The Satirical Troll Reviews Chrono Cross: A Satirical Retrospective

Predetermined destiny, or freewill? A question that has been asked and will be asked as long as humans remain sentient beings. For what makes us uniquely human is not only the ability to question the circumstances of our fate, but the ability to affect tangible change ourselves. These are the ideals at the core of every alternate timeline or alternate reality theory. Is there a branching point where our choices cause multiple simultaneous realities? Chrono Cross is a game that seeks to explore these themes. So then why is it such a divisive sequel?

It’s no secret that I think the world of Chrono Trigger. It’s not only one of my all time favorite JRPGs, it’s one of my favorite games period. For my taste, Chrono Trigger is the definition of a 10 out of 10 masterpiece. I’ll admit that I actively avoided playing Chrono Cross, the PS1 follow up to the SNES classic, because of my affinity for Trigger. I’d heard so many differing opinions on Cross that I wasn’t sure if it was going to be the worst game I’ve ever played or a literal masterpiece, because that’s unironically how vitriolic the discourse about this game is. But, I figured with the Radical Dreamers re-release and HD port, it was time to jump in, so keep in mind that this is the version I’m reviewing.

Chrono Cross without a doubt separates its identity from Trigger right away. There’s a unique island/tropical vibe to the world of Chrono Cross that is basically present in Final Fantasy X and that’s about it. It’s an underexplored avenue for RPGs in general, but I really love how Cross builds the world around the seafaring nature of the archipelago of El Nino where the game takes place. Most of the people there are fishermen, either for work or subsistence, each island in the chain has its own gods; its own culture and traditions and architecture. Boats are a huge facet of life obviously and the way the human races and the demi-humans interact is also fleshed out a lot. The setting and atmosphere of Chrono Cross is top notch and is one of the main things that separates it from Chrono Trigger. In fact, as a whole, Chrono Cross is an ambitious sequel that does everything it can to prevent itself being compared to its legendary predecessor… Until it doesn’t, but we’ll get to that. It’s so adamant that you treat it as its own entity that the game will literally not allow you to continue if you try to rename the protagonist Chrono.

I might as well get this out of the way too, the soundtrack is fucking superb. Chrono Trigger’s OST is incredible, largely regarded as one of the best gaming soundtracks of all time… And yet Chrono Cross might actually have it beat. Multiple times I genuinely got emotional because of how beautiful the soundtrack is. Right off the bat, the first village theme is one of the most nostalgic, incredible JRPG tracks I’ve ever heard, and the music only gets better. While we’re getting the meat and potatoes sorted, the visuals are really nice. The HD remaster is carrying a lot of weight here, but I do really like the new portraits and HD sprites. One thing I appreciate about the presentation of Chrono Cross is that unlike a ton of JRPGs especially from this era, it doesn’t reuse enemy sprites or re-color old enemies. Every enemy has multiple unique forms with new attack animations and honestly, it adds a lot to the game that they put so much effort into the enemy design. One moment in particular when you’re going to challenge the dragon gods of each island for part of the plot, every single dragon is uniquely designed to look like they embrace the elements they represent. It’s really cool and the sprite work in general in this game is fantastic. Square has done such an amazing job of allowing us to play their classics in a way that feels modernized without stepping over the original’s charm and visual identity, and Chrono Cross is no exception.

Speaking of the combat, I really grew to like Chrono Cross’s unique combat system. It’s a little hard to explain, but essentially, each character has an “innate” magic type. When you use it, the battlefield becomes charged with that type of magic, meaning attacks of counter and complementary magic types to that magic get buffed or debuffed. What makes it cooler, you don’t have one attack action per turn, instead, you have a type of stamina meter that shows you the probability of each type of attack hitting, and you essentially use it (or with magic) to build your own “combos.” It’s a hard sell in just words, but after a few hours, I grew to learn and love it and the versatility that it offers. The game is just hard enough to were I could try different strategies without really feeling the need to grind (and when I did, the remaster’s options really help speed that up.)

There’s a lot to unpack with the story of Chrono Cross. While Trigger has an amazing story, it is a much more simple causality loop; your typical Terminator 2 style time loop story. Chrono Cross is a bit more ambitious, bringing in themes of alternate realities and timeline splits. The story starts out like your typical JRPG, you’re going to get some random item for your stock, childhood cute female friend, when suddenly, our protagonist Serge is engulfed in a dimensional portal. He wakes up on the same beach and thinks nothing of it. But when he returns to the village, nobody recognizes him. His friend says that he looks like a kid she used to know growing up that drowned in the ocean during a storm. You go up to a grave on a hillside and you find that Serge in this reality died 10 years ago.

I’m not going to go over every single plot point of the game obviously, but this intro and set up really sets the tone for the game right from the beginning. For the first two acts, I was enthralled with Chrono Cross’s timeline jumping story, and this is reflected in the gameplay as you often switch between the two alternate realities and seeing how the worlds have changed and the consequences of the party’s actions in each branch of the timeline is really engaging. This game gets massive props for having the fucking balls to have an entire in game altering branch if you decide not to save a character. Midway through the story, one of the main party members gets infected by Hydra venom off the knife of the villain, General Lynx. The problem is, there’s no way to make the anti-venom because in this reality, the hydra was hunted to extinction. So you have a choice, go back into the alternate reality where hydras are still alive, but in doing so, you kill the last remaining hydra, causing tensions between the demi-humans and humans. Or, you let one of the main characters die. The idea that you’d make an entire game altering choice on something that 99.9% of players would never choose is not only a gutsy call, but something that absolutely shows how games are fundamentally different today, as this would never be considered for a second in modern game development.

Other than the obvious themes portrayed in the story, I love how meta Chrono Cross is. And I don’t mean meta in the “El oh el, we broke the 4th wall, aren’t we cute?” pretentious kind of way. One of my favorite parts of the story is when you go to confront General Lynx after the longest dungeon in the game. Serge up to this point had been a completely silent protagonist, until he gets body swapped with General Lynx, now with Lynx in his body, you finally see Serge talk for the first time with Lynx’s voice and it’s honestly one of the coolest meta twists in any video game. Aside from having the obvious deep themes, Chrono Cross remains a truly weird video game. Right after the aforementioned sequence, you have to play an entire chapter in Lynx’s body in an MC Escher abstract painting nightmare world. There’s tons of light hearted elements to the story, tons of funny and goofy characters and some of the side content is genuinely just trying to be silly. Yet, despite all this, it still remains a very traditional JRPG that fans of the classics should feel very at home with.

Speaking of the characters, let’s get the elephant out of the room, or rather all 45 elephants in the room. Yeah, one of the only massive drawbacks of Chrono Cross is that it has an obscene amount of party members. While it’s really cool to go around and recruit new cast members, the reality is that there’s only really about 8 (Including the main protagonists that are essential to the story) characters that are fleshed out enough to justify having them in your party. The rest fall into the category of either being totally redundant or lacking any depth of character or personality. While some of the characters offer fun combat gimmicks like Mojo’s beast taming (akin to a traditional blue mage) most of the party members aren’t worth using. Some have quests that amount to decent side content, but really, only about 8-10 of them are worth investing any emotional energy into. For every Guille or Harle there’s a… What the fuck is that blue haired girl’s name? This games’ character mechanics are like a block party turning into an orgy, eventually you look around and see about 50 people you’re not comfortable with being there. One detail that I really love though is that they created specific speech patterns for certain characters. Harle for example is French, so all of her dialog is written as if to simulate a French accent which is really cool and gives a lot of personality to characters that aren’t fully voice acted.

Where the games’ story lost me a bit was in the final act. And yeah, the final act is kind of crazy. You can feel the exact moment the writers started hitting the blunt, it’s around the time you get to the Dead Sea. But what really hurts is that Chrono Cross up to this point had such an engaging, not all that confusing plot, and it becomes ultra messy at the end when it wants to sacrifice the identity it carved for itself to double back and connect to Chrono Trigger. Essentially, (and seriously, pray for me on this) the plot is that the Serge from the alternate timeline was lost at sea, not actually dead. He got trapped inside a research facility on an island frozen in time by the games’ plot McGuffin and thus, it created a future that didn’t exist. He was sent to the alternate timeline where he ultimately meets the spirits of characters from the first game that tell him that he lives in a future timeline created by Lavos, the alien parasite that was the main villain of the first game. On the island of Chronopolis, they built a research facility to create a way to deal with Lavos, because like another certain villain that ends in os, Lavos is inevitable since he is the reason humans even evolved to begin with in an event called “The Time Crash.”

So the past citizens of the kingdom from Chrono Trigger sent people to the future to build a super computer named FATE to stop the timeline Lavos created in Chrono Cross from merging with the original timeline Serge is from. After defeating FATE, the timelines are remerged, and we get a very bittersweet ending. None of the party remember their journey, or each other, life just returns to normal. The third act is a lot to unravel, and honestly, I see why the story is divisive, this type of convoluted plot stuff is exactly what people who don’t like JRPGs make fun of JRPGs about. Despite it being incredibly messy, and sloppy at best with the exposition, the third act didn’t negatively impact my view of the game. I can see why people think it’s a poor sequel, as it really isn’t one until it decides to shoehorn characters from the first game into the plot at the very end. Chrono Cross’s story would have been better if they had wrapped the themes up in a way that was complementary to the rest of the amazing plot instead of just using Lavos as a story crutch. That being said, I don’t get people acting like it falls flat on its face as a sequel either. Thematically, it’s an amazing counter piece to Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Cross was never going to live up to the perfection that is Chrono Trigger. But in a somewhat poetic way, to like it, you must escape the consequences of looking at the series’ past. People who compare Chrono Cross to Chrono Trigger will never be happy with Cross, it just isn’t the same level of polished; trading ambition and inventiveness for the razor sharp pacing and ultra tight theming and writing of Trigger. Though, if you look beyond the clunky connections to the game that came before it, you’ll find a wonderful title full of inventive ideas, charm and attention to detail that holds up as one of the greatest JRPGs ever made in its own right.