What is Chrono Trigger: The Brink of Time?

The album's full title is Chrono Trigger Arranged Version: The Brink of Time. NTT Publishing released it in Japan on June 25, 1995, three months after the game. One disc, ten tracks, about fifty three minutes. Yasunori Mitsuda composed the music and produced the album; the arrangements are credited to Hiroshi Hata, Hidenobu Ohtsuki (billed as Kalta), and Gizaemon de Furuta, who performed them as the band Guido.

Mitsuda's reason is on the record. In later interviews he explained that the album came about because he wanted to do something no one else was doing: acid jazz and its related genres were uncommon in the Japanese market at the time, and he took inspiration from the British acid jazz band Jamiroquai. The track list reads like a tour of the score's landmarks, each stretched to five or six minutes: Chrono Trigger, Secret of the Forest, Zeal Palace, Chrono Corridor, Undersea Palace, World Revolution, Guardia Millennial Fair, and the closing Outskirts of Time.

The gamble was noticed, and not all of the notice was kind. Mitsuda later recalled the criticism the style drew, joking in a question and answer for his own studio that if social media had existed in 1995, he would have gone up in flames. The album stayed in print anyway: it was reissued in 2004, and twenty years after the game, Mitsuda titled his 2015 anniversary concerts in Tokyo The Brink of Time as well, performing with his group Millennial Fair and announcing the orchestral and vocal arrangement album To Far Away Times at the same shows.