In 1992 Square assembled what it called the Dream Team: Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and manga legend Akira Toriyama. This episode tells the story of the 1995 Super Nintendo classic Chrono Trigger, from its origins as a cancelled CD-ROM project squeezed onto a 32 megabit cartridge to composer Yasunori Mitsuda's grueling ordeal of sleeping under his desk, losing 40 tracks to a hard drive crash, and being hospitalized with ulcers.

We explore the mechanics that rewrote RPG rules, including the removal of random encounters, Active Time Battle 2.0 with positional techs and combo attacks, and the invention of New Game Plus. We also unpack the time travel narrative spanning 65,000 BC to 2300 AD, the parasite Lavos, the executive intervention that reversed Crono's planned permanent death, Ted Woolsey's  ...