One of the most beloved roleplaying video games of all time celebrates its 25th anniversary this week – Chrono Trigger.

The original Super Nintendo release came out on March 11, 1995 in Japan, and was released later that year in North America. Though it was released during the heyday of RPGs on the Super Nintendo console, its popularity has endured even two decades later.

Part of the reason behind the game’s critical and commercial success was the “dream team” of people that Squaresoft had working on the project. Designers included Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series, and Yuji Horii, the creator of the Dragon Quest series; Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were easily the two biggest Japanese RPG series at the time (and continue to be today). Others who worked on the game included Akira Toriyama, a manga artist best known for Dragon Ball who also contributed designs to the Dragon Quest series. The script was written by Masato Kato, who went on to work on Final Fantasy titles. The music was composed mostly by Yasunori Mitsuda, who went on to work for the Xeno and Inazuma Eleven series; Mitsuda fell ill during production and deferred composition of remaining tracks to Nobuo Uematsu, who has composed the music for the entire Final Fantasy series.

The game focused on the character Crono, who attends the Millennial Fair with Princess Marle. The pair attends a demonstration of a teleporting machine by Crono’s friend Lucca, but when Marle’s pendant reacts to the portal, it sends her back in time. Crono and Lucca then chase after her through time and rescue her; their adventures through the timeline send them to a number of different times and places in an attempt to stop their world from being destroyed both in the past and in the future.

The success of Chrono Trigger led to a quick rerelease of the game on Sony’s PlayStation console in 1999, which added anime-style cutscenes to the game; the rerelease was part of Squaresoft’s lead-up to the release of the sequel to Chrono Trigger, called Chrono Cross. Chrono Cross focused on the idea of parallel worlds rather than time travel, and was also hugely successful – selling more than a million copies worldwide and receiving near-perfect scores in reviews – but was only vaguely connected to Chrono Trigger in terms of the plot and characters.

Though there’s no planned continuation of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, the games have lived on via ports to current consoles (Trigger was rereleased on the Nintendo DS in 2008). Other recent games have made references to Chrono Trigger, including Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Blue Dragon, the latter of which also had Akira Toriyama as an artist and character designer.