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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Chrono trigger has a sequel, Chrono cross
Great game. Awful sequel.
I agree with this assessment a lot. The art and environmental design is gorgeous. The music is top notch (the battle theme is a bit polarizing though). In terms of production it's seriously well put together, for the most part. But, it suffers a lot of the worst excesses of 90s JRPG design, with a meandering, nonsensical plot and a battle system that's more interested in being fiddly than in being fun. It feels like one of the worst examples of a company just straight up not understanding the appeal of a game and making a "sequel" that could easily have been called something else. As a recommendation for someone just coming off of Chrono Trigger, I can hardly imagine something worse, oddly.
I disagree. As for the meandering, your nostalgia is blinding you to how bonkers Chrono Trigger's story is.
"You turn the corner and you're in a space station now but it's also at the bottom of the ocean and floating up in the sky at all times simultaneously and the guards are knockoffs of this one goofy karaoke cat machine your childhood friend made for some reason, now crash your TARDIS into it so you can go fight cyber god mom before she wakes up the ufo that's using our planet as an egg for the third time, your team is a super Saiyan clone with a samurai sword, the mechanic from dr slump, a cavewoman you abducted, an evil robot with memory loss, cyber god mom's goth son Dracula, tomboy princess and some frog"
The major plot points are "fighting a bridge zombie", "Ozzie's in a pickle", "showing a necklace to some treasure chests", "jailbreak", "oh no time is broken", "genre whiplash", "jailbreak again", "the time machine flies now", "did those two goblins just say by our powers combined", "eyes cream", and "time to kill god x5".
I love Chrono Trigger deeply. But the biggest sin Chrono Cross committed was that they just threw more things at the wall in their nearly identical "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach.
Sidenote: I will fight for Cross's combat system.
Whenever someone makes that claim I just assume they haven't actually played Chrono Cross.
I played CC.
Sure, the story is connected - Kid being raised by Lucca, the Time Devourer being Lavos, Guile being strongly hinted to be Magus, all that thing. But the loads of characters make you look at the big picture, instead of focusing on their individual personalities; the theme (dimensional travel vs. time travel) is different; and the battle system is nothing alike. Those things are actually improvements, but at least for me, they make it that CC doesn't scratch the same itch as CT.
And there's always that lingering melancholy in Chrono Cross that is at the same time beautiful and completely unlike the "happy" Chrono Trigger.
That's why I say that it's a great game, but an awful sequel. It doesn't have the elements that make you say "THAT is Chrono Trigger 2!", but it's fun and in certain aspects better than CT.
In fact one of the goals as stated by the team was that they very explicitly did not want to pump out "Chrono Trigger but it's got a 2 at the end of it".
Yup. In other words they didn't want to pump out a sequel. Even then that's what plenty people expected from CC, since it's "part of the Chrono series", and then got disappointed and an otherwise great game got this "but what about CT..." stigma. (I remember the outrage back then. And the kids distorting it into a SNES vs. PS fight.)
This is an interesting topic now that I think about it.
I'd like to give people in this thread the warning I wish they had given me about this game. Don't go into Cross expecting it to have anything to do with Trigger (or expecting it to be 10% as good as Trigger). They made a weird JRPG where every character is just a text filter and then decided in the last 3 hours that it was the sequel to Chrono Trigger. It has nothing in common with CT except a couple of place names and some dead characters, and would be a much better game if they called it Lynx Quest or Radical Dreamers 2 or what the hell ever.
Can't agree enough. My brother and I played through Chrono Cross together and that's honestly the only reason we even finished it.
It's tenuously connected to Chrono Trigger at best and those plot points are terribly written anyway. Combat is mediocre, the element system is annoying, and there's so many characters that only a couple of them get any screentime.
If you enjoyed CT, don't play CC; you'll almost certainly be disappointed.
Really good final fantasy of the era, but not a real sequel to Chrono trigger.
Pop quiz, who's the final boss of Chrono Cross?
As I recall it's the time devourer which is lavos after merging with part of schala, but it takes more than a final boss to make something a real sequel to another thing.
So the fundamental theme of scratching back our destiny from our own self-destructive nature isn't a 1:1 match?
You're free to disagree and think it's a perfect sequel that has everything you ever wanted out of a chrono trigger sequel. Lots of people like it. I just don't feel that it's a real sequel.
I don't think it's fair to say not to bother with Chrono Cross but I do agree it's important to stress how unrelated to Chrono Trigger it is. As a sequel it fails. But as its own stand alone JRPG, I think it's great.
Personally I love Chrono Cross and how different it was. And the music is ridiculously good (Yasunori Mitsuda main Chrono Trigger composer.)
I think it's worth a go. It starts you somewhere in the middle of the story so you get action straight away. So anyone who tries it will know quickly if it will be up their alley without having to invest too much time.
Hey so my rebuttal is just a really long list of spoilers for Chrono Cross, demonstrating how every corner of Cross is deeply connected to Trigger. Seriously, like, every aspect of the game.
I will always prefer an experiment that fails over an unending stream of bland clones.
I disagree with the extent of your warning, but only just. I also originally bounced off of Chrono Cross because it wasn't what I was expecting (3D Chrono Trigger). Once I went back to it like it was a brand new game, I grew to enjoy it on its own merits.
At least play it long enough to get the nostalgia whenever you hear the music come up on rainwave :p