What inspired Chrono Trigger?

Begin with what is documented. The time travel theme was suggested by an uncredited Square employee. Story planner Masato Kato initially opposed it, fearing repetitive, dull gameplay, then spent hours a day with Yuji Horii writing the plot anyway. Horii's contribution came from genuine fandom: he was a fan of time travel fiction such as the television series The Time Tunnel, and he fostered the theme through his story outline, with input from Toriyama. The grandfather paradox at the heart of Marle's storyline, a princess vanishing because her ancestor was not rescued, was a scenario Horii particularly liked.

The ambitions were as concrete as the influences. The three creators conceived the game on a 1992 trip to the United States to research computer graphics, aiming at something 'no one had done before'. The fusion is on the record too: Toriyama's editor Kazuhiko Torishima called the concept 'Dragon Quest plus Final Fantasy'. Even the game's shape carries an accidental inspiration: it began as a title for Nintendo's planned SNES-CD add-on, under the Mana license with the working title Maru Island, and Nintendo's cancellation of that hardware pushed it onto a cartridge, a constraint the team credited for its seamless battles with no transition screen.

Smaller documented sparks fill the margins: graphics programmer Yasuhiko Kamata cited Ridley Scott's visual work on the film Alien as an inspiration for the game's lighting. What inspired Chrono Trigger, in the end, is mostly a mood its makers named themselves: creators from rival companies playing in one sandbox, Horii's love of time stories, Kato's refusal to write 'a long string of errands', and a machine that did not exist forcing the game to become itself.