Over a recent holiday I spent quite a long time playing through the Nintendo DS remake of the 1995 SNES RPG Chrono Trigger. This absolutely has to be one of my favourite games I have ever played. It was created by a group referred to as the RPG "dream team": Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, Yuji Horii, the creator of the Dragon Quest series and art provided by Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and lead artist on the Dragon Quest series.
Chrono Trigger often appears on best game of all time lists:
Chrono Trigger has recently placed highly on all six of multimedia website IGN's "top 100 games of all time" lists—4th in 2002, 6th in early 2005, 13th in late 2005, 2nd in 2006, 18th in 2007, and 2nd in 2008. GameSpot included Chrono Trigger in "The Greatest Games of All Time" list released in April 2006, and it also appeared as 28th on an "All Time Top 100" list in a poll conducted by Japanese magazine Famitsu the same year ... Nintendo Power's twentieth anniversary issue named it the fifth best Super Nintendo game.
Source: Wikipedia
The battle system is simple, yet deep, where characters can combine their special and magic moves, called Techs, to make double or triple attacks for massive damage. The story is equally simple, with plenty of humour and lightheartedness, while maintaining a sinister and subtle undertone. The characters are loveable, totally conforming to the genre stereotypes, but in a good way! Your party is eventually made up of your silent protagonist, tech whizz geeky friend, a princess, a frog-man, a robot and a cave woman; my party of choice was the main character, the frog-man and the robot.
However, possibly the finest thing about Chrono Trigger is the music. Scored primarily by Yasunori Mitsuda, and then completed by Nobuo Uematsu when Mitsuda feel ill. Most all the tracks are catchy and evocative of the situations or locations being presented. After the release of the official soundtrack, Mitsuda went on to produce an acid jazz album called The Brink of Time based on the tracks from the game. And it does not take much hunting on YouTube to find fan covers of many of the tracks. Below is my favourite one I have found so far, by YouTube user ViolinTay (Video above)
If you get a chance to buy this game; it is currently available to buy on Nintendo DS, iPhone, Playstation 3 and an Android port is coming soon; I would highly recommend it. Or if you are particularly crazy, Giantbomb did a whole, narrated play through of the game as a video series which is available to watch (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL085723EE35418F90) if you have a spare 30 hours!
For full disclosure, yes, I have not only played through the game in the last few weeks, but watched the entire video series and loved every minute of it! 
