Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 10:30 am
CHRONO TRIGGER (Upgrade Ver.) – Roleplaying Game Review
CHRONO TRIGGER (Upgrade Ver.) is a Roleplaying game from SQUARE ENIX Co., Ltd., first launched in 8th December 2011.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 1,254+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes CHRONO TRIGGER (Upgrade Ver.) Stand Out
Journey to the forgotten past, to the far future, and to the end of time. A big adventure to save the planet, now begins…
CHRONO TRIGGER is the timeless role-playing classic developed by the ‘Dream Team’ of DRAGON QUEST creator Yuji Horii, Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, and the creators of FINAL FANTASY. As the story unfolds, embark on a journey to different eras: the present, the middle ages, the future, prehistory, and ancient times! Whether you're a first-time player or a longtime fan, this epic quest to save a planet's future promises hours of enthralling adventure!
As the definitive version of CHRONO TRIGGER, not only have the controls been updated, the graphics and sound have also been revamped to make your adventure even more fun and enjoyable to play. To complete your journey, also included is the mysterious ‘Dimensional Vortex’ dungeon and the forgotten ‘Lost Sanctum’ dungeon. Meet the challenges presented to you and long-lost secrets may be revealed…
Story:
A chance encounter amid the festivities of Guardia's Millennial Fair in Leene Square introduces our young hero, Crono, to a girl by the name of Marle. Deciding to explore the fair together, the two soon find themselves at an exhibition of the Telepod, the latest invention by Crono's longtime friend Lucca. Marle, fearless and brimming with curiosity, volunteers to assist in a demonstration. An unanticipated malfunction, however, sends her hurtling through a rift in the dimensions. Taking hold of the girl's pendant, Crono bravely follows in pursuit. But the world into which he emerges is the one of four centuries before. Journey to the forgotten past, the distant future, and even to the very End of Time. The epic quest to save a planet's future makes history once again.
Key features:
Active Time Battle Version 2
During battle, time will not stop, and you can enter commands when the character's gauge is full. The enemies' positions will change as time passes, so choose your actions based on any given situation.
‘Tech’ moves and combos
During battle, you can unleash special ‘Tech’ moves, including abilities and/or magic and characters can combine these abilities to unleash all new combo attacks which are unique to them. There are over 50 different types of combos that you can execute between two and three characters!
Experience the 'Dimensional Vortex' and the 'Lost Sanctum' dungeons
The Dimensional Vortex: a mysterious, ever-changing dungeon existing outside of space and time. What wonders await you at its center? The Lost Sanctum: enigmatic gates in prehistoric and medieval times will lead you to these forgotten chambers. Meet the challenges presented to you and long-lost secrets may be revealed…
Graphics and sound
While keeping the atmosphere of the original, the graphics have been updated in higher resolution. As for the sound and music, under the supervision of composer Yasunori Mitsuda, all songs have been updated for an even more immersive gameplay experience.
Autosave
In addition to saving at a save point or choosing to quit from the menu, your progress is saved automatically while traversing the map.
This Roleplaying game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, CHRONO TRIGGER (Upgrade Ver.) is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 24th July 2023
Recent improvements include:
Fixed a bug.
Download & Availability
CHRONO TRIGGER (Upgrade Ver.) is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get CHRONO TRIGGER (Upgrade Ver.) on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This game is an actual masterpiece and could potentially be the greatest story ever told through any medium. Story: 10/10 Music: 10/10 Gameplay: 10/10 (Git gud Death Mountain Haters) If for whatever reason you haven't played this absolutely EPIC JRPG yet… Do it. Your only regret will be that you didn't pick it up sooner.
They made this soooo easy to play on the phone. An actual dream. Would love more Jrpgs to be this well made.
This game truly is the entire package, and the wrapping, with the pretty bow on top. The story is engaging, the gameplay is smooth and crisp, the artwork is beautifully rendered, and the replayability is unmatched. With modern technology, where it is, this is one of the few truly masterful RPG games that could be configured for iOS accessibility function for visually, impaired and blind people using the voice over system. Hopefully that becomes a norm with future games, but as of right now, there are so woefully few games for accessibility friendly systems like iOS. We would love for this game to take that step and for the developers to consider that there is an entire demographic of customers out there who are visually impaired or fully blind that would absolutely adore the story in this game if they made it Voiceover/accessibility, friendly. Just food for thought.
A solid port of one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Selection on menus when playing on iOS is a little difficult but gameplay on AppleTV, with any controller, is just like playing in the 90s.
Appears to be missing the anime cutscene when Robo first appears. We read online the cutscenes are there on later events (Ayla) but wanted to reach out on the store page as we have not gotten that far yet. We do see the Movies option in Extras but we havent cleared the game yet to be able to see them. Thanks for bringing this classic to iOS, it plays like a dream with no hassle in regard to mechanics and controls.
Everything about this game is Fire Combat, Story, All the Ending, side Quest, This Game was Ahead of its time and 30 years later the combat has not been matched, from duel tech, triple tech the gameplay never gets boring. 10/10 A MUST PLAY GAME for any gamer.
Plays like a dream on our phone. The gameplay, music, and story is peak as always. The UI for the phone and the overall performance is very good. Only thing we would add would be an option to adjust the sound settings. Otherwise though its perfect.
The game runs great, we have zero complaints. We do wonder how long we have to wait for you guys to do CHRONO cross though.
Havent gotten far in it but we love it. It was hard to move around at first, Then we connected our switch controller to our iPad and its amazing.
Generational in it's time of creation and still holds up.
There are a few bugs but honestly this is our childhood game so we love it anyway. We wish they would get rid of those bugs because we did pay 10 bucks for this so we want to work properly but hey its still worth it.
The new edition has lots of challenges you unlock after beating the game the first time. You can return will all of your old tools and advanced HP/MP to follow up on them with New Game+ mode. We bought this game when it debuted. Almost three decades later, we love it. The graphics are simple, but there is something special about it.
Finished this game after playing it on and off for around 6 years and it has an amazing payoff. There is many endings left for us to complete but this game needs to get a remake like Live A Live. The art, music, and world building is some of the best in gaming. Rest in peace Akira Toriyama.
Theres a reason this game is one of the greatest of all time. The characters, their design and dialogue, the story with them. Its an amazing time, we implore all of you to play this masterpiece. Combat has aged very well. Play this on your Apple TV if you have one, its stunning to look at on a HD big screen. If your in mourning, us too. Its the community he built that is massive, and dont be afraid to reach out to them.
Superb Product! We are not paid review writer.
Excellent game excellent story for the time it was made it definitely had a very complex story for the SNES that made it all the better wish they made a remake with todays graphics and more in depth time conundrums would be epic all in all 10/10 must buy and play.
Doesnt suffer from the same frame pacing issues that that PC (Steam) version has a modern hardware/Windows. Yay! However, there is an awful filter that just ruins the pixel art that you cant disable. This filter is present on PC but you can turn it off. If this port had feature parity with the PC version, it would be the best way to play this game easily (unless they fixed the PC port). Between the weird issues and poor design choice on any platform, the best version of the game remains the DS port, which is sadly cost-prohibitively expensive.
We really hope we can change the display language inside the game instead of changing system language.
We cant seem to transfer this app that we bought with a gift card to our new phone and thats unfortunate that Ill have to burn more money on this and wait a long while to be interested to play a completely new save file.
Needs an option for the original translation, we dont know what a silver swords is or Athenian water. We need a lode sword and revives.
For those of you who dont know, after snes, this game was released on PlayStation as part of the Final Fantasy Chronicles. It has a lot in common with FF, but its a lot like Secret of Mana, another Squaresoft snes title. This game is mostly a blast, except for the slick and icy part, which is just aggravating. We dont need to pay to be angry. We get that for free. The animations are a lot of fun, though.
We love this game but wish the mobile version. You guys have on here had arena of ages it was on the ds lite version of CHRONO trigger and was a lot of fun you guys should add it im sure Im not the only that would love it.
Great game, but no way to mute sound? We cant listen to music or podcasts while playing? Surprising.
We love this game dearly and it works fine on iPhone. We downloaded the app on our Apple TV, which is signed into the same iCloud/game center profile with the hopes that we would be able to load a cloud save after playing the game on our phone for two hours. Sadly, this is not the case. Cloud saves from one device will not show up on a different device. In the iOS cloud save/load dialog, it specifically states that, you can load data saved to cloud servers from other devices. But this clearly doesnt work so thats a bummer. We would have just emulated it if we had known this so we didnt spend $10. Otherwise its an amazing game.
CAN WE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GET A PATCH THAT GIVES US THE OPTION TO REMOVE THE TERRIBLE SMOOTHING FILTER FROM THIS GAME AND ALLOW US TO SELECT THE UNFILTERED VERSION TO HAVE THE BEAUTIFUL RETRO GRAPHICS LIKE IN THE STEAM PC RELEASE SMH WITHOUT IT THIS GAME FEELS UNPLAYABLE IN MY OPINION.
This is one of our fav games all time but the sound only runs through ear buds. It wont play through the speakers on the phone.
When you use the controls to move diagonally across the map, theres a stutter. It doesnt happen when youre on the world map, but when youre traversing normally across the game. Ex. A house, the fair, cathedral, etc.
You would think after so many years that they would fix the issues with being able to toggle the sound. There is no option to so you can play your own music while playing.
The game described as supporting 8 languages but there is no option to change the game languages.
Its everything we remember, and we love it, but we cant seem to get the audio to work.
This is our fist time ever playing this game, it looked so interesting and thats it is, a great game with a awesome story if you like rpgs youll love this game. Seriously its great please consider it.
Great port with amazing quality of life changes. Just one issue: in Extras, under Illustrations, you can view any picture, but when you tap the screen to exit that picture, the app crashes.
This is the way to port jrpg games. We prefer to play on iPad. When controller support is taken away from games that had were released them, it feels a little dumb to say the least. This game does it correctly. Thank you for the effort.
So far the game runs well. We hope the devs keep it optimized for devices such as ours which is a 11 Pro Max. Otherwise we may have to turn off automatic updates for it or something. We have always been a fan of this game and it is great to be able to have a copy of it even if it is a digital copy. It is sad that the series is somewhat short lived however. As far as we know; there are only two official dedicated sequels to the game called Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross. From what we understand; Radical Dreamers was the first sequel but it was text based and was very obscure and unappealing and easily neglected because of those factors along with difficulty issues. It would be nice if Square could release a updated version much similar to the original game with the same engine and some of the various mechanics that made Chrono Trigger such a legendary game. We remember reading there was a group that recreated the game with such changes before, but only as a fan based project sadly and nothing official.. We are sure it would be very enjoyable if even as a text based game, Radical Dreamers made a port over to the mobile market with some improvements to the user interface and combat systems. It is surprising that while Final Fantasy IV had been updated so many times; other games including ones related to the more notable have received less attention.. As for Chrono Cross; we never actually played this one ourselves, but we have heard and read both good and bad things about it. In a way; its a title sounds as if it needs a major story rewrite or something. We do not remember much given we only know so little to begin with. But if it is ever re-released; hopefully it will also be updated. We really want the story from the original game to continue and carry on and for Chrono Trigger to be recognized for the long term. There are still things we have yet to try with the game such as Bluetooth and Wired Control support and limitations and general gameplay in the long term. Since we only recently downloaded this version; we still have much exploring and testing to do, but again, so far it is great and runs well! We have only ever played the version for the Super NES. We wanted the version for the PlayStation but it has been hard to obtain and the one that could be played on the GBA/ NDS had some issues we were not found about due to certain restrictions. We noticed many of the remakes coming out are beginning to have more CGI themed cinematics and/ or gameplay such as FF IV. We mean no offense, they like that they are being updated, but some bits do look weird. And we also noticed some reviews on games like the Mana games needing updating to run more efficiently. Anyway; please keep up the good work and please do not push to hard to make some already great gamers more perfect than they already are! Its like the FFVII Remake; we are one of those who do not enjoy The whole release by episode and the digital content themes.. It is actually quite the frustration.. Thank you.
Chrono Trigger is a timeless classic. We love it, and we hope that if youre reading this that you do or will love it as well.
This game is one of the best- The Best RPGs ever, and its on iOS. Seriously. This is awesome. The only thing that would make it better, would the additional cut scenes from the PlayStation. Otherwise, very nice.
If you love RPGs and have never played this SNES Square-soft classic do yourself a favor and pull the trigger and buy it. It doesnt even have to be this App Store. This story takes you threw time and will be an adventure that you will never forget. Forget about the graphics and delve into the story and have fun grinding levels. There is a new game + mode which is well worth it.
Its a fabulous game, but please add controller supporr.
Played it back on the SNES. Honestly we were not expecting to like the mobile version. We were wrong. This is great! The worst part is the cutscenes (kept from the PS1) that feel like they interrupt the moment, but you can skip them and there are not that many.
Its chrono trigger so its good. 5 stars.
As far as we can tell this is a pretty good port of CHRONO Trigger. Ive clocked in 12 hours so far and its never had any glitches or crashes and we play on the IPhone X. We had some trouble with a mini game at Leanne Square where you toss the rocks at the creatures to push them back but other than that its been alright. It was just slow response time to our button pressing.
We played this game on SNES and it plays so well on the iPhone. Ive replayed it so many times over the years and was so happy to see it available on iOS and have continued to replay it. For anyone who is a fan of RPGs we HIGHLY recommend this game. It is truly a classic.
Great port of the game , so please consider add mac support consider the m1 chips mac.
Seriously. This is one of the best rpg games of all time. Played since its release. Just play this all the way Im end out if you havent. Good game.
Amazing game and amazing port. One of the bests games Ive ever played.
This is the best JRPG and arguably the greatest RPG ever made. Art was done by the creator of DBZ and music/design was but the guys behind FF6&7. Its absolutely amazing.
Its a good game and its cool how you turned a controller game into a mobile game.
Loved this game growing up, a truly timeless classic adventure. If there could be an update that would allow the Voice Over accessibility feature for blind people to also play the game that would be amazing, as we have lost our eyesight and really miss playing games.
We played this on iPad a few months back and cant stop thinking about it. Everything we play is in comparison to Chrono Trigger now. We even caught ourselves the other day while we were out hiking thinking it would be nice to bury some wood in the past and then come back to our time and have petrified wood. What has this game done to us. A must play. Seriously.
Brings back our childhood in the best way.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.1.1
- Size: 532.42 MB
- iOS: 11.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, ZH, ES, ZH
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: SQUARE ENIX Co., Ltd.
Last updated: 24th July 2023 | Genre: Roleplaying | Developer: SQUARE ENIX Co., Ltd.