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 Gaspar, the Guru of Time.

Chrono Trigger, naturally, involves a great deal of time travel. Early in the game, you leap between timeframes without any control of where you’re going. However, the first time you step through a time gate and there’s more than one other timeline you’ve been to, you appear in a special location in the game called The End of Time. It looks like little more than a small cobblestone island in a sea of blackness with shafts of light at one end. You can step into these beams to jump to any time period you’ve been to.

Master of The End of Time is Gaspar, who leans against a gas lamppost in the middle of the place, sleeping. When you speak to him he wakes (the anime staple sleep-bubble coming from his mouth pops noisily). He offers some reasonably useful advice, mainly on the nature of time in the game.

Gaspar’s innocuous form is very misleading. He’s a powerful and wise character, like the two other gurus, Belthasar and Melchior. They originate in 12000 BC like Janus and Schala. Also like Janus and Schala, he was cast from this time when Queen Zeal attempted to take control of the energy of Lavos.

Later in the game, once the time machine Epoch has become available to you, visiting The End of Time as a kind of crossroads in the game is no longer necessary. Instead, it serves only as a place to spar with the mysterious Spekkio. More on Spekkio in another episode.