Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

I’ve played a lot of video games to completion over the years. I tend to finish these games once and then move on, periodically poking back in for a few minutes here and there. However, there have been a few games I’ve played through, start to finish, more than once. Metroid Prime, for example, I’ve played to completion four times. The SNES RPG Chrono Trigger, however, stands alone as a game I have played through at least a half dozen times. Three of those times were end on end. This game was that good.

With Chrono Trigger confirmed for Nintendo DS this November in North America, there’s a great deal of excitement floating around. There are all kinds of questions as well regarding additional material that’s being added for the port, but without a doubt, the game is going to sell very well. This feature will focus on some of the more obscure aspects of the game in great detail. That means this will serve as your spoiler alert. If you’ve never played Chrono Trigger and you don’t want to have the game’s various twists and turns ruined for you, stop reading now and ignore all of these from now on. Prepare yourself, for I am about to reminisce.

Today, I’ll talk about Janus Zeal.

You were warned about the spoilers, so now you have only yourself to blame.

Janus appears very little in the game as Janus, but is one of the most critical characters to the game. Like his sister, the young mage Schala, Janus hails from 12000 BC in the utopian kingdom of Zeal. As a young boy, he is flung 12600 years into the future and dropped among a group of monsters. He goes on to become a powerful mage himself, renaming himself Magus, and leads the monsters against the men of the era who they are struggling against for dominance. Magus eventually kills one of the kingdom’s most loved knights and draws the vengeful wrath of that knight’s friend, Glenn, who Magus ends up turning into a frog.

Magus eventually meets up with the party in Chrono Trigger. While they have set out in aid of the kingdom to destroy him, you’re given the option of joining with Magus after defeating him in battle. As Glenn is in your party at this time, you’re able to decide that Glenn’s drive for vengeance outweighs the common goal your party has with Magus: to destroy Lavos.

Interestingly, if you decide to battle Magus again and kill him, it doesn’t change a whole lot in the game until the very end. You don’t get to play as him, which is unfortunate, but in the ending sequence, Glenn finally changes back from a frog into a man.

If you allow Magus to join the party, you get to rename him. I named him Janus on my second playthrough and all subsequent ones, and it helped to humanize him to me. Janus’ character is complex. On one hand is a tiny boy who was thrown, helpless, through 12 millennia and raised by monsters. On the other is a powerful foe who’s killed some very good people and battles over some really, really cool music. Knowing Janus’ history as Schala’s brother made it difficult for me to choose to kill him on repeated playthroughs of the game, despite my wish to see Glenn destroy him. It became, for me, something of a shades of gray issue. Did the evil done to Janus kill him when it made him into Magus, or does it serve as an explanation… or even an excuse?

I found myself wishing for a resolution at the end of the game that brought Janus and Schala back together. Schala, in some form, reappears in the sequel Chrono Cross under the name Kid… for some reason with an Australian accent. A character who looks and moves exactly like Magus is also in that game, but he is not Magus… I assume he was meant to be at first. That game had a lousy ending. But I digress.

Image source: Creative Uncut