Chrono Trigger's Prison Disarmament Feature

The heroes of a tale being captured and locked up is a common trope in pretty much all forms of media and genres, and certainly no less so in RPGs--if anything, it might happen a bit more frequently than average in this particular storytelling landscape.  But RPGs do definitely stand out for just how very lax jailors are with their heroic detainees.  Aside from the fact that most cells and prisons in RPGs are not terribly difficult to escape from by virtue of poor design and poorer guards, the standard internment procedure for most RPG holding facilities as regards captives’ possessions is “toss it all in an unlocked box down the hall, preferably still within eyesight of their cell.”  And that’s if these super-powered world-renowned warriors who have been mowing enemy soldiers down by the hundreds are relieved of their equipment at all; in most cases, wardens hold right of property to be so sacred that prisoners are tossed in their cage still fully armed and armored, without so much as a bag check to see whether the sack of 99 healing potions hanging on their belt might also contain a full assortment of explosive attack items.

(It does, but in fairness, no RPG character I've ever encountered seems to connect the dots between "The walls of this cell are some bricks that were laid down hundreds of years ago" and "I'm currently carrying 36 Grenades, 14 Hi-Bombs, and 1 item that is literally just called Real Actual Nuke").

Every now and then, though, you come across an RPG imprisonment that views detainment as more than a polite suggestion, and the incarcerated heroes actually have their swords, shields, guns, spears, armor, magical accessories, bombs, portable heavy artillery, monster-summoning crystals, knives, bows, axes, hammers, poisons, crossbows, vials of varying acids, darts, maces, spell scrolls, orbital laser cannons, and whatever pathetically insufficient everyday object the team mage is pretending is a weapon removed, and placed somewhere that isn't just 20 paces in a straight line away from the cell's most accessible exit.*  And 1 of the earlier and more interesting examples of this can be found in Chrono Trigger's sequence aboard the Blackbird, in which the party has been captured by Dalton and locked in a cell.

You have to give credit to Dalton: he may be an idiot, but he's still smarter than at least 90% of other villains who lock their foes up.  The guy sees an anthropomorphic frog hauling around a broadsword longer than he is, he takes it.  He sees a gal with a haunted look of emotional desperation in her eyes and a crossbow in her hands, he confiscates the hell out of that crossbow.   Hell, he even literally disarms the damn robot; Robo's tossed in the brig sans his hands, somehow, theoretically just as harmless as the rest of them.  And for good measure, the guy removes all their crap, grabs their item sack, pockets all their cash, and then divides it all into multiple treasure chests that he stashes in half a dozen unconnected spots on his ship.  Just about the only oversight Dalton had was not to realize that the titanium weapons of war that Robo was carrying on his wrists were nothing compared to the hands that Ayla's packing.

Well, that, and employing underlings that can be fooled by the Sick Prisoner routine being played by a robot.

And you know, it's actually a pretty neat little gameplay mechanic, 1 of many bits of technical flavor that contributed to making Chrono Trigger so memorable.  By splitting all the gear to recover up into multiple locations, with the party being at a severe combat disadvantage until the weapons and armor for each member are restored, what might have been a very short and uneventful little hiccup in the story has its duration extended, and becomes more memorable for its application of new strategy and mechanics to the usual dungeon-exploring grind.  Either you've got to rely only on a much weaker Ayla alone in combat for a time, or you're actually forced to briefly engage in 1 of the earliest incarnations of a stealth section in an RPG as you try to navigate your way to an equipment chest that's unguarded, and either way, it makes the Blackbird arc stand out, which would otherwise have been very difficult to do given that it's basically filler between some of the biggest moments in the game's story.  Coding in a mechanism to disarm and distribute the party's stuff was a creative flourish that Chrono Trigger used to its full potential.

…Except that, when you think about it, it kind of didn't.  In fact, for a feature that the creators had to invent and work out the mechanics of, it's surprising that they only used it this 1 time in the game.

I mean, it's not like there haven't been scenarios previously during the course of Chrono Trigger where this idea of disarming the party for a time could be implemented.  1 of the many memorable sequences of the game is Crono's trial, and the incarceration and prison break that it leads to.  Crono gets shoved into his cell fully geared up for war, and while the war in question occurred 400 years prior, I'm relatively sure that most law enforcement experts in our own world would still raise a disapproving eyebrow at the idea of putting a guy in lockup with a fully loaded, bayonetted rifle in modern times.  Hell, Crono only gets more stuff to give him an edge in battle once he's behind bars; if he did well enough in the trial, there's a bag of healing items waiting for him on his cot.  Sure takes the piss out of the mint on a hotel pillow; next time I go out of town, I'm gonna book myself into a prison tower and enjoy some proper luxury.

So, like…if they'd invented the mechanics for enhancing an imprisonment stint in the story, why not also apply them here?  Get their money's worth out of the extra programming?  Hell, with Crono alone in the jail, it simplifies the retrieve-your-stuff goal down to just 3 chests (equipment, items, money) to find instead of the 5 for the full party later in the game, so it'd actually be an ideal "tutorial" version of the later mechanic.  Not that the Blackbird sequence is complicated enough to NEED that, of course, but still, ramping-up new mechanics is the elegant way to introduce them.  And while Crono's escape sequence is overall completely fine and functional, it's only especially noteworthy at the beginning and end of the mini-adventure, so if the Blackbird event is any indication, adding in the element of sneaking around to find your stuff  probably would only have made the section stand out all the better.

Heck, they could've employed this mechanic again to some degree later on in the story, too.  After the prehistoric party Ayla throws for Crono and company, the party wakes up missing the Gate Key, and have to track down who stole it, which turns out to be Kino, before it was in turn stolen from him by the reptites.  The developers could have extended this theft to not just the single plot doohickey, but the entirety of the party's stuff, and make the act of following the reptites' trail one of also hunting down the party's other scattered belongings along the way.  Again, it'd even serve as a useful case of preparation for its use later, as Ayla's mandatory new addition to the party would introduce the fact that she can be relied on to battle even when the rest of the party is unable to.  Heck, it'd even make a little more sense overall; instead of Kino (who, let's face it isn't the brightest even by caveman standards) somehow managing to grab the most important item that Crono's got by some inexplicable ooga-booga intuition, his having just taken ALL of the heroes' stuff feels more realistic as a bit of petty lashing out.  And the reptites subsequently discarding/hiding the stuff they grabbed from Kino on their way back to their leader until they're left with the most interesting device would be a good reinforcement of the idea that they're overall more intellectually advanced than the humans, too.

I mean, obviously it's not like Chrono Trigger is lacking for having only ever employed its mechanic of separating the party from its gear once.  The Blackbird area is made memorable by it, and Crono's jailbreak and the prehistoric search for the Gate Key are both fully adequate and enjoyable parts of a great plot overall.  Still, kind of like the party-split dynamic that Final Fantasy 6 utilized less than it could have, the de-equipped scavenger hunt mechanic that CT invented for Dalton's imprisoning the party could have been used to decent effect earlier in the story, during events that were already present and suitable for it.  It just seems like a bit of a missed opportunity for Squaresoft to have gotten the most bang for its buck on this interesting nuance they'd coded.











* All the deadly implements of murder will still be stored somewhere on-base, of course, but hey, there's only so much sanity we can ask.