Chrono Cross

Let's discuss it, what went wrong? I think it has quite a unique world, but poor gameplay. By the way, it does have a lot of nice waifus.

I remember trying to play this when I was young and had no idea what the fuck was going on, the story was all over the god damn place

I could never bring myself to get past the early segments in the game before my autism sets in and I see it as pointless without a way to get all the characters.

Why even play a squareshit rpg if you don't like squareshit rpgs?

Anyone here actually preferred Kid to some of the other girls?

The artist does weird shit to people's faces sometimes, but the worst was his work on Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon.

I played it years ago, but game is massive and hard to finish. Matter of fact I don't think i know anyone who finished it be it online or IRL, everybody played it but never finished it.

Last few days I was thinking of replaying it again and trying to beat it. But mostly i want to play it because of cool art style and great music.

It's not even the longest of all PS1 RPGs. the only reason many people don't beat it is because the only satisfying ending is locked behind a rather obscure sequence of actions right after a large infodump that probably fried most people's attention spans and willingness to give a shit.

I thought the gameplay on its own was more or less decent.
The only real issue I had with it is too many throwaway characters with only a tangential connection to anything, which in a way also includes Serge and the actual plot related characters.
Some kind of end of time - character storage place, kind of like Trigger or the castle in Suikoden, would go a long way making them characters and not just elemental affinities for your three faggot grid.
Could have probably expanded on the story in that way as well, having the characters comment on what kind of aimless bullshit I'm dragging their asses through.

All in all, I'd say the pieces to make a good game were there. But without anything tying them together it was just a disconnected mess.


Pretty sure you can get everyone on your team at the first ng+ playthrough, if you know what you are doing. Such as not picking the mohawk faggot at the first three character route split, since you can get him later at another split anyway.

Does the game ever tell you the sequence for propperly beating the final boss? I think I heard something about there being a series of riddles you have to figure out.

The problem with chrono cross, is that it's a final fantasy game instead of chrono trigger 2.

That shading and eye shape looks like Masamune Shirow's work. I don't think he worked on Chrono Cross, did he?

Decent game, here is some shit I didn't like

Each element lets out a noise and you're supposed to play them in a sequence that goes a long with one little tune.

Don't really remember a riddle, but I'm pretty sure the whole dragon tower dungeon and Harledragon were made as a really vague hint.
Harle in particular, since she shifts the background to the dragon lairs in the order.
Also not much of a hint, but Lavos tends to counter your elemental magic with the next element in the sequence of the element you attacked him with. So if you manage to catch it, you can get him do do half the work for you.

I wonder if the plot makes more sense in the jap version

Haven't played it in awhile? Chrono Cross had a weird and unfortunately quite broken combat system that ALMOST worked, but was built on a flawed foundation. Like most of the game, really. It's absolutely not standard Square RPG combat - it's closer to Xenosaga, but with the bizarre addition of a colour-matching mechanic that crippled the magic system.


Before actually buying/playing the game, I thought Kid was super-hot and clearly going to be best girl. Then she "spoke", and the godawful "accent" they gave her suddenly made her 1000x worse. Plus her personality in general.

This, more or less.

I'm positive Chrono Cross was some totally unrelated Monolith RPG up until like a month before release, when they suddenly decided they could market it better if they pretended it was a sequel to Chrono Trigger - it has the same composer, that's good enough, right? So they jammed in a bunch of text-only references to Chrono Trigger and some half-assed models of the original heroes who appear briefly to administer another wall of text, threw in one piece of CT music, and called it a day.

Even more infuriating is that all the Chrono Trigger references don't even make sense: ESPECIALLY claiming that Lavos created humans, when the original game has you hanging out with Ayla's tribe of cavepeople at the moment Lavos originally lands. And they arbitrarily declare that one of the game's characters is actually a character from Chrono Trigger, besides looking nothing alike or even having the same hair colour. Plus the direct mentions of the original cast boil down pretty much to "they all died, lol". (With the exception of Magus, who may or may not be in your party. The game is dodgy about this. Slightly less in Japanese.)

It's a shame, because there were some clever meta story ideas there (Save Points being evil was especially genius), and some interesting if only half-realized game mechanics. And the graphics and music are of course wonderful. I just can't get past how bad it is as a "sequel". Had they just not tried to tie it into Chrono Trigger and just released it as "Xenocross", it wouldn't be nearly as bad.

user that's a bunch of words. How was it broken? What is this flawed foundation?
I guess it "crippled" the strategy of just using the same overpowered spells over and over, but for the rest of us, it added depth, strategy, and required foresight where before you never had to think ahead outside of what you were doing on that turn.

despite having a great translation, it had some glaring problems. They changed all the character's names for pretty much no reason.

Why in the FUCK would you change Lucky Dan's name to Mojo?

Wait what? when did the lavos creating humans thing come up? Whats this about save points being evil?

If I remember correctly, save points sent all your daily info straight to the mother computer boss, so basically they were used to spy on people. As for Lavos creating humans? Fuck if I know. I VAGUELY remember something about lavos speeding up humans evolution for some reason.

I don't remember any of that and the scary part is that it could easily be true and be shit i overlooked with all the nonsense that plot produces somewhere near the middle.

The Record of Fate (save point) is a device employed by FATE to control the actions of the citizens of El Nido to ensure none traveled to mainland Zenan or made contact with the outside world. The lore of the land insisted that each citizen visit one regularly; the citizens did not question this imperative, consulting the records often and trusting in them completely. Once contact was made, the Record of Fate would cause a neural rewrite of the person's mind. When the dimensions split, the Records of Fate in Home World stopped working, as they were not designed to function across dimensions. Once FATE was defeated by Serge in Chronopolis, the Records of Fate went silent, allowing the citizens of El Nido pure free will for the first time in history.

Everyone has a godawful accent in chrono chross.

Holy crap! I did overlook it!

A decent but far from perfect game but a terrible sequel.
On it's own merits the gameplay itself is good, the story is passable up until shit gets weird at the end but it suffers from having way too many characters which means none have a chance to stand out or get any development so you have a team of like 50 essentially nameless jobbers that you don't give a shit about.
As a sequel it fails because any connection to chrono trigger is so insubstantial up until the very end that one could easily just swap out some nouns and have it be its own story. It does very little to expand on the story of CT and I'm now realizing that analyzing this properly is way more effort than I'm willing to put in at the moment.

Is there anyone that didn't do this?

Yeah, I'm talking about the colour matching system as the flawed foundation. I don't mind it being impossible to spam the most powerful spells and summons, I'd just like to be able to use them once in awhile. IIRC the game was set up such that by the time you actually had filled the field enough to be able to use one, the enemies would pretty much be dead already. (Or, if you were fighting a boss, they would use a skill that would flood the field with another colour.)


There's a giant mural on a wall near the end of the game that just gives you a massive text dump explaining the game's plot (and trying to connect it to Chrono Trigger.) Among other things, it refers to humans as the "destructive spawn of Lavos" and how they were evil parasites interfering with the Planet's intended course of evolution. (Square was really big on sentient planets and strongly anti-human at the time.)

And as and helpfully point out, it's an actual plot point in the game that Save Points were controlling people's minds (and this is why you got "hints" telling you what the plot expected you to do next when you used one.)


True. But Kid's is probably the worst, especially because she was intentionally written that way for most of the game, rather than "auto-accented" from generic text.

Lavos didn't create humans as they existed prior to it arriving on earth. Lavos landing killed the reptites who were the "true" inheritors of earth and left the humans, who were manipulated by lavos's influence over the years, as seen in zeal.

What was the "chrono cross" then? Some wikis claim it's made from LAvos's shell & caused pre-humans to evolve.

It has better gameplay than most JRPGs.

How is it ANYTHING like a Final Fantasy game.

Wasn't it a 7th element created by combining the dragons tears?

Chrono cross was the two dragon tears merged together.
Dreamstone/red rock that was used to make the Masamune in trigger, was parts of the shell, that evolved the humans and gave them the ability to use magic over time.

Nothing. I finished the game at least a dozen times. The plot made perfect sense if you stuck to it to the end and did some exploration and talked to characters. The only problem the game had was too many characters so barely any were fleshed out properly. Problem today is most people don't have a speck of attention span.

Yes. It's specifically mentioned that the Chrono Cross is a form of the Time Egg.


Dreamstone existed on earth before Lavos.

Music is good and it has some good ideas, like the multiple characters and keeping them on multiple playthroughs. Branching paths is cool too. Main problem is that the combat is fucking awful, holds the whole game back. This is coming from someone who's beaten in twice to unlock everything. 5/10 game because the actual gameplay is some of the worst in jrpg history.

The only thing I really recall for sure was that one of the kids you can help grows up to be the soldier that accidentally kills the Chrono Trigger crew while they're cruising around in the Epoch.

They could have just done a direct sequel to Chrono Trigger with a huge cast, but they were in their weird experimental phase where they kept wanting to dick around with unorthodox mechanics,

Because Random battles are a much better idea right? Boy I sure do love not being to avoid fighting while I explore.

I don't remember saving dalton as a kid…

Fuck, you are right.
Confused it for the frozen flame in cross.

Who said anything about random battles? That's a delivery method for combat systems.

This.

Then what do you think is wrong for the combat system?

Also forgot to mention, this game carries the stigma of being a "different" sequel, i.e. it did not copy-paste the first game and just do the same thing again, which is ironic considering today's sequel trends. Just goes to show that retards had no idea what they want even 20 years ago. Don't give me any of the "it's not a real sequel" either; unless you're a retard with the attention span of an average avocado you'd see the direct connections.

FUCK OFF ALREADY

Chrono Cross is not a good game
It's best trait is its soundtrack. That's it.
I don't know why people jerk off to it so much. It doesn't hold a candle to chrono trigger. As a jrpg is ok at best too. It hopped on the "many party members" bandwagon fad of the time and its story is a convoluted mess

If it didn't have Chrono on the title this game would be just a run on the mill jrpg of the time and it wouldn't have gotten any renown, with the exception of hipsters online praising "hidden gems"

It's story was absolute nonsense but fun things are fun, nigger.