Even after nearly 30 years since its original release, Chrono Trigger remains one of the greatest RPGs of all time where many players were initially drawn to the game because of the iconic artwork of late Dragon Ball Creator Akira Toriyama.
While the RPG did receive a successor in Chrono Cross, it turns out Square Enix came very close to developing a Chrono Trigger fighting game in the ’90s too.
Japanese publication 4Gamer recently sat down with the storied game developer Seiichi Ishii where this surprising information came up.
Ishii is one of the fathers of 3D fighting games having coordinated and designed the original Virtua Fighter for Sega before joining Namco where he directed and designed the first two Tekken entries.
In late 1995, he would establish his own development studio as Dream Factory after catching the attention of Hironobu Sakaguchi.
The Final Fantasy Creator approached him because Sakaguchi was very interested in the 3D cinematics used in Tekken according to Ishii, and so a partnership arose to make Dream Factory a subsidiary of Square.
It of course led to Dream Factory working on a new 3D fighting game for Square where the Tekken creator requested to join forces with Akira Toriyama.
Ishii claims they were prototyping a Chrono Trigger fighting game, but then the man that gave the world Son Goku saw what they were doing and had a different idea.
“Then Dream Factory was founded and started having discussions with Square Enix, I said ‘I want to work with Toriyama-san’,” said Ishii via 4Gamer. “It was around the time when Trunks was heavily featured in Dragon Ball Z, and I wanted a character like that.
“But at first, we were actually meant to be making a fighting game based on Chrono Trigger. While we were in the prototype phase of that, Akira Toriyama was also there and he told us ‘I’ll draw new characters for you’, which is what we ended up with.”
There’s no mention of if whether any of that initial prototype or anything may still survive at the archives at Square or Dream Factory, but considering the way data preservation was handled in the ’90s — especially at Square — we’re going to guess probably not.
It would be crazy to see how the likes of Chrono, Magus, Ayla and Frog would have been translated into a 3D fighting game officially, but we all know what the project ended up becoming.
Tobal No. 1 released in 1996 on the original PlayStation as one of the first fighting games to focus on the home console experience with more single-player content than the competition at the time.
Toriyama provided not just the original character designs for Tobal, he also helped with the setting and worldbuilding featuring the odd charm that only he could provide.
The developers also honored the mangaka by putting his signature self-insert design into the game as the Toriyama Robo secret character.
While the new fighting game found initial success by being packaged with a Final Fantasy 7 demo disc, Tobal never fully caught on like the developers had hoped.
Dream Factory did release Tobal 2 in 1997, which never left Japan, and Square has scarcely brought up the series since.
Ishii reveals in the interview that the Bouncer also started development as a fighting game, but it was changed as the team was told to make the game more cinematic.
He says that he moved to Canada in 2003 because his work stress was so severe that doctors reportedly told him he would die if he didn’t change his environment though he still tried to manage the company abroad.
With his 56th birthday on the horizon, Ishii claims he’s considering returning to Japan and still has the desire to work on a new fighting game.
The original Virtua Fighter designer even ponders if he could negotiate with Sega and reboot the IP himself, which seems pretty unlikely to actually happen.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Tobal again recently, as Dragon Ball Super mangaka Toyotarou illustrated Chuji Wu from the game to honor his idol and teacher.
Akira Toriyama’s sudden death at just 68 years old impacted the world in a way that we’ve basically never seen before for an artist and showed how many lives he touched whether it be through manga, anime or the games he helped create.
You can find the full interview with Ishii on 4Gamer though of course it’s all in Japanese.