Chrono Trigger font
Chrono Trigger's dialogue is set in a proportional 8 by 12 pixel font Square drew for the game. It was never released as a font file: the identification comes from the font bank inside the cartridge, extracted and rebuilt glyph for glyph.
A Chrono Trigger font generator, your words in this lettering, as an image you can keep.
What it matched
About the lettering
Chrono Trigger is a game that talks constantly, and nearly all of that talk is set in this one font: dialogue, narration and menus run in it for the whole adventure. The title logo is separate hand-drawn artwork, not this typeface. For thirty years the dialogue face existed only inside the cartridge, and the conversion catalogs listed Chrono Trigger as a famous gap, with rip sheets and a fan redraw standing in for the real thing. The pilot extraction changed that: the bank sits uncompressed at offset 0x3F2060, and once the right layout (row-interleaved 2bpp, the third of three decoders tried) was found, the decoded bank spelled the game's published text table exactly, in order, which is the verification: glyph index equals text code. Two sibling banks, a second font at 0x3F8E60 and a partial font at 0x3FC9FC, are documented in the same audit and queued; a fourth bank is stored compressed and was left alone. The one honest gap is widths: no discrete width table exists in the offsets audit or the bytes around the bank, so the build measures advances from the art and says so on its face.
Common questions
What font does Chrono Trigger use?
Its dialogue is set in a proportional 8 by 12 pixel font Square drew for the game itself. It has no retail name and was never sold; the extracted build is called Chrono Trigger Dialogue. The title logo is hand-drawn artwork, not this font.
Can I download the Chrono Trigger font?
Square never released it as a file, and font.lol does not distribute the extraction. The free fan redraw ChronoType by Caveras covers the same lettering for personal projects under CC BY-NC-SA.
How was the font identified if no file existed?
From the cartridge. The font bank sits uncompressed at ROM offset 0x3F2060 in the US release; decoded as row-interleaved 2bpp, its 84 glyphs spell the game's published text table in order, and the rebuilt font's specimen matches the bank pixel for pixel. The build passes the FontBakery validation gate clean.
Make your own in this style
Your words in the Chrono Trigger lettering, pick a treatment, download the image, keep it. The full catalog lives in the generator.
