Triggered

Maybe Chrono Trigger is the reason I'm not big on "replay value."

Chrono Trigger is at its best when you're working through it for the first time, or at least for the first time in a few years. Story beats are dramatic and fresh, era changes are a surprising change of scenery, scrounging for items fleshes out each era's world, and the difficulty curve is just enough to keep the moment-to-moment gameplay interesting. In New Game+, these strengths all fall apart as the plot is familiar and combat becomes trivial, ... but that's okay, because one-shotting enemies is still kinda fun.

It's in subsequent New Game+ runs, for the sake of collecting endings, that the grindy monotony really sets in. The new-ish Auto-battle mode is a mercy for releasing me from 'A'-mashing during the tedious, brain-dead battles. If only there was an Auto option for story dialog, too.

The kicker is that none of Chrono Trigger's alternate endings are really worth watching. They don't feel like legitimate story options as much as they feel like easter eggs, left as teasers for obsessive fans who really want to re-fight Lavos at every conceivable opportunity.

(Yes, I still went after them all for the Steam achievements. Go ahead and judge me.)

Anyway, all that has been true since I fell in love with this game in the late '90s, so it ain't exactly new. The Dimensional Vortex dungeons, meanwhile - first added in the DS version - ... are just as inconsequential and uninteresting as I'd supposed back when that was new. ("[...] your big question is probably whether the new content makes it worth playing yet again. The answer: not especially.") And the "new" ending that follows those dungeons -- well, maybe it would have meant something more if I'd played Chrono Cross, but ... I haven't.

Chrono Trigger is still an all-time classic that will be difficult for any other RPG to unseat, personally speaking. And I know that its modern incarnations include some updates that I'm taking for granted, like turning on "run" (instead of "walk") by default! But this replay has refreshed my perspective, at least a little bit; present-day RPGs like Witcher 3 may eventually replace it in my "greatest of all time" list, nostalgia pending.

Progress: Saw all the endings.