How Nonexistence Connects Chrono Trigger to Super Mario Bros. 2

There’s a quirk to the English localization for Chrono Trigger that makes a bit of world-building wordplay in the sequel hard to spot. But once you spot it, you can also make some sense of one of the more obscure bits of lore for Super Mario Bros. 2, believe it or not. It’s fun when video games connect in the most unlikely ways, and this one is quite the ride.

One of the key items in Chrono Trigger is the Masamune, a powerful sword capable of taking down Magus, an antagonist early in the game. Through a flashback, the player learns that this blade was once wielded by Cyrus, a valiant knight and the childhood friend of Glenn, but a fight against Magus ends with Cyrus being killed, Glenn being turned into a humanoid frog and the Masamune being split in two. Because the sword is broken in half, it makes sense, then, that it’s represented by two attendant spirits, Masa and Mune, who initially appear as human boys and then as impish sprites. When they challenge Crono’s party to battle, however, they combine to form into a single entity that’s bigger and beefier, and this is a sign that the sword functions as both two and one, though it’s always stronger when the two parts join together. 

Masa, Mune and their joined form in the middle.

The English version of Chrono Trigger is just one of many video games to feature a powerful sword called the Masamune, and in fact the original Final Fantasy featured a Masamune katana as the single best sword in the game, capable of turning even the most sheepish White Mage into a formidable attacker. It and all Masamune blades take their name from the thirteenth-century Japanese blacksmith Gorō Nyūdō Masamune, whose swords were of such high quality that the name still implies prestige today. But while the original Final Fantasy version of the Masamune is called that in both the English version and the original Japanese, Chrono Trigger is different. In the Japanese version of the game, this legendary sword is given a name that is, as far as I can tell, unique to the Chrono series: Grandleon (グランドリオン or Guranrion), and the sprits are known Grand (グラン and Guran) and Leon (リオン or Rion).

In Chrono Trigger, the plot events involving the Masamune mostly occur in the game’s medieval period, but when Crono’s party travels further back to antiquity, Masa and Mune are seen again alongside their older sister, Doreen, who looks just like them. When I first played Chrono Trigger back in the day, I figured it was some kind of a joke that Masa and Mune would both be named after this legendary mystical sword, but then their sister would have a plain, western name that’s otherwise inexplicable. And while this may be the case, there’s more going on with these characters than is immediately apparent just playing the English version of Chrono Trigger.

The Masamune turns up again in the sequel Chrono Cross, and this time Doreen figures more centrally in the associated story event. For reasons I won’t get into, both because they’re not explicitly stated in the game and because the details are a matter of debate among fans of the franchise, the Masamune becomes cursed. Once the curse is lifted, however, Doreen appears alongside her brothers, and together they transform it into an even more powerful form. In English, it’s called the Mastermune, and I suppose that’s a fair enough twist on the localized name, but in Japanese, its Grandream (グランドリーム , Gurandorīmu), because Doreen’s Japanese name (ドリーン or Dorīn) is very close to the katakana rendering of the English word dream, ドリーム or dorīmu. Neither name fully communicates that this new version of the sword is now powered by all three of them — Masa, Mune and Doreen — but what’s most interesting about the Japanese version is the way it connects Doreen with dreams, because this puts some of the things she says in Chrono Trigger in a different light.

Doreen , meanwhile, dances alone.

When Crono’s party first encounters Doreen in antiquity, she makes some cryptic comments — about the technomagical city you find yourself exploring but also about the nature of existence itself. Here are here three pieces of dialogue, in order of when you encounter her as they were rendered in the original, Super NES translation of the game:

This is the eternal kingdom of Zeal, where dreams can come true. But at what price?

Am I a butterfly dreaming I'm a man… or a bowling ball dreaming I’m a plate of sashimi? Never assume that what you see and feel is real!

I’m Doreen. Seek the hidden path, and open the doors of knowledge, each in turn.

What’s interesting about these quotes is that they mention dreams twice when the original Japanese version of the dialogue does not at all, per this translation:

This is the eternal Magic Kingdom Zeal, the place where all desires come true… However, there’s no telling how steep the price for that will end up being…

The world that you see with your eyes and the world that I see with my eyes may be completely different things. Got it? There are as many universes as lives. Don’t think that only the things you can see and touch are the truth. 

I’m Doreen. Seek the way that was shut. Get the order correct and open the doors of knowledge.

In the first one, the original Japanese has her specifically using the word 望み (nozomi), which can be translated as something like “hope,” “wish” or “desire.” Localizer Ted Woolsey instead chose dream, which also makes sense in English, but given that he creates an entirely new version of the second chunk of dialogue that also discusses dreams, I wonder if he was doing this to draw the player’s attention to the idea that Doreen and her brothers are some sort of dream beings, especially because the connection between Doreen’s name and the word dream is not especially apparent in English. It’s never actually stated explicitly in the game what Doreen, Masa and Mune are — the Chrono Compendium, which is a great resource for deep Chrono Trigger lore, just terms them as the dream species — and perhaps this was Woolsey’s way helping players understand these otherworldly characters.

Other NPCs in Zeal also make references to dream beings, and I don’t think it’s fully clear that they’re telling you about Doreen and her brothers, though that does seem to be the case. Here are a few pieces of dialogue as they’re given in the original Super NES localization, as well as the original Japanese — per this translation. For example, there’s a sleeping man who doesn’t seem to say anything of value in the English localization but who says something rather profound in the original Japanese.

Zzz...zzz...
Truths exist in dreams...
Herbal tea...zzz...crystals...zzz...

Zzz, zzz.
It is within dreams that there is reality.
It is within me that there is the universe.

And then there’s a woman who seems to be telling you what these creatures are — and that they have a connection to Lavos, the game’s primary mover, though it’s fairly cryptic in both the English and the Japanese.

Beings that are born of dreams, must return to them...
The power of Lavos can make hopes and dreams come true...

Born of dreams, returning to dreams...... beings such as that exist as well.
At times, human prayers and desires borrow the power of Lavos-sama and materialize.

Should we conclude that Doreen and her brothers are as this woman describes — beings born of dreams but somehow made real? And having a special connection to Lavos? 

Well, one way to attempt to answer that question is by looking at another item in the game: the dreamstone. Referred to basically the same way in the original Japanese, as ドリストーン (dorisutōn), it’s a red mineral that comes up in a few different time periods in the game. In antiquity, it’s what Melchior uses to create the Masamune. In the medieval period, it’s what’s needed to repair the broken Masamune even though it no longer exists. Only in the prehistoric period does it exist in vast quantities, and traveling back to then is necessary to repair the sword in later timelines. But dreamstone is not only associated with the Masamune; the same substance forms the pendant so pivotal to the game’s plot, worn by Marle, kicking off the game’s events — and before that poor, doomed Schala, and after that, Kid in Chrono Cross. Like the Masamune, the pendant was also created by Melchior, and it’s supposed in more that a few discussions online that if Masa and Mune are “figments” associated with the famous sword then perhaps Doreen is similarly the entity associated with the pendant — the “dream of Melchior” as it’s stated online, although I couldn’t find where in Chrono Cross this line is actually spoken. 

Now, Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross both open with their respective protagonists waking up in bed, but neither game really abounds with dream symbolism, so all this is more or less additional series lore that doesn’t really affect the central plot. Still, it’s interesting to be given this tacit acknowledgement that dreams hold a certain power in these games, even if those dreams are associated with seemingly inanimate objects. At the very least, we’re given some indication that elements from dreams can cross over into reality, and the people inhabiting the waking world could be interacting with a dream without realizing it. That should call to mind the heady, dream-focused surrealism of David Lynch… but there’s also a rather deep-cut connection to Super Mario Bros. 2. And, in fact, ol’ Doreen provides a way to make sense of an element from that game that otherwise goes unexplained.

If you’re reading this site, then you already know the plot of Super Mario Bros. 2, I would guess. In case you don’t, I’m going to spoil this decades-old game which, unlike Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, is very much about the business of dreams. In the game’s backstory, we’re told that Mario has a dream in which he opens a door and sees a whole new world, which is identified by a faroff voice as Subcon, the land of dreams, which has been conquered by an evil frog king named Wart. But then Mario wakes up, and afterwards he goes on a picnic with Luigi, Peach and Toad. While exploring a cave, they spy a door just like the one Mario dreamed about. The four enter and end up venturing through the very same Subcon, ultimately defeating Wart — at which point Mario wakes up again and realizes that all of *this* was also a dream. The end. 

The story as it is put in the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. 2. A condensed version plays in the game’s intro.

To put it differently, Mario has a dream within a dream, and then when the larger dream is revealed to be, in fact, a dream itself, we’re apparently meant to be surprised even though this has been heavily foreshadowed, and that’s not including the fact that the dream world he accesses (in both dreams) is called Subcon, which is almost certainly short for subconscious, just it case it was not clear enough where all this is headed. 

Once Wart is defeated, Mario goes to a back room where he pulls out a block that had been stuffed into the mouth of a vase, like a cork in a wine bottle. Once he does this, eight red-suited, white-faced fairies fly out, having been apparently held captive in there this whole time. We have not seen them before. There’s a brief victory celebration where the fairies dispose of Wart’s battered corpse, but then the action changes to Mario sleeping in bed, signalling that all of this was a dream. And in lieu of staff credits, we get a scroll of all the players in the game, good and bad. Mixed in with the various generic enemies, we also see these fairies, and we’re told that they are also called Subcon. This always seemed weird to me, that this race of fairies would be called the same thing as the place they inhabit, but I suppose that it’s not weirder than anything else in this game.

Them being named Subcon, however, is all the info we’re given about these little guys. They don’t really show up again, although the Sprixies from Super Mario 3D World are clearly meant to evoke them in their design, seeing as how 3D World is in some ways a spiritual follow-up to Super Mario Bros. 2. And I, being an intense little kid who wanted to know everything about games I enjoyed, was always frustrated that there apparently wasn’t more to the story.

However, there sort of is, because as we all know now, Super Mario Bros. 2 was based on a previous Nintendo title that despite including some Super Mario-specific elements was released in Japan first as Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, with no real connection to Mario and his own games. This original version of the game calls these fairy creatures the Mū or Muu (ムウ), and the setting of the game is also called Mū, though sometimes Mūkai (ムウカイ) — literally “dream world,” in the way that Makai is “demon world.”

The Subcon/Mū, clockwise from top-left: as they appear in Super Mario Bros 2/Doki Doki Panic, Super Mario All-Stars, The Great Mario Character Encyclopedia (via Super Mario Wiki) and the ending to BS Super Mario USA (via the Video Game Museum).

But why should the Super Mario Bros. 2 version of Mū apparently mean “dream”? And how does it relate to Chrono Trigger? I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out, and if you’ve been paying attention so far, you might be able to guess where I’m going with this, but it’s actually not what I’d imagine most Japanese-fluent people would presume, though that one is still relevant in various ways.

In Japanese, various concepts relating to nothingness, nonexistence, and negation are referred to as mu (無 or 无), and it was this name that I became familiar with from playing Japanese video games, even though these same concepts are referred to in Chinese as wu. Either name can refer to a void or the void, but it can also refer to a Taoist concept that gets translated as “the original nonbeing,” referring to a sort of pregnant nothingness from which existence arises.

Various permutations of mu/wu appear throughout Taoist texts, including wu wei (無為), which can be translated into English as “non-action” but also “effortless action,” among other options. And I initially assumed this sense of mu might be the throughline here, because of the similarity of the Mū’s name and because the bizarre statement Doreen makes in the original English localization of Chrono Trigger — “Am I a butterfly dreaming I'm a man… or a bowling ball dreaming I’m a plate of sashimi?” — is a riff on a famous passage in the Zhuangzi, which is one of the fundamental Taoist texts. The original, you will likely not be shocked to learn, mentions neither bowling balls nor sashimi:

Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.

Now, it might actually be the case that the Mū were named after the Taoist concept of mu, but at least in my head, it doesn’t quite connect, unless you figure in the notion that the elements of dreams don’t exist despite seeming real in the moment. It’s probably also relevant that the original Japanese version of Chrono Trigger contained no allusions to the “butterfly dream” passage, and as I said earlier, I do think it’s possible that Ted Woolsey inserted it specifically as a way to make players associate Doreen with dreams in a way they otherwise might not.

I actually think the Mū got their name wholly independently from anything related to Taoism or voids, as attractive as those links might seem. No, the actual throughline might actually be the katakana rendering of the English word dream, ドリーム or dorīmu, the last syllable of which sounds just like and is written very similarly to Muu (ムウ). My guess is that they get their name from the final character in ドリーム or dorīmu, that loanword that Doreen’s name is meant to evoke, and there’s actually evidence from the game to back that up. Wart’s name in the original, Japanese version or Doki Doki Panic is Mamū (マムー), and it’s presumed that this name is an anagram of muma (夢魔) — figuratively “nightmare” but literally something I’ll get into in miscellaneous notes. More than a few of the Japanese names for Doki Doki Panic enemies seem to have been derived through similar types of anagrams, and in fact this is pretty standard in Japanese for fictional character names. The fact that both the name of the big bad and the captives his holding use the character ム may not only unite them stylistically but also allude to some of the connotations that character has.

This was quite the round trip, I will admit. But it really was realizing that Dorren’s Japanese name was so close to dorīmu that made me figure that Mū was likely a play on that same word. They’re both dream species, in a sense, and while they’re presented very differently, I think it’s interesting how the same kernel of idea can evolve in two very different directions given two very different environments. I probably lost most of you before this final paragraph, but I do genuinely love how the little bits of other cultures that we collect by playing video games can add up over time and ultimately help us to understand something we might have guessed would always remain a mystery.

Miscellaneous Notes

Believe it or not, this was actually one of the things I wanted to write for this site, and a version of this has been sitting in my Google Docs for years. When I first started this, writing out a link between a minor bit of Chrono Trigger lore and an even more minor bit of Super Mario Bros. 2 lore seemed like too much of a stretch and too weird for the concept of this site. And maybe it is too weird, and maybe this should have stayed in drafts, but here it is.

As a word, mu has some associations beyond what I was able to fit into this already overlong piece. Aside from its philosophical associations, it also has regular grammatical ones. It just means “no” or “not,” in the sense that Mugen, the freeware fighting game engine, takes its name from the Japanese word 無限, meaning “unlimited” or “infinite.” And the Japanese brand Muji (無印) means essentially “no label.” There are also associations that don’t involve Japanese, however. One of the continents purported to have been lost from the surface of the earth as a result of one cataclysm or another is also called Mu, and I’m not totally clear if this missing landmass is the same as Atlantis or not. As near as I can tell, the continent is also the namesake of the Japanese magazine Mu, which has since 1979 focused on all manner of paranormal topics. And finally, in 1976, Osamu Tezuki began publishing a serialized crime manga with the name that’s written on the cover both as MW and ムウ. In this case, I assumed the MW part is a reference to the fact that one of the characters is a man who dresses as a woman in order to commit various crimes, but I could be wrong.

Since it eventually crashed into the ocean, is Zeal not itself a lost continent?

I asked Fatimah what we can make of the fact that ム means “mu” on its own but Doki Doki Panic styles the fairies’ name as ムウ. This was the response I got: 

Muu/Mū (ムウ ) to me does look more like a name compared to ム (Mu). Oftentimes with katakana names, they'll extend sounds or do double consonants just because/for stylistic reasons, or to make a word more name-like. ム is one of the readings for 無, but spelling it like ムウ can make it look more like a name while also referencing the meaning of the 無 kanji.

Of course, because I spent so much time discussing Chrono Trigger in this post, I feel like I must mention the Nu (ヌゥ or Nū), a strange, blue, football-shaped creature that appears in all time periods of this game and may or may not be an artificially created lifeform. 

The many emotions of the common Nu (all negative).

While exploring the floating kingdom of Zeal, you can come across a book in which Belthasar, one of the three gurus alongside Melchior and in fact the one who builds the time machine, makes a cryptic statement about the Nu: “All life begins with Nu and ends with Nu...This is the truth! This is my belief! At least for now [...].” There’s a whole Chrono Compendium theory that gets into water symbolism, and I don’t know that I agree with much of it, especially the notion that nu and mu sound so similar that the have to be connected, although I should admit that that’s basically the relationship between Doreen and dream, and I’ve written a whole post about that. I tried to take everything I learned about the Taoist concept of mu and apply it to the Chrono Trigger Nu in a way that made sense, but I’ve not come up with anything. Maybe someone smarter than me can come up with a way that works or at the very least explain the role these strange creatures play in the game. 

Of course, I was curious to see if the statement in Balthasar’s book reads differently in the original Japanese. Not really, or at least not enough that clears anything up.

すべての生命は、ヌウにはじまり 
ヌウに終わる……。
このわしがそー言うのだから
まちがいあるまい。
たぶん。

Translation: All life began in Nu, and will end in Nu…… Because I say so, this is probably unmistakable. Maybe.

In the revised English localization released for the Nintendo DS version of Chrono Trigger, it’s only slightly different — and again, not in a way that tells us anything: “All life begins and ends with Nu. This is the undeniable truth, because I believe it to be so. At least for the moment.”

For what it’s worth, something that looks a lot like the Nu shows up in Chrono Cross, but only in a minor role, and with a different name: Beach Bum in English, and the very similar Beachy Boy (ビィチボゥイ or Bichiboui) in Japanese. Otherwise, they’re nowhere to be found, save for a Beach Bum that may be subbing in for Balthasar’s personal Nu in Viper Manor.

Another Chrono Trigger element that I’m unable to square away with Doreen and the idea of inanimate objects having their own dreams is the Black Omen, the floating fortress commanded in parallel timelines by the evil Queen Zeal. Its Japanese name literally means Black Dream (黒の夢 or Kuro no Yume), and although I did read somewhere in all the research for this post that some theorize that the Black Omen the dream entity manifested by the Mammon Machine, which like the pendant and the Masamune is also made of dreamstone.

Speaking of the dreamstone, surely it’s notable that it physically resembles Lavos, no? Lavos is a spiny-shelled monster that erupts from the earth and rains down fire on the surface, and dreamstone has Lavos’ general shape, with the red hue recalling the fire. And for that matter, dreamstone also sure looks a lot like the Frozen Flame, a key item that appears in both Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross. But unless I’m remembering wrong, the Frozen Flame is not actually dreamstone, even if it looks like it. Right?

While the dream-theming is on point in Super Mario Bros. 2, to the point that they’re hitting you over the head with it in that ending, it’s oddly less so in Doki Doki Panic, where no one is having a dream at all. The adventure involves two children being snatched into a storybook world and the four heroic adults jumping in after to save them. (And if you want to know more, check out this post.)

The world inside the book is still referred to as a dreamland, however. And then there’s the world “dream” in the full title: Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, the first two words meaning “dream factory” but in this chase the “dream” is being represented with the kanji 夢. I suppose I’ll have to hear from those fluent in Japanese what the difference is, connotationally, between 夢 and ドリーム, but apparently the former can also mean “fantasy,” “illusion” or “delusion,” which I suppose lines up nicely with how we use dream in English.

I didn’t think I’d be discussing succubuses in back-to-back posts, but here I am. If we’re being technical, the word that inspires Wart’s Japanese name, muma (夢魔), can mean “nightmare” but it can also mean “dream spirit” or “dream demon,” and it’s often translated as “succubus” or “incubus.” Granted, those concepts are tied closely together, but there’s no small bit of dissonance I am feeling at even the hint that both Wart and Morrigan from Darkstalkers have similar extracurriculars. Apparently it’s not necessarily literal, however, as the Japanese name for the Pokemon Misdreavus is also Muma (ムウマ).

I know more than a few RPG fans like to hate on localizations that they think play too loose with the original Japanese text, and in particular there are some who roll their eyes at the “bowling ball dreaming I’m a plate of sashimi” line in the original Super NES translation of Chrono Trigger. And I can see the objection, but if Woolsey did it for the reasons that I’m guessing, to better highlight Doreen’s connection to dreams, then it’s actually not a bad workaround for the fact that her name wouldn’t make anyone think of dreams the way that name might in Japanese. Just saying. Did the newest English localizations for Chrono Trigger keep that line or toss it?

One of the many recruitable characters in Chrono Cross is Turnip. He’s a sentient turnip who dresses like Frog from Chrono Trigger and also speaks in a similarly hokey faux-medieval accent, and as a party member he’s often given the chance to ponder the nature of his own existence. While patrolling Viper Manor, he can come in contact with a sleeping soldier whom he will recognize as his own dream-self — that is, when Turnip dreams, he is this man, the implication being that Turnip exists in the current reality because this man is dreaming him into existence. The situation is very reminiscent of the dream paradox mentioned by Doreen in Chrono Trigger — but again, since she does not mention it in the original Japanese version, I wonder if Turnip can be said to be a callback. Very odd, either way.

And finally, I could swear that I learned about the Taoist concept of mu from playing video games, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out which. Surely it was a Japanese game, and I’m guessing that a Japanese RPG would be the most likely candidate, but just googling around I didn’t turn up anything. The closest I got was the Great Forest of Moore in Final Fantasy V. While I don’t think there’s any of this in the actual text of the game, I think I must have read somewhere — Maybe Mark Rosa’s guide to Final Fantasy name origins, maybe the Almagest, maybe some other long-lost website that collected Final Fantasy lore — that the name was meant to allude to mu. This would have been years before the game was ever localized and went with Moore, which is boring, but I think this actually checks out, as the Japanese name is Mūa (ムーア) and that is fairly close. And in the sense of mu being the kind of fertile void from which existence can manifest, it would seem appropriate that it’s this forest from which Exdeath emerges as a sentient creature. But then again this origin story would have made sense if his Japanese name, エクスデス or Ekusudesu, were translated as something like Exodus, but ragging on the localization choices in Final Fantasy V could easily be its own post.