Chrono Cross

What are your thoughts on this one?

Also, are there any other RPGs like this? Like without grinding, rich world, huge lore and stuff?

B-bump.

Started off really, really good - an interesting world, some unique characters - but then got up in it's own ass sometime in the two thirds. (I'd say right about when they tied it in with Chrono Trigger)

Really awesome music by Yasunori Mitsuda which really taxed the PSX sound chip - none of it was streamed, just traditional tracked compositions with instrument banks.

Visually pleasing, but not too incredible.

Gameplay was a little shit, never taxed me too much during combat, I just spammed my strongest techniques.

The final bossfight was a bitch, needed a guide for that since I just couldn't fucking get what I needed to do out of the game alone.

Bretty good, Chrono Trigger was better. Fapped to Harle.

I've seen some compare the visuals of Baten Kaitos to Chrono Cross. Maybe you can start there.

It gets a lot of shit for failing to be a proper sequel to trigger, but it's a pretty good game in its own right, if you're willing to put up with all the ridiculous accents. It also suffers from novelty over quality syndrome, but that's part of the charm. Harle is kill way too early.

How can one girl be so perfect?

I'm curious now, what is incredible to you?

...

What is she then?

The backgrounds were indeed great, but I'd have preferred 2d animation over CGI for the cutscenes. Especially Lynx/the panther looked like complete dogshit, even at the time. CGI also gave human characters, especially Kid, this uncanny-valley feel. The interface could have used a little more work too, the brown didn't really work well with white detailing.

Otherwise, no truly big complaints, it's still fucking lightyears ahead of the shit that FF7 was. It just could have been better.

I miss Harle. She was the perfect tease with a heart of gold. Shame about being a dragon and ultimately killing her.

What's the matter, user, you don't like potatoes?

A dragon. It's a bit confusing but that's what she implies before disappearing.

It is an unpopular opinion, but I honestly prefered cross to trigger. While both are good games, I just feel that cross grabbed my attention more

Fuck off gook.

Bought it twice, sealed, kept, got a Korean NTSC PS3 to play it. Of course it wasn't compatible. On Vita the performance is too low for it to be playable, it's psx emulator running inside a psp emulator.

I would have liked it, but too late for that now.
Glad I played FFVIII when I did. Same for Portal.

Sad fact for people who miss out but games may only be enjoyable at some point for you, and maybe only around their release time. Better too if you only have posative expectations and previews of them. previews being in screenshot form.

Should definately not seek out previews for games you know about. Look around in store make a decision. When you know something is good go after it. Doesn't matter what anyone else thinks after that. Shouldn't consult others for decisions anyway. Just tell others and hear others out when they are mad about something.

And I mean that in a posative sense nothing to do wth psychology. If someone said something posative in front of me about psychology I would remove them from my presence, has happened, stopped happening immediately.

Sharing your enthusiasm helps set up games to be seen well. From friends or friendly people the most, same for everything, music etc.

You know they wouldn't be pushing it so much if they didn't think it was special. Otherwise you just talk shit together, common ground being great things then swapping them/sharing them, because they can care about something so what they get told about won't be shared unless to the right people who will like it.

Good things are universally good imo, but it doean't mean they will he liked. People may need to be set up to. Get the perspective that sees them right. An exchange of perspective goes on in conversation probably, where things you wouldn't otherwise have enjoyed become important, part of the real world, which the person who told you about them is from to. For sure because they knew about something good like it was just for them, even if they came to know of it from someone else. If it matters to them it's theirs. Or that is talking shit. It's a truth that there is a better world, mostly formed by people. Artwork is a part of them and they are part of that world. The atamosphere lingers. What's said stays in the air and soaks into the coming of something else, something's had it's performance the rest is too.

nigger, Bleem worked on Pentium-grade PCs way back when. Emulating a PSX is a done deal for many years. What the fuck have you been doing.

It's really good if you pretend it has nothing to do with Chrono Trigger and all of the references are just little in-jokes, like Lucca's cameo in Xenogears.

I just see it as a Monolith Soft RPG instead of a Chrono game. Still one of the best imo.

It's a mediocre at best game that's remembered (especially by me) as a pile of shit that shits all over Chrono Trigger, because

sir are you aware that too much sodium in your diet is bad for your health

c'mon, man, he needs all that salt to cook the massive amounts of spaghetti he dropped in that post

user. You can't ignore the shit ton of useless characters.

Personally have a pet peeve about that in rpgs in general. Where party size exceeds the active party size.
Why even fucking do it user? It's fucking annoying and in most cases the inactive party is with you at all times and get no XP. Just stick with what can actually play and put a story around them. It's the only thing I praise X-2 for. I didn't have to worry about inactive party baggage.

shit ton of characters.
But CC does it right. Everyone levels at the same rate so you can switch them on the fly at any point without being punished for it.

I played it when I was a child and never got very far

The battle system and music were better than Chrono Trigger
There, I said it

That's pretty much it. It's no coincidence that the game actually started great until it "tries" to connect to CT, then the story gets convoluted as fuck, characters that make no sense, etc. A real shame, I think it really would have been a amazing game from start to finish if Square wasn't greedy like that and, I don't know…bothered to make a REAL CT sequel instead of ruining someone else 's game? Fucking idiot assholes. Now, we have two dead games that could have become awesome franchises. It's ridiculous that the last time we got anything from CT was that port to DS and, since it didn't sold well for obvious reasons (port didn't got much new content to justify buying it again if you got the port for psx, high price for a port of a SNES game, etc) they were like "Oh it didn't sold, guess people don't want a new CT despite the fan working sequels we shut down having lots of support and fans…oh well!". I want to punch every one of those idiots that work there for being this autistic.

Well, yeah, but she's also literally just Schala.

Schala and Lavos become one, evolves into Time Devourer, and is then separated into 7 dragons. Harle is Schala, albeit under the control of the Time Devourer. At the end of the game, you use the Chrono Cross to destroy the Time Devourer and save Schala.

There. That's the story.

Give replay value and be a bit experimental, its clear at the end of the day a small and focused roster is superior but I'm glad it was at least attempted.

Politics just fucked the game hard like says

No, the time devourer didn't make the dragons, the dragon god did, which is a creation of the dragonians, which are what the reptites would evolve into if they didn't go extinct.

I liked it. I only barely got past the middle because my second disc didn't work. But the game was good up to that point.

I really think it's connection to Trigger hurt it a lot. There was no mechanical throughput that connected them gameplay-wise, and the story connection was far too esoteric (and minor, in many ways) for many people to appreciate, understand, or even notice.

This is exactly why everyone complains about this plot.
I wish I could just have enjoyed the first half of the game and played that through to a logical conclusion. Cross didn't deserve this shit.

The worst part is you KNOW exactly when the rift occurs, how the Frozen Flame is delegated to a macguffin, new regions are a mess and the plotline stops making any kind of goddamn sense.

I still really like Cross. It just could have been so much better if they stuck to their original vision. Fuck Square.

If you play on an emulator use the original resolution and rendering modes. Such as affine and nearest neighbour upscale.

Like that the backgrounds blended in with the characters.

Some CRT shader mods as well could blend everythig further. It would have looked nothing like the first image in this thread.

HD is degenerate. Unfuck yourself.
Quite a serious thing especially if preparing games for others. Show them wrong and they wont be enjoyable. Stay away from "steam" and similar parasites, such as game shops. Standards prior to them were much higher and only exist outside of them.

Prerendered games should be converted from 2D to 3D, games made the same could put all rendering to characters blending them seamlessly with the world. Voxelising 2D elements after 2D to 3D conversion futher making the world immersive. Animating recognised elements by subtle breezes, waves etc.

Might take some fiddling around but the characters could be blended with the backgrounds even with texture filtering by using gaussian blur on everything, as well as bloom. Character and world emitting the same effects in the same area making them seem the same. Wide Tent Supersampling may work, but the backgrounds would need to be cleaned up using 8xhq scaling or something like that in conjunction.

Texture filtering and anything non-affine was a very stupid decision to waste performance on, always better to have higher resolution textures, more geometry etc.

Meant to be a world, not someone's flash game.

Hardware is meant to facilitate the creation of highly complex designs. Instead shows of now the ability to waste performance for no benefit, hardware dedicated to degenerate techniques is wasted hardware as well. Would be interesting to repurpose hardware for unintended things to raise performance.

Making a current game in PSX/Saturn style.
Using CPU for rendering what it can, sound chip to aid rendering too if present. Utilising a CPU's GPU if it has one.

Would be a great start for an engine to detect and use hardware directly. Understanding it and assigning tasks to it automatically, detecting errors and correcting itself.

Squeezing every last bit of performance out of hardware is essential, games wouldn't be impressive any other way.

More room for performance doesn't mean allowance for waste.

Well in a good game, each character should be different from one-another and have distinctly different combat abilities. That way you feel the need to switch them out for certain situations. In X-2 you're basically doing just that, except instead of different party members it's different "dresses"

Note that FFIII and FFIV both do the same sort of job system, and you never have more than the maximum in both of those games.

FFIX and FFX are good examples of having different characters being suited for different situations.