Underrated and many people still haven't heard of it or played this wonderful game.

I played it only recently, some years ago, and I asked myself over and over again why I never owned this game when I had a SNES. It's really great!

Characters, story, battles, music... They're all so great and the time travel theme got my attention as well. I really loved it and now I want to make my fiancé experience this game. ^_^

It came out in 1995. It's still awesome. How many games from this gen will we be able to say that about in 14-15 years?

YES, YES, A MILLION TIMES YES!

The only way someone can say Chrono Trigger is overrated is if they're comparing it to other SNES (or Genesis) RPGs. Otherwise it's probably just a younger gamer who doesn't like the older style graphics.  A case of 2D-phobia.  (Which is fine, but in the case of Chrono Trigger pretty extreme, considering how colorful and well-designed the graphics are.)

The idea to make Chrono Trigger was actually an idea Sakaguchi (Creator of Final Fantasy) and Yuji Horii (Creator of Dragon Quest) had been throwing around for a while.  They wanted to make an RPG that no one else had done before.  And Sakaguchi wanted to make an RPG that allowed him to, as he put it, "play around with Toriyama's universe". So after a long time of planning, they got a large group (basically, most of the best JRPG developers of the day) together to make the game.

A lot of the games early development was just based around themes and elements drafted by Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii, who were credited with the main producing and development roles of the game.  But they were expanded on by Masato Kato and Akira Toriyama when writing the actual final story for the game. Many of the areas of the game are distinctly Akira Toriyama, such as 65 Million BC or 2300 AD.  Nearly everything has that feel of AKira Toriyama, not just from his Character and Monster designs, but from his type of storytelling and comedic releif.

The reason the game had so many endings was because the various branching storylines converged at so many points, it was easier, storywise, to allow the player to choose when to end the game.  Other famous JRPG developers also contributed to the games plot such Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita.

Definitely not overrated. Maybe it isn't the most unique character or story, but it still in incredibly engrossing and fun.

Regarding the DS version, I can see why someone would say that. Don't get me wrong, I love the SNES version, and put it in the top 5 games on the system. But the DS version has been tinkered with, and it feels more sluggish as a result. And the extra content that I was so looking forward to? It has the worst case ever of actually feeling tacked on to a game.

But at the core question, no, it's not overrated. It is an excellent game, that can still shine even when SE decides to... touch things up a bit...

yes, it is definitly overrated. i just don't found anything amazing about it, the story is average, the lenght of the games is average, battles are average nothing special, graphics are good but not as amazing as other rpgs of the time like bahamut lagoon or terranigma, the stages get boring fast.