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When I was a kid I wanted to review games. I dreamed of writing for EGM or GamePro (oh god some of you are so young you don’t know those). I thought I could combine my loves of writing and games. Instead I became a teacher who coaches esports. Close enough. Pictured: Actual mags I owned as a kid

Still, for some reason I think I can pontificate on my love for a silly little art form for children. So for the month of February, I'm going to write each day about some game or series that I love. Go into detail as to what makes it amazing to me and maybe why it might be amazing to you too.

Because truly what the world truly needs is the video game opinions of one more straight cis white dude.

I’ll start tomorrow with some low hanging fruit. Some will be games everyone has played. A few will be games just meaningful to me. But it’s the month of love, baby. And I love stupid little video games. Pictured: Me, probably like eight, playing an NES on someone's floor. Also what is that face

It's midnight EST, so let's start here. Day one. Here's a game I love...

So Chrono Trigger. Have you heard of this? Anyone heard of this? It's an SNES RPG from the Final Fantasy guys, the Dragon Quest guys, AND the Goku guy. That's right Goku is here and he's got a sword and a frog and he's going to fuck you up.

Way back when I was a wee lad we never had enough money to buy video games. But my mom worked at a Kroger which had a video rental store in it - a relic of a bygone age for sure - and so we could get movie and game rentals for very, very cheap. That's where I met Chrono Trigger.

I already had a love of RPGs thanks to Final Fantasy II/IV (we'll talk about that later in the month), but Chrono Trigger was a different beast. The cover had this wild artwork of a guy leaping in the air and teaming up with this girl and frog to strike at a monster with a flaming sword. SO cool.

I remember renting that copy of Chrono Trigger so many times. The store had two, so I had to hope I got the one with my save on it (I eventually noticed some superficial differences between the cartridges) and then hope that no one else ended up overwriting it. I played the entire game this way.

The joy of Chrono Trigger comes not just from nostalgia. It’s a game with very little to complain about. The artwork, the music, the battle system, the story, the general pacing and difficulty - all of it flows together to make a unique feeling game that holds up 30 years later.

I guess if I'm going to do this I should give you the facts and then get into just why this game touches my heart. Chrono Trigger is a turn-based RPG about a group of teenagers from 1000 AD who stumble upon time travel. Which I'm sure lots of people did in 1000 AD.

From there, our time-crossing heroes Crono, Marle (rhymes with "Carl" sorry not sorry), and Lucca break up a war in the middle ages, discover a conspiracy in the modern royal court, and discover that the apocalypse is just 999 years away - and there's a chance they can stop it.

The characters are simple. You're not going to get pages and pages of lore on Crono, meant to be a silent protagonist who could-be-you. But the rest of your party is just interesting enough to fill in the blanks and make extremely memorable.

Marle is torn between being a princess and a party girl (meaning in your party, adventuring throughout time). Lucca is haunted by the crippling of her mother by machines and so strives to perfect machinery herself. Ayla is driven by a need to protect her people, now and in the future.

Magus is special: a boy tossed through time who embraces evil as a means to an end - both revenge and justice, saving his sister and the world. These characters don't get extended monologues like a later FF character about nature and existence. But they're fully formed in their archetypicality.

You could add twenty more hours and flesh out the world, but you don't need to - Chrono Trigger DS tried and kinda stumbled here. Instead, this is a 20 hour RPG that feels like a full experience compared to the 60 hour playthroughs of other games at the top of "Best RPGs Ever" lists.

It's effortless in a way that feels deliberate. The colorful world of Toriyama's art helps, aided by Yasunori Mitsuda's impossibly good soundtrack (though Nobuo Uematsu's contributions can't be forgotten - Tyranno Lair might be my favorite dungeon music ever). www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYN_...