult for me to get into them. That said, I loved Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, so I was prepared to give Chrono Trigger a chance, and I was very glad I did.

A quick recap of the premise: Crono, the suitably mute viewpoint character for much of the game, lives in a mildly fantastic kingdom in a time period roughly corresponding to our late 20th Century. The kingdom is throwing a massive fair to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of its founding, and Crono's best friend Lucca is demonstrating her new invention - a rudimentary teleportation device. Marle, a mysterious girl who earlier on latches onto Crono and declares him her date for the evening, tries out the teleporter only to get sucked into a gate between time periods, and Crono and Lucca have to leap into action to rescue her. As they come across more and more gates, it becomes apparent that they are not appearing randomly, but are somehow connected to the mysterious Lavos, a vast alien parasite that, buried in the Earth's core, is busily sucking the planet dry, and is due to emerge and take flight 1999 years after the kingdom's foundation, incidentally causing the utter destruction of civilisation and dooming the planet to an agonising, drawn-out death in the process.

Aided by a mysterious man who lives at the End of Time, Crono must battle to stop Lavos, with the aid of friends and allies drawn from across the time periods; my favourite playable charcters are Frog, a medieval knight with Final Fantasy VII levels of angst that is rendered adorable rather than irritating by the fact that he's a cute fwoggy, and Robo, a robot from the postapocalyptic future who joins the fight to stop Lavos despite knowing that this might cause him to paradox out of existence altogether. (This game is still old school enough that you get to pick names for all of the characters, so if you want to call Crono, Frog and Robo juvenile swears like Dickbutt and Scalydong and Brassbollocks you can). A nice feature of the game is that, more or less as soon as you discover the existence of Lavos, you have the option of travelling to its time period and doing battle with it; indeed, the game presents a vast number of alternate endings, which are mainly differentiated by precisely which point in time you chose to go kill Lavos. That said, I suspect that many players (like me) will be too terrified of the thing, and too enthralled with the game to attempt to take out the nasty creature before they've exhausted every other possibility the game offers on the first run through (also, I suspect you're not meant to be able to kill Lavos at an early stage on your first runthrough).

This is just one manner in which Chrono Trigger distinguishes itself from traditional JRPGs. Then again, I suppose you'd expect nothing less, since the game was designed by a "dream team" drawn from the creative forces behind the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises, which between them pretty much invented the traditional JRPG format in the first place. (It even has Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragonball Z and in-house artist for the Dragon Quest series, coming up with all the character designs, which is a nice touch - it makes the visual style of the game seem more individual and unique than the sometimes overly generic Final Fantasy games and their imitators). In fact, an argument could be made that on release Chrono Trigger was the JRPG that was least like a typical JRPG, for a whole host of reasons:

No random encounters. I seriously dislike the random encounter system in early Final Fantasy games: nothing is more jarring than walking along happily in the world map only for the random encounter sound effect to blare forth, at which point you are yanked into the fight screen. Conversely, Chrono Trigger has no random encounters on the world map, and in the individual locations monsters are consistently found in the same place - and, except in cases where they leap out from behind bushes to ambush you, the fights can be avoided entirely (although in my experience you want to do each one at least once to avoid being woefully under-levelled).

No grinding. That's right: at no point did I find myself obliged to go around randomly killing monsters to get my characters to the point where they can tackle the next it of the plot; so long as you do a reasonable amount of exploration and do each fight you come across at least once, then your characters will almost always be at a suitable level. (Arguably, this is a necessity, given the lack of random encounters.) Characters even level up when they're being held in reserve, so if you spend ten hours not using Robo at all and then find you need him to do a particular side quest you won't be hopelessly screwed. That said, it is still highly advisable to swap characters out frequently - not only are some characters better suited to certain challenges than others, but as far as I can tell characters only earn "technique points" - which unlock special skills and spells - while they are active.

Fast, exciting combat. The use of an Active Time Battle system, as featured in Final Fantasy games ranging from IV to IX, combined with the integration of encounters into the area maps, means that fights are simply less time consuming than the traditional turn-based combats presented in many JRPGs. It also ties in nicely with the game's time-related themes: once a character's action guage has filled up after their most recent action, you can choose to have them strike immediately or bide their time until the moment of maximum effectiveness - and there are a number of adversaries which require just this sort of approach. This version of Chrono Trigger comes with the option of turning this off and reverting to a somewhat more traditional turn-based system, but this really isn't necessary; the combat system is forgiving enough that only the most slothlike player would have trouble keeping up, and the joy of the Active Time Battle system is that makes sure that encounters that in earlier JRPGs would take fifteen minutes get resolved in three.

The Panacea solution. As in many other JRPGs, there are a host of different ailments that can affect characters - being incapacitated/killed, getting confused, suffering bllindness, that sort of thing. In most JRPGs there'll be a host of spells and items you can use to cure these things. In Chrono Trigger, there is only one such item - the Panacea - which cures everything (bar incapacitation/death), and a spell which works in a similar manner. This makes picking the correct spell or item out of your arsenal much easier, because the menu screens aren't cluttered with a thousand cures, which considering the use of the Active Time Battle system is very handy.

Branching plotlines and one genuine moral dilemma. The main point of divergence in the plot, of course, is when you choose to go and lay the smackdown on Lavos, but there's also a bit where it transpires that a character who has caused you a lot of trouble over the course of the game has been doing the terrible things he's been doing as part of a grand overarching plan to destroy Lavos, and you have to choose whether to forgive the guy and let him join the party or fight him and kill him. (I killed him; his cunning plans to kill Lavos tended to involve genocide, and sparing him would be like slapping one particular party member in the face).

This DS edition of Chrono Trigger includes various enhancements. For the Playstation port of the game, Akira Toriyama's animation studio produced a number of lovingly-animated cut scenes, marking one of the few occasions I've seen TV-quality 2D hand-drawn animations used in a computer game; these are retained for the DS. Opinion is divided on these sequences, but personally I really like them; the quality of animation is fantastic (I suspect more money was spent on each individual cut scene than would be spent on a dozen episodes of Dragonball Z), and they go a long way towards enhancing the game's distinctive individual style; also, the original cut scenes are all present and correct, so it's not like you're missing anything.

But aside from this, there are also a number of other enhancements added specifically for the DS. Whilst there are some token efforts to incorporate the DS stylus, I found it far more easy and natural to use the normal buttons to control the game; far more important is the decision to move all the combat menus to the touch screen, and to provide an automatically-completed map for outside of combat; this means that the action on the main screen unfolds without being obscured by menu screens and other clutter. In addition, a multiplayer functionality has been added (there's an arena where you can buy and train a monster by sending it to go quest in different time periods while you do your thing in the main game), but I never felt a need to use it. There's also two new areas that have been controversially added - the Lost Sanctum and the Dimensional Vortex. To be fair, both of these areas are completely ignorable, being tucked away behind special portals in obscure parts of the world map, and in fact I did ignore the Vortex because you can only access if you've completed the game once and I've not yet felt an urge to replay it (although I'm sure I will in the future). I didn't, however, enjoy playing the Lost Sanctum; it's incredibly repetitive, and isn't really properly integrated with the rest of the plot. In particular, finding an entire village of Reptites surviving the arrival of Lavos in the prehistoric era completely undermines the enormity of the Reptite extinction, because suddenly they're, uh, not extinct.

But the less interesting DS enhancements are, as I say, completely ignorable, while the actually useful ones make a big and positive impact on the play experience. Not only is the DS version of Chrono Trigger the most complete version of the game ever released, it also benefits from a new, more accurate translation. Earlier versions of Chrono Trigger often fetch a high price on the second-hand market, because despite the fact that the game sold millions most people who own a copy are loathe to let the thing go; it's that good. Not only is Chrono Trigger DS good enough to stand side-by-side with new games today on the DS, but it's also one of the best arguments for getting a DS I've seen to date.

The DS version of Chrono Trigger is released in Europe on the 6th of February.