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Backlog: Chrono Cross

Parasite Eve 2 is taking slightly longer than expected.
That is to say, I want to get the most out of it, and I know there are multiple endings, and RIGHT AFTER the decisive point of no return I remembered that I bought a guide for this game, like, 5 years ago, at which point it was of course already too late.
So you know what I did? I decided to Reboot from Start, as the saying goes, and just redo everything with my trusty guide next to me, meaning I'm not missing out on ANYTHING. Needless to say that one would only do this if one REALLY likes a certain game, and dammit I do. Some investigation into online reviews indicates that Parasite Eve 2 hasn't been received that well in general, but I honestly can't see why. But that is of later concern. To compensate for the absence of a PE2 review, let me regale you a nice backlog, namely Chrono Cross.

Chrono Cross is the aptly titled sequel to Chrono Trigger, which is officially one of the best games ever made, and only complete idiots don't like it.
For the sequel, it doesn't go down quite that well, but there's still a great game in here, if you have the patience.

You play as Serge, which has to be one of the dullest and stupidest names for a main hero EVER, actually I have a cousin named Serge, believe it or not, and we have officially disowned him. For having a stupid name of course.
Serge lives in the wonderfully peaceful Arni Village, which makes me feel dirty because it ALWAYS reminds me of an obnoxious character from a ridiculous TV Drama we have on TV here. "Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrniiiiiiii". God I hate him.

Anyway, Serge goes out on one beautiful day, to collect lizard skin or something but while he is on the beach, a big black warphole type thingy sucks him up and spits him out in a world that initially looks just like his old home world, with one major difference, the Serge in this world died a long time ago.
Of course, soon it will turn out that that's not all that's different here, and this is really only the tip of the iceberg, but Serge doesn't let that stop him from finding out what the heck happened to his other self.

Where Chrono Trigger dealt with Time Travel, this game is all about parallel universes, which is always nice. The game starts out very interesting, like described above, but soon explodes into an insanely complicated, but very deep and original story, that probably requires multiple playthroughs just to be able to fully understand it. It should come as no surprise that the people behind these game were also responsible for Xenogears, which to this day still stands recorded as the most impossible to understand story EVER.
The main gripe here probably, is that the story builds up kinda slowly. At least, that's what most opponents of this game complain about. It takes too long before anything starts happening and most people don't want to bother. I respectfully disagree actually. I thought the build up was done very well, you get little bits of information every step you take, sometimes it will make you go "aha!" and sometimes it will make you go "now I get it even LESS" but in the end, most of it will make sense. Or perhaps not.

Being a HUGE fan of the original Chrono Trigger, I was not expecting this game to top it's forefather, and it doesn't, but I was surprised at how much justice it still manages to do to the original. At first glance it has nothing, NOTHING, to do with Chrono Trigger, but if you advance far enough, you will see that you couldn't be more wrong, since the two stories are VERY closely intertwined, and this game will even provide you with additional information about the original's story. Very well done.

Actually the main reason this game is not quite as good as it's predecessor lies in the gameplay and some rather disappointing decisions Square made. This game was released in november 1999 in Japan, I fondly recall, and you may have noticed that a lot of Square games released in 1998 and 1999 (and partially 2000) are a bit....different. That is, it really seems they were trying to come up with alternative methods of levelling up or use of experience. Just look at FF8, Parasite Eve 2, Legend of Mana etc. and you'll see what I mean.
Perhaps there was a rising demand of gamers for new systems, from the point of view that the old tried and tested formula of "defeat enemy and gain experience. repeat until level up" wasn't interesting enough, so Square did their best to come up with different approaches, and quite fairly, NONE of them work as well as the traditional way.

I mean, geez, there's a bloody REASON that such a system has established itself over the years, and it's that it just works PERFECTLY for this kind of game. Fortunately, we can see that every game developer nowadays has gone back to that original system, and it seems everyone is now reluctant to experiment, which is fine with me.

Uh. To get back to Chrono Cross, the system here does not involve any kind of point collection. Basically, your character gets a level, with stats, but fighting doesn't earn him experience. No. After battle you will get to see the results, and status increase may randomly occur. This only happens for 2 or 3 battles usually, and then it stops, because the character will have reached its predetermined base values and he will not grow any further. Only when beating a boss, will you recieve a special "level up star", which greatly boosts your stats, and after that you'll get some slight increases again after battling 2 or 3 times, and then you have to wait until the next boss battle again.

This basically renders combat almost entirely obsolete. You could blaze through the game without every fighting any standard enemy (if you can avoid them that is) and you would not be in any kind of trouble for the final battle.
Very fortunately, Chrono Cross doesn't have random battles, but instead uses enemy characters running around on screen. Touch them and the battle will commence.
This saves a lot of frustration that would otherwise have been born from the meaningless levelling system.
The only real merit to combat, is getting items from enemies. They will often drop accessories, materials that can be used to create armor and weapons, or more frequently they will drop magic. Magic?
Yes, Magic.

You see, magic is not acquired per person. Every character has a couple of personal special attacks, that are unlocked once he or she reaches a certain level, but magic has to be equipped. For that, every character gets a grid, that allows installing magic spells. Usually, your grid goes from level 1 to level 8, rising in power.
Each magic attack has a set level, equipping magic with level 4 on a level 2 grid will decrease its attack value, but alternatively, equipping it on level 6 will make it stronger.
Furthermore, there are summon monsters that can only be equipped on one specific level and require a full elemental charge. A what? Well, in the top left corner of the battle screen, there's an elemental indicator, showing the three elements that have last been used in attack. There are 7 elements in total, which even come to play a vital role in the story, and their correct use will eventually determine whether you get the good ending or the bad one.
If the last three elements were all the same, then the elemental gauge will reach one color and summons of that particular element can be used. This way, using summons can be very hard, so the damage is usually proportionate, ie they HURT.

It's a very original system, and it throws a big tactical element into the gameplay, which kinda saves the battles from being totally unnecessary at all. This game would have been perfect if it had just had a normal experience system though, cos otherwise it's ALL good. The way it is now, fights with standard enemies can be just boring and serve no purpose.

Also, there are a whopping 45 characters (!) in the game, and ALL of them can be used in battle. You can't get all of them in one playthrough though, cos you'll have to make important choices along the way which will lead to certain characters joining you, and others leaving you. And that's what I love about this game, you get to make a LOT of choices, and most of them directly influence the course of the story. Rather than the majority of RPG's where you are pushed into a certain decision:

"Should we sneak inside that mansion or just burst through the front gate?"
"I say burst through the gates, dammit, that'll show them who's boss!"
"I disagree. Should we sneak inside that mansion or just burst through the front gate?"
"What the!? I just told you! I wanna go in guns BLAZING!"
"I really think that's unwise. Should we sneak inside that mansion or just burst through the front gate?"
"THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ASKING ME!?"
"Syntax Error"

If you've played Suikoden, you'll know what I mean.
Not so Chrono Cross however, cos you get a LOT of freedom, and multiple courses through the game. Initially, there will only be a bad and a good ending, but finishing the game will open up a "new game+" mode (gotta love those) and a host of new endings can be achieved. Also, on your consecutive playthroughs, you'll get a nifty Remote Control which allows you to fastforward through cutscenes by pressing R1 and even make you run faster.

To make a long story (and it IS) short, I totally love this game. The story is fantastic, it looks great with loads of pretty CG movies, the soundtrack is very mellow (great job by Yasunori Mitsuda, as usual), there are loads of brilliantly directed scenes, some touching, some exciting, and there's plenty of subquests, minigames, alternative routes and things to discover to make this an extremely replayable game, clocking in at about 45 hours or so.

The biggest gripe is really the lack of experience, meaning battles are kinda useless, also the totally overwhelming amount of characters means that character development is a bit scarce, and I would have expected, this being a Chrono Trigger sequel, there to be more Double and Triple techniques with such a huge cast, but in total, there's probably even less than in Chrono Trigger.

That aside, this is a huge and epic RPG that'll keep you going to see what's going to happen next. One of the PSX's finest. I give it a 9.3.

posted by Ingen! @ 11:23 AM