| 1 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 2 | |
| 3 | '''WARNING:''' All of the folders contain spoilers in the game. Proceed at your own risk, or simply time travel a few seconds back to forget what you just read. |
| 4 | |
| 5 | [[folder: Black Omen's Name]] |
| 6 | * A number of people in 600 and 1,000 AD comment on the Black Omen as though it's just a part of daily life. While it makes sense that everyone would regard it as something that has always existed, that doesn't really explain how they know what the thing is called. It's not like Queen Zeal periodically came down and let everybody know what its name was. |
| 7 | ** Unless "Black Omen" is just a nickname given by the people. I don't recall Zeal ever naming it herself. |
| 8 | *** Actually, she does. When you first enter, before she tells you how long until 1999 AD, she says "The Black Omen is a path to Lavos." At least, she says this in the 1995 Woolsey script. |
| 9 | *** Possibly the name was a cultural thing among the people of 12,000 BC, ie. she named it that because it fit some legend or story or meme. The survivors down on the ground saw it and did the same thing independently, and passed that name on to their descendents. |
| 10 | [[/folder]] |
| 11 | |
| 12 | [[folder: Six-Gear Epoch]] |
| 13 | * Why can the Epoch only travel to 6 different time periods instead of any time (ok I know the real reason but what's the in universe reason) |
| 14 | ** Those are just the times that the group put into the Epoch. It's simpler to go to key points in time you are already familiar with than deal with all the temporal paradox and uncertainty of going to other times. Alternatively, those are just the points that the temporal barrier have been broken previously, so they are the only places the Epoch can get through. |
| 15 | ** The Epoch seems to still work within the Gate system that the party used before (except they don't actually go through the Gates, allowing them to bypass the barrier in Zeal). There are only Gates to those 6 eras, so that's the options they have. When they need to travel to more specific times that don't have Gates, they use different methods (Lucca's red and seemingly temporary Gate, Crono's eclipse). |
| 16 | *** This doesn't work, though, because the ending indicates that the Epoch is still fully capable of traversing the timestream even after the Gates have permanently closed. It's possible that the Epoch needed to read the Gate system to "memorize" temporal locations, perhaps, but it's certainly able to move between them under its own power. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | [[/folder]] |
| 19 | |
| 20 | [[folder: Crono And Marle Timing Problem]] |
| 21 | * When Crono first comes back with Marle from the year 600 and gets arrested for supposedly kidnapping her, why does everyone act like he's been gone a long time? Assuming the portal from 600 to 1000 drops him off at the same time he left it would be like no time would have passed at all for them. |
| 22 | ** This is answered again later on down this page, but the short answer is that the gates and the Epoch run on SanDimasTime. You leave 1000 AD at 9:00 AM, spend five minutes in the past, then come back to 1000 AD at 9:05 AM. |
| 23 | ** Why would the portal send him back as though no time has passed? If the portals go back a set period of time (as opposed to sending you to one specific moment in time), and I'm pretty sure they do, the portal would send Crono and crew back 400 years from Marle's disappearance, then send them forward 400 years from the time Crono has saved Marle from not existing. The same amount of time would pass in both time periods. |
| 24 | [[/folder]] |
| 25 | |
| 26 | [[folder: Magus vs. Lavos]] |
| 27 | * Why does Magus die every time he tries to defeat Lavos alone? He manages to do it while significantly drained in the endgame, why can't he do it with 6666 HP and the most powerful Dark spell known to man? |
| 28 | ** I think the point is, he doesn't have a chance without companions |
| 29 | ** Because he doesn't have Megalixirs. |
| 30 | ** Actually implied and outright stated in VideoGame/ChronoCross that Lavos was too strong when they first meet, and by the time Crono and friends take him down he is in a weakened state so that even at 300 HP Magus could insta-kill the alien. |
| 31 | ** To be exact, he encountered the empowered Lavos in 12000 BC, the time when Lavos is at his strongest (having harvested all the power of Zeal and being empowered by Schala through Mammon Machine); it's not a stretch that especially combined with Zeal and without healing equipment, he had no chance. His in-game stats are twice those he normally possesses. It's plausible if Magus got to fight him at 1999 AD, he could've won. |
| 32 | ** HealthDamageAsymmetry. How much "power" a hit point represents is not the same thing for a character as it is for an enemy. |
| 33 | ** I think it's weird how people assume that party!Magus is always weaker than enemy!Magus. His weakened state was just an excuse for his spells to require unlocking, at the endgame Magus is at least as strong as he was in his prime, maybe stronger, and so is the rest of the party. Magus alone was always a poor match against Lavos. |
| 34 | ** Considering it's heavily implied drawing on the power of Lavos is what gave the kingdom of Zeal, and especially the royal family their power in the first place of course Magus would never stand a chance trying to destroy Lavos by himself with it's own power. That's likely why it could drain Magus's magic from him in the first place, Lavos gave it to him and it could take it back. |
| 35 | [[/folder]] |
| 36 | |
| 37 | [[folder: The Gates... Entity or Lavos?]] |
| 38 | * The game states that the Gates are caused/powered by Lavos. How, then, is there a gate that can take you back to the Mystic Mountains of 65M BC...days/weeks before Lavos even arrived on the planet? |
| 39 | ** Because it's left ambiguous if the gates are made by Lavos or The Entity to give people the ability to ''fight'' Lavos. That gate suggests the latter. |
| 40 | *** Make no mistake that gate ''was'' opened by itself, assuming the second gate in the future links to Medina village. |
| 41 | *** I thought the Entity created the gates? Something about it reliving the key moments in its life. |
| 42 | *** Right. During the sidequest where Robo restores the forest, he explicitly advances the theory that the Planet opened up the gates. Immediately afterward, Lucca discovers a hidden Gate that lets her save her mother. Lavos, doing that? He doesn't care enough. |
| 43 | *** And the planet does? Lucca's personal sidequest to save her mother's legs has no bearing on its survival one way or the other. Additionally, the ominous red color of Lucca's personal Gate signifies that it's different from the other Gates we've seen, as does the fact that it appears out of nowhere and ceases to exist once the attempt to save Lara's legs is made. This Gate is an anomaly, and is not indicative of the behaviour or purpose of any other Gate. Ultimately, there just isn't enough information to 100% confirm where the Gates came from and what their purpose is; it's just ambiguous enough. |
| 44 | *** A thought, but perhaps the red gate is a "gift" of sorts. The "entity" has seen the pains the party has been going through to help it, it decided to give a small, truthfully insignificant, by it's own magnitude, boon to Lucca. Small to it, but monumental to her. |
| 45 | *** Honestly, the fact that gate magically appeared, ''right after'' the discussion about the gates, and there being some sort of benevolent entity controlling them, which leads to a specific point in time that directly impacts Lucca's life seems to point to the obvious answer. If not, then what are the odds that a gate would appear before a brooding Lucca, at that specific time and place, and take her back to a specific time and place she was thinking about? The signs are pointing towards 'yes, entity' more than 'no, random, are you high?'. |
| 46 | *** The different colors could also be indicative of the nature of the gates. The regular ones are essentially stable passages, and the red one is a temporary one-time only type. |
| 47 | *** Hmmmm. It certainly is a seemingly insignificant gate, but there are few explanations for its "anomolous" properties. It is most likely (if the gates are somehow related to the entities memories) that is was created by a bare margin solely due to (I see we are not using spoilers in this folder) Robo's 3 or 400 year effort to restore a forest at but a small request. This time and effort might have been enough to spark the "memory mechanism (feel free to insert appropriate trope please)that is revealing other gates, as it wasn't directly neccessarily related to Lavos, but certainly lay in the realm of effects of Lavos. As for it's red color, if it is indeed Entity memory, and therefore somewhat emotionally, related, then perhaps the red color is a warning (as it often is in nature) for the party or Lucca in this case to not lose sight of the primary purpose of the gates in the first place. Even though this gate could potentially shatter poor Lucca's resolve, again, the red, indicating risk. [[NotHyperbole Literally red]]. Awesome trope for this btw. |
| 48 | [[/folder]] |
| 49 | |
| 50 | [[folder: Marle and the Queen]] |
| 51 | * Concerning time paradoxes, when they go to the past, Marle disappears because her being mistaken for the queen prevents her from being born in the first place. I have a few issues with this. First, how did they originally save Marle? I guess if anyone did it, it would be Frog's doing, and he's still looking for her even after you get there and they say they've called the search off. But more importantly, why did Marle disappear if the Queen hadn't even died yet? Shouldn't she disappear WHEN the queen dies? And if Marle never existed as a result of her going into the past, then she would never have existed to have the pendant that results in Crono and friends going into the past in the first place, so shouldn't they disappear too since they couldn't have possibly been able to cause a time warp without the presence of Marle and her pendant in the future? |
| 52 | ** The only answer I can think of is that The Entity pulled Marle into the Darkness Beyond Time for a short while in order to motivate Crono into saving Queen Leene. The reason he did this is actually kind of simple. In saving Leene, Crono beat Yakra. Beating Yakra angered Yakra's family. Eventually, Yakra VIII was born into Crono's time, and decided to take revenge. Yakra VIII impersonated the Chancellor in Marle's time, who then tried to execute Crono. This led to Crono's escape, their flight from the castle, their uses of the Gate to 2300 A.D., and their discovery of the Day Of Lavos recording, which led to them saving the world. For The Entity, pulling one person into the DBT for a few hours was a simple thing, especially if it meant leading the heroes down the path to defeating Lavos. |
| 53 | ** Perhaps even if Frog was the one that saved the Queen, he'd have had help, like people who searched for her and gave him clues, perhaps even helped him rescue her. As soon as the 'queen' was found, Frog would lose that extra help and be unable to rescue the true queen. |
| 54 | ** It's a stable time loop. If Marle didn't disappear, the Queen would die. If the Queen dies, Marle would never be born, and thus would never have gone back in time to be mistaken for the Queen and prevent the Queen from being saved - which means that the Queen would get saved and result in Marle being born after all...The paradox involved creates a stable time loop instead. It is also possible that Frog originally did track the Queen to the cathedral, but was unable to progress from there. Only Crono's insistence on poking everything that wasn't nailed down opened the secret door to the lair. |
| 55 | ** Here's how I took it: without Marle's appearance in the Middle Ages, Frog would have found Leene and rescued her from Yakra's Cathedral. However, the pulling back of troops and the big deal being made about Leene's rescue when Marle was mistook for her delayed Frog. Despite the fact that he was searching for her when we first meet him, his first instinct upon hearing that she's been rescued would have been to go see for himself. Because of this, even though he pegged her for an imposter and began his search again, he would not have arrived in time to save Leene; she would be dead by the time he confronted Yakra. Intervention by Crono and Lucca flipped this back the other way, because instead of a slow infiltration by a lone soldier, Frog had backup that allowed him to fight his way to Yakra faster. |
| 56 | ** I looked at it from the direction of the different realities. No time travel happens & Leene is saved by Glenn in reality 1 (the first reality). The Entity creates gates and Marle is sent to the past. This alters history, the search is called off and Frog cannot save Leene alone with the present state of affairs. Leene dies and Marle ceases to exist (the second reality). Crono then joins Lucca and Frog witnessing Marle's "death" (being erased from the time stream) and save Leene and thus Marle, creating a third reality. The principal way I see this works is, the time travel/creating a paradox actually moves the characters to an adjacent reality where these events are not a paradox. Thus, their past is in the previous reality and they have all memory of it but when they cause a paradox, they move to a new reality where things are in the post-change state and everyone not involved in the paradox thinks things were always that way (also suggested with Black Omen and such later). Assuming Marle wasn't directly involved in the second paradox (that is, assuming the paradox is caused by Crono meeting her again or whatever), she would then not be there in the second timestream (complete with fancy special effects) and then, gets restored in the third timestream. |
| 57 | ** Everything about that episode indicates that time paradox is ''not'' why she disappears. It doesn't follow the rules of Time Travel Immunity held by the rest of the game (including Crono and Lucca ''during'' Marle's disappearance), there's no time-paradox-related rhyme or reason to when she disappears and reappears, and finally she isn't erased, but rather left awake and aware while trapped in some dark, cold place. My theory is that it was caused by an instability left over from the initial gate event caused by the telepod overloading, thus why it looked similar to the telepod's sparkles. Lucca's Gate Holder (apparently Gate Key in the English version?) is explained as having been designed to stabilize the gates, so it could have also stabilized whatever bubble Marle was trapped in, freeing her; this explains why Crono didn't disappear even though he used the same telepod overload as Marle, since he immediately met Lucca and was stabilized by the Gate Holder, and why Marle didn't reappear immediately when Queen Leene was rescued, since the Gate Holder needed to be brought close to Marle in order to stabilize her. |
| 58 | ** I have my own theory. It's very cracky, so bear with me. In short: Marle is her own ancestor. In the original timeline, Crono didn't wake up in time to bump into Marle (literally), and then be present to chase after her when Lucca's telepod prototype reacts to the pendant, which is shown later on in the game to have the power to manipulate certain types of energy. So. Marle gets sent back in time, is discovered by the soldiers searching for Leene, getting mistaken for her ancestor...you can imagine where it goes from there. Leene dies for some reason, Glenn finds out about it, and the war against the Mystics gets turned into Glenn's private revenge plot (he does have justification in prosecuting an end to the war, though it's very selfish at this point over his previous motivation), and life continues as normal. Crono getting to the Millenial Fair when he did breaks the stable time loop and forces Marle out of the time stream until she can be recovered by Lucca's Gate Key. |
| 59 | ** Did everyone purposely leave out the possibility of exactly why the pendant is solely responsible for the "permitting" of this "paradox"? One word [[spoiler:Schala]] spoiler #2 ahead [[spoiler: due to it's connection to Lavos through the Mammon machine and Schala's ability to influence things to some degree]] first: the pendant destabilizes whatever Lucca's telepod thing thinks its doing, and whatever mechanism it uses to transfer matter is susceptible enough to be whacked into time travel forces, and BAM this [[AscendedGlitch glitch]] is now the no-argument no-holds-barred time travel method. Second: the pendant resonates with Schala enough at this event to preserve Marles existence in this HIGHLY volatile occurence within this timeline, and UNDOUBTEDLY protects her when she should have been completely stripped of existence. A little more crazily, the now time travel and timeline sensitive pendant either senses the impending paradox and can't outright return Marle (as that would negate the paradox that initiates those actions in the first place) and shift's her existence to protect her as a last resort. Lucca's gate key could probably return her immediately, since it would be attuned to the telepod glitch and therefore be recognizable by the pendant to return, but without Leene being rescued the paradox would probably always reassert itself, but if there was time, MAYBE they could all quickly return, but again that "initial paradox" thing. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, sorry, haha. The last bit of it seems like a wholly uncertain scenario. |
| 60 | ** Gonna throw out my own theory: when Marle got accidentally sent back in time, she dropped her pendant, which is how Crono followed her. Crono didn't drop the pendant, and this prevented him from disappearing. Lucca had her Gate Key so she didn't disappear. Close proximity to both these items held by people from a reality where Marle existed is what brought Marle back--it had nothing to do with rescuing the Queen, the timing was just a coincidence. Gonna add: Notice how everything important in the game is set off or is influenced by Marle's pendant? Could it be sentient? |
| 61 | [[/folder]] |
| 62 | |
| 63 | [[folder: Kangaroo Court]] |
| 64 | * So, the trial. I get that this is supposed to be ludicrous in general and mostly exists to set up Marle and her father falling out and the jump into 2300 ultimately. However, two things just bug me...First, why didn't anybody seem to consider calling in Marle herself as a witness? You'd think she would be one of the most knowledgeable people as to whether or not Crono kidnapped her. Second...what about Lucca? One of Yakra's motivations was to kill the people who killed his ancestor, and Lucca was right there alongside Crono, helping to kill the original Yakra. She was also the most obvious choice for princess-abductor since she built the thing that made Marle disappear in the first place. So why didn't she get arrested, too? It's not like it'd be hard to find where she lives, and they had three days to go arrest her instead of sitting back and letting her plan Crono's rescue. This might not bother me so much if the chancellor didn't SPECIFICALLY mention Marle vanishing at Lucca's show. |
| 65 | ** Simple, the trial was fixed. If they called Marle up to the stand, the case would be over right there and then. As for Lucca, well, maybe Crono was best remembered as the person who killed Yakra. Lucca and Frog were just lost to history (like many faceless soldiers of war). |
| 66 | ** The spiky-haired kid was easier to remember than the girl with goggles, or possibly was the only one who went down in the Yakra-generation family history as a person that wasn't described like a mystic. |
| 67 | ** Also, I guess they could've made up some excuse about Stockholm Syndrome for why Marle couldn't be a witness. |
| 68 | ** They caught and tried Crono because he was the one that just waltzed into the castle right into the Chancellor's arms. Presumably when Lucca heard the news that Crono was arrested she went into hiding for a few days planning the jailbreak, just in case the guards started looking for her, too. |
| 69 | ** The answer is quite simple, actually. Crono is not the target of the "grudge" at all, as evidenced by the Rainbow Shell quest ending. The Fake Chancellor only pursued his imprisonment and execution on the basis of Crono being Marle's friend. His grudge is against the Royal Line of Guardia. King Guardia and Princess Nadia. Not only does the Fake Chancellor get to cause emotional damage to Marle due to the execution of her friend / potential love interest, but he more importantly drives a wedge between Marle and her father. Setting the king up for a kangaroo court of his own, with no immediate heir present due to Marle running off. And, really, who gets anything but the death sentence on their first playthrough? |
| 70 | ** On a separate note, they're kind of horrible at running a kangaroo court. If I were trying to get Crono executed I'd mention the fact that he was responsible for cheating the vendors, specifically the race (which, admit it, you tried) or ''lowering the princess into a vat of fire'' (it wasn't actually dangerous, but who cares about facts?) or, like, literally anything about the Gate?? I guess maybe they are doing the court equivalent of CherryTapping but come on. |
| 71 | [[/folder]] |
| 72 | |
| 73 | [[folder: Frog's Accent]] |
| 74 | * Frog speaks in Medieval English. I am fine with that in and of itself. What bugs me is that ''he is the only person in the Medieval era who does so.'' |
| 75 | ** Worse than that, [[YeOldeButcheredeEnglishe he does it wrong]]. |
| 76 | ** He doesn't even do it all the time. In his flashbacks, he speaks normally, and he also speaks normally at several other points in the game, such as when you enter Lavos's shell. I think it's an affection. |
| 77 | *** Yeah, it's just something Frog does ([=IIRC=], he even does it when he's turned back from a frog into his original form). |
| 78 | ** It's a translation choice. In the original Japanese, he speaks much more rudely and not in an archaic language at all. |
| 79 | ** Actually, this whole little tidbit was lampshaded in the flash series Chrono Trigger Unglued, in which (the now-able to talk) Crono points it out. |
| 80 | ** Glenn's speech has been changed for the DS port. |
| 81 | *** [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks D:]] |
| 82 | *** Waitwaitwait. Clarify. PLEASE. Do you mean Frog's speech has been changed (I saw a re-translated line that kicked out all the little niggling Thees and Thys), or do you mean that Glenn has been given an infusion of the Cyan drugs as well? |
| 83 | *** Clarification: Frog has dropped the thee's and thou's. He talks just like the rest of the people in the Middle Ages... who all talk more formally than they used to, but still relatively normally. Not a 'thee' to be seen. They make up for it with a wee bit of PurpleProse. |
| 84 | *** The old English accent was added for the original US script. The DS port has a new script and they apparently chose not to use it. |
| 85 | ** In the original SNES game, it might have been a conscious and symbolic choice for Glenn to alter his speech as his body changed. Once he obtained his original body and had his [[RoaringRampageOfRevenge revenge]] against Magus, he could revert to his normal, pre-frog speech patterns. |
| 86 | ** Woolseyism. Not much else to it, really. |
| 87 | *** The Doylist explanation is probably that Woolsey wanted to emphasize the origin of the medieval-era character (just like Ayla gets YouNoTakeCandle), but figured doing it for the entire medieval setting would be annoying. |
| 88 | ** Might be explained by upbringing/class relations/inferiority complex: Frog might have been born to a poorer class. That explains the rougher tone in Japanese. However, he got changed into, well, a frog. He might speak more formally now (bear in mind that he didn't before!) in order to get more respect... |
| 89 | [[/folder]] |
| 90 | |
| 91 | [[folder: Wibbly Wobbly]] |
| 92 | * How about the massive chronological paradoxes involved? Humans from the future affect human domination over dinosaurs, the player personally creates the sword used in the first half of the game in the second half. Time is a total mess by the end of the game, and I get a headache even thinking about it. Freaking time travel. |
| 93 | ** Even if the party didn't defeat Azala, Lavos hitting the world and starting an Ice Age would wipe out the Reptites anyway. |
| 94 | ** Those examples you mention aren't paradoxes, they're time loops. In both cases, the consequences of the time travel result ultimately in the travel being able to happen. Now, there are *other* paradoxes in Chrono Trigger, notably the whole "killing Lavos and preventing him from destroying the future" deal... |
| 95 | ** [[Main/{{TimeyWimeyBall}} ...Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey...]] |
| 96 | *** Go to the [[http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Principles_of_Time_and_Dimensional_Travel.html Chrono Compendium]]. They've thought about this ''A LOT''. |
| 97 | *** More concisely, those examples aren't paradoxes because, in happening, they cause themselves to have happened in the first place. A temporal paradox happens when something happens which, in happening, ''prevents itself'' from happening. |
| 98 | *** Just to clarify, the two basic rules are that stuff that time travels remains immune to the effects of its time travel, and any temporal duplicates vanish at the exact same point in time that the original time-traveled. |
| 99 | *** ohh yeaahh. If stuff is there when it is gotten and brought back in time, then back in time, just because the getter creates it [[DeadUnicornTrope "in the first place"]] (sorry I couldn't resist using that trope XD XD) all that did was preempt the ORIGINAL creation of it. I assume this would be a different story if the getter's goal was explicitly to destroy an item just to witness it's disappearance. |
| 100 | *** Immune? At the beginning, Princess Nadia's existing caused her to not exist. And then her non-existence indirectly caused her to re-exist. Except Crono was only there to re-exist her because she existed in the first place, which she didn't. And she managed to change her clothes while not existing...I think I need some aspirin. |
| 101 | *** Perhaps Nadia never put on the Queen-clothes in the first place? |
| 102 | *** The best explanation that I can think of for that is that it was an intervention by "the Entity". See, Marle vanishing led to Crono saving Leene, which he did by beating Yakra. Then Yakra VIII or whatever replaces Marle's chancellor in 1000 A.D. and tries to kill Chrono, which leads to the group escaping into the Gate in the woods, which sends them to 2300, which leads to them discovering the Day of Lavos transmission, which leads to them saving the world. Pretty convoluted, but the Entity is God, after all. He's probably more than capable of pulling one small human into the Darkness Beyond Time for a little while. |
| 103 | *** The Entity is the planet, period. Why are there still debates over this? |
| 104 | *** Because there's no compelling reason to believe that from either Chrono Trigger ''or'' Chrono Cross. |
| 105 | *** The hell there isn't. Go back to Chrono Trigger, run through the sidequest where Robo restores the forest. He outright STATES this. |
| 106 | *** True, you know, except for the opening cut scene to the re-release of Chrono Trigger being called "Our Planet's Dream" and one of the chapters in Chrono Cross being called "For All the Dreamers: Our Planet's Dream is Not Over Yet." :P |
| 107 | *** In addition to the Entity being the Planet, it's also stated that the Gates are memories, not conscious intervention. The Planet is flashing on key moments of its life before it dies. Of course, this raises further questions about certain Gates (Both in the Present and Lucca's Red Gate, particularly), but it makes it unlikely the Planet pulled anyone into the Darkness Beyond Time of its own volition. |
| 108 | *** The Entity is definitely the planet. And the planet is the closest thing that would qualify as a god in-universe (aside from Lavos/Time Devourer, of course). |
| 109 | *** Leene was never in any real danger. Frog would have defeated Yakra on his own and saved her, the Entity just pulled Marle out of the timeline to get Crono and Lucca to meet Frog and strengthen their ranks against Lavos. |
| 110 | *** And because it led to Yakra's ancestor attacking Chrono, which led to them ending up in 2300 A.D. |
| 111 | *** What are you on about? Everyone thought Leene was fine because of Marle, so Frog wouldn't have done anything. |
| 112 | ** Furthermore, it's not clear that humans from the future really and significantly freaked over earlier timelines. The dinosaurs were already predicting/summoning Lavos down on their own heads, and that's what screwed them over, not humans beating Azalia up a couple times. Crono and co ''were'' essential for the creation of the Masamune and rescuing the "Queen" in the final timeline, but there's no indication that the original timeline-less timeline operated that way; without the Prophet, Zeal might not have been able to prevent one of the Wise Men from getting in place, and Leena wouldn't have distracted the royal knighthood. |
| 113 | ** Actually, aren't all the consequences of mucking around in time and space one of the major themes in ''VideoGame/ChronoCross''? I mean, besides HumansAreTheRealMonsters. |
| 114 | *** VideoGame/ChronoCross attempted to cover the consequences of mucking around in time and space, but the slapdash approach to temporal mechanics that Chrono Trigger took made it fairly difficult to take those "consequences" seriously. You could say that VideoGame/ChronoCross covered the consequences of the temporal mechanics ''initially'' established (specifically, the unwriting of Marle from time), but Chrono Trigger itself stopped caring about those mechanics almost immediately after its first arc was complete, in favor of a rolling timeline full of minor changes, and then finally discarded it entirely with the ending, in which a major change is introduced to the timeline (Lavos's defeat) and, instead of dropping the timeline into the Darkness Beyond Time as Cross postulates, reality itself contorted around in order to incorporate the people who were a part of it originally. The problem isn't just that Robo continues to exist; he could easily escape the unwrite by just not being present for it. It's that Atropos continues to exist, and that Robo has a place in the new future. Centuries after a colossal change is offered into the timeline, all the same people that were in the original timeline apparently still exist. The timeline didn't die, it only shifted to a new timeline, and the same people remain a part of it. Nonsensical though this may be, it's what Trigger establishes as the end result of the battle with Lavos. Cross takes the original Marle Vanishes mechanic and attempts to apply it to the ending as a whole, in the process completely disregarding Trigger's ending. Then they go right ahead and include Robo as a part of their story, suggesting that Trigger's temporal mechanics in the ending WERE valid at the same time they've spent the entire story saying they WERE NOT, contradicting themselves and making the problem worse. Ultimately, Chrono Trigger played hard and fast with temporal mechanics and effectively had their take on time travel shift to affect the story they were trying to tell; it was a minor part of the story at large. Cross attempted to explain all the temporal mechanics in Trigger, and wound up muddling the issue and just making it worse by building their entire story around a mechanic Trigger abandoned almost immediately after the story began. |
| 115 | *** I really really really lean towards there definitely being an entity but, not the planet, for one. The only argument I accept against this is if the Dinos were foreseeing Lavos then it was because the planet was also anticipating it, and due to their connection, could as well. The only reason Robo thought any of that was because of his probable exsposure to Sylvan powers (similar to Agent Orange in the Vietnam war which game writers might have wanted to communicate) over the course 300 years of lone agriculturing compounded with the yearning to be re-united with the party. As to take some liberties, I would guess that the reason reality contorted around itself was due to the MAGNITUDE of the time traveling in Cross. I feel like I can reasonably assume (after understanding the events of Chrono Cross) that the glitch which occurred in Trigger was spontaneous, creating a quickly made window with a party that (cmon truthfully) stood little chance of affecting anything. Cross, on the other hand, offers insight into a slow and deliberate manipulation of the time stream using technology that harnessed the error made by Lucca's actual original tech. Which occured within that reality. Since it wasn't the first such "time offense" reality had evolved a solution . . . otherwise all discrepancies in Trigger are covered by this universal ability as there would just be reality contortions to access no matter what the occurrence . . . . . |
| 116 | ** This troper always assumed a lot of those things were done by others. |
| 117 | *** Masamune? Considering Melchior's knowledge, it is plausible that he was the one who plunged it into the machine under the guise of a "tune up" or something and, being more knowledgeable, actually damaged it enough to prevent Black Omen from rising in the first place. |
| 118 | *** Considering the Mystic Village still worships Magus originally, you can assume he died along with Ozzie, Slash and Flea in the Middle Ages summoning of Lavos. So, no Prophet in Zeal who might have simply knocked off the original person who created Masamune before we arrive there. |
| 119 | *** It's pretty obvious that Magus remembers the Gurus being there the first time, so Melchior COULD'VE slammed the knife right into the Mammon Machine before Magus mucked up the timeline. |
| 120 | *** Speaking of that, how does Magus even exist? In the original timeline, he was transported to the year 600 AD at the same time that the Gurus were sent through time, during the Ocean Palace incident when Queen Zeal summoned Lavos. However, when the party winds up witnessing that time period, the events are changed so that Janus is not even present when this happens, meaning that he could never grow up to become Magus, meaning that Magus should disappear just like Marle did. But this is never addressed at all. |
| 121 | *** It's mentionned that during the Fall of Zeal, Melchior tries to rescue Janus in the "new" timeline, and both fall into time gates. Presumably, the same happened to the other two missing gurus. |
| 122 | *** . . . . . (<--- haha sorry) I surmise the party's interference with the queen led to her [[AntLionRampage accelerated Rampage]]. Before the events of Chrono Trigger, everyone was simply leary, not knowing the full magnitude of Lavos, I don't think. After however much time, she summoned everyone to the main chamber to demonstrate the new Mammon Machine, but, presumably Melchior had been preparing to sabotage this event, [[spoiler: creates the Masamune]], and everyone (including Mr. Janus/Magus) are flung about to set the stage as we know it. |
| 123 | *** We are in the new timeline where the Ocean Palace rise as Black Omen. Yet in this new timeline, we still find Ozzie now leading the mystics, holding a grudge against Magus for abandoning them. This means that little Janus in this new timeline did get pulled by a gate to 600 AD and become Magus. This is where I disagree with Time Bastard theory, that was based on the assumption that Janus and Melchior was safe at the village and got ret-goned. When Dalton kidnapped Schala, he created a flash and they dissapear. After that, Janus was nowhere to be seen as well. Knowing Janus, he must have run to the Ocean Palace to save his sister, and Melchior would chase the boy, with the help of the Village Elder since he witnessed what happened to them. This IS just a theory, but it is more likely that in this new timeline, Janus and Melchior got sent through the gates at the Ocean Palace near Lavos just like in the original timeline, rather than suddenly got erased from existence no matter where they are. |
| 124 | ** The Leene example, as said above, demonstrated she would have been rescued anyways. |
| 125 | ** Summoned or just bad/good timing on the Reptite's end, Lavos was already en route. |
| 126 | ** This troper sees it as thus: Anything that happened before 1000 AD was meant to happen, seeing as it still happened in the end. The ONLY paradox that happens but ends up going away is Robo, seeing as his future changes when you defeat Lavos. Other than that, I don't see any real paradoxes in the time line. |
| 127 | *** Well, there is the Ayla paradox. |
| 128 | *** What paradox? Ayla is sent back to her time (65000000 BC) at the end of the game... |
| 129 | *** Predestination doesn't work in Chrono Trigger. Taking Ayla from her time and going to the future should have resulted in ending up in a future without Ayla's influence on the timeline. As another example, Lavos isn't defeated until you actually defeat him, even though you're ''going'' to defeat him. |
| 130 | *** Ayla only joins the party in their time-traveling after she's done everything that needs to be done in her time. There's nothing left for her to do except serve as the sixty-five-million-year predecessor to the Guardia line, which itself is iffy. |
| 131 | *** Wasn't it that one guy who liked Ayla and stole the Gate Key who was Marle's ancestor anyway, rather than Ayla herself? |
| 132 | *** As Ayla is returned to her own time at the end of the game, it prevents any and all paradoxes from ever forming. In fact, the only paradox that would occur was if she was killed - and that requires the whole party to be killed off in a fight, which, again, results in a game over. |
| 133 | *** We know that the timeline is pretty damn resilient. That Robo, Atropos, and Doan still exist in the future despite everything changing is a fairly solid demonstration that time in Chrono Trigger is largely static, taking the course of least resistance when presented with alterations. If a COMPLETELY different future still contains the same people, there's no reason to assume that removing Ayla from Prehistory would cause any significant change; Kino just sires his bloodline with someone else, and history moves on without her. |
| 134 | [[/folder]] |
| 135 | |
| 136 | [[folder: The Guards Must Be Crazy]] |
| 137 | * Why don't the guards confiscate Crono's weapons when they throw him into prison after the trial? |
| 138 | ** He hid them in HammerSpace. |
| 139 | ** Also, by the time New Game Plus rolls around, the man's a freaking One Man Army capable of punching out Cthulu. He's probably playing down his kick-assedness by that point (if you assume New Game Plus to be Crono et all being stuck in a time loop now that they've paradox'ed themselves out of existence--hey, maybe that's how Guardia gets taken over by freaking ''Porre'' in Crono Cross!). |
| 140 | ** Porre was led by Dalton, who came from Zeal, which had all sorts of magical thingamabobs. I think this was confirmed in the DS version. |
| 141 | [[/folder]] |
| 142 | |
| 143 | [[folder: Ayla Punch!]] |
| 144 | * How does Ayla transmute her fists into bronze and iron and stuff? This has always puzzled me. |
| 145 | ** Figure of speech, maybe? The Discovery Channel had a guy, far east martial artist, claiming his fists were as strong as steel because he spent time every day punching a mounted car hood. |
| 146 | ** I assumed she merely wore bronze or iron gloves. |
| 147 | ** Maybe it's just a metaphor. |
| 148 | *** Or it is an example of hyperbole. |
| 149 | [[/folder]] |
| 150 | |
| 151 | [[folder: Spekkio Must Be Lazy]] |
| 152 | * Not so much with regular Lavos, but the Dream Devourer really bugs me. You know, the guy who can eat time and space. This would make him far more threatening than regular Lavos. My question is, why doesn't Spekkio, the freaking GOD of War and the guy who teachs Crono and co. the magic that is partially used to kill Lavos, go out there and kick his butt back to the stone age? Spekkio gets stronger based on the strength of his opponent, so fighting the Dream Devourer would make him a literal god and make the fight all the easier. Spekkio also can't be hit by physical attacks, and no matter how much he seems to get hit with magic, he is never truly beaten or even hurt. One would think Spekkio would eventually do something to kill Lavos/the Dream Devourer once it starts threatening all of time and space. |
| 153 | ** The Dream Devourer is an incarnation of the Time Devourer of ''Chrono Cross'' -- even if you take the latter game as FanonDiscontinuity, the Dream Devourer doesn't make sense independent of it. The Time Devourer can't be truly beaten by force, as it will merely sidestep into another timeline where this didn't happen; the only way to truly defeat it is to activate the Chrono Cross, which peacefully undoes the FusionDance that created it, nullifying its existence without violence. And the alterations to the timeline that will lead to the creation of the Chrono Cross haven't happened yet. |
| 154 | *** Not to mention Spekkio is no longer a ''God of War'', but a ''Master of War''. He even admits he could learn a things or two from Magus. |
| 155 | *** Spekkio might just be stuck at the End of Time, unable to interact with anything that doesn't pass by the End of Time. |
| 156 | [[/folder]] |
| 157 | |
| 158 | [[folder: Lucca's Disposable Weapon]] |
| 159 | * Why does the weapon Lucca uses to save you from prison if you don't escape just disappear? No, contrary to what some FAQ writers say, you ''don't'' get it -- check her equipment. |
| 160 | ** She says it's disposable. Maybe that's what she did afterward: get rid of it. |
| 161 | *** She uses it in battle if she attacks an enemy too close to shoot at. |
| 162 | [[/folder]] |
| 163 | |
| 164 | [[folder: Marle's Pendant]] |
| 165 | * How did Marle get the pendant in the first place? And if Doan is her descendant, does he (or one of his ancestors in 1999 AD) have it? Does Queen Leene or King Guardia XXI (in 600 AD) have it? |
| 166 | ** It's passed down through the royal family, yes, and yes. |
| 167 | ** So how does Leene and/or Guardia XXI get it? We last see it with Schala, and if this is the same familial line that passes from Ayla and Kino through Zeal, Schala and Janus, which of those three have children to pass it down to? Zeal presumably [[spoiler: dies before she can pop out any more kids]], Janus/Magus is unlikely to have gone back to 12,000 BC and had kids to rule, and Schala [[spoiler: ends up merged with the Time Devourer/sending a clone of herself, complete WITH PENDANT, to 1000 AD for Lucca to raise]]. How does that even work, or is there a scene I've forgotten? |
| 168 | *** The pendants originated in Zeal as incomplete Time Eggs made by one of the Gurus. Schala's pendant and Magus' pendants are two different pendants (though possibly of the same design). Queen Zeal, Schala and Magus are not part of the Guardia line. The Earthbound Elder was a member of the Gaurdia line in 12,000 BC. After Schala used her pendant's power to save everyone from the disaster with the Mammon Machine (irrespective of the specific details of the event in the various time streams), the depowered pendant got warped out along with everyone else, after which it came into the possession of the Earthbound Elder and got passed down to his descendents. The pendant in Crono Cross was recreated at the same time [[spoiler:Schala cloned herself, because she knew that Kid would eventually need the power of the partial Time Egg]]. |
| 169 | ** Magus carries around a copy of the pendant as well. It is possible that there were multiple pendants, and one was picked up in 10,000 BC by some Earthbound elder after Zeal went [[ColonyDrop kaboomy]] and passed down through the generations. Or, for that matter, Kino could have gotten the pendant from Marle as a souvenir, and it was passed down from there. |
| 170 | *** Magus does not have the pendant in any way, shape or form. His amulet is an etched metal object which hangs from his waist and comes to rest on his thigh, as easily seen in most artwork of him. However, in game, the amulet just uses the same sprite as the pendant. |
| 171 | [[/folder]] |
| 172 | |
| 173 | [[folder: Phlebotinum Properties]] |
| 174 | * What ''is'' Dreamstone supposed to be? What are its physical properties? |
| 175 | ** I would assume it is a fragment of Lavos, as that would make the most sense. It fell from the sky in an age when Lavos was in orbit above the planet, and it interacts with Lavos' energy there. |
| 176 | *** No, Dreamstone existed before Lavos crash-landed (Ayla gives the party some after the banquet in 65,000,000BC). His arrival and the Frozen Flame's influence probably caused it to become much more abundant. |
| 177 | *** Except it didn't? I seem to recall that the point of going to the prehistoric era to begin with was because that was the only place to find the Dreamstone, and it doesn't appear in any era thereafter except for what Melchior somehow got hold of to make the Grandleon. |
| 178 | *** Note I didn't say it was only there after he crash-landed. I said ''he was above the planet'' at the time. Which he apparently was, as, not long after that, Azala sees him in the sky and he falls out of it. Funny thing is that it's not impossible that bits of him broke off and landed ''before'' his main body did; given the obvious durability of Dreamstone, it would hardly be impossible for it to survive such a fall. |
| 179 | *** The physics wouldn't work. If a piece of Lavos broke off while he was still in space, even if it had the correct trajectory to hit the earth, it would not fall before he did. |
| 180 | ** Another possibility is that Dreamstone is a native resource of the planet and is somehow related to the power of the Planet/Entity, and NOT related to Lavos at all, and Lavos' fall in 65,000,000 BC actually ''destroys'' most of it. |
| 181 | *** This is supported by the retranslation, which clarifies that Azala was not summoning Lavos to Earth, but lamenting the inevitability of his arrival. Taking away the ambiguous possibility that Lavos was orbitting the planet before Azala brought him to the surface, it's unlikely that the Dreamstone is related to him at all |
| 182 | [[/folder]] |
| 183 | |
| 184 | [[folder: Prehistoric Schizo Tech Weaponry]] |
| 185 | * Why does the trader in prehistoric times have usable weaponry for Robo? |
| 186 | ** I always figured, since Robo attacks by [[PowerFist just punching everything]], that all of his weapons were some form of glove or gauntlet and not necessarily robotic attachments. |
| 187 | *** They were likely maces or clubs that fit into Robo's weapon arm, and slightly modified by Lucca where necessary. |
| 188 | ** I think a bigger question is, how does he have ''guns''? |
| 189 | *** My guess? They're actually selling her chunks of stone, metal, and other stuff that they throw at prey. Lucca, being the genius she is, modified the stuff into potent ammo for her gun. |
| 190 | *** This troper was of the belief that Lucca merely changes ammo for her gun when a new one is purchased (so it's not so much a Wondershot gun, as it's a Wondershot ''clip''), and Robo recieves some kind of slab of metal/stone in the rough shape of a fist. |
| 191 | *** Another possibility is that it's all Reptite technology scavenged or stolen by the humans, which Lucca modifies as needed for her and Robo to use. Crono's sword might also be some sort of Reptite blade, since Ayla's people did not seem to have knowledge of sword-making. |
| 192 | *** Their technology is not our technology. The first working aircraft was created in the Ice Age. The year 1000 AD featured the invention of a working matter-teleporter, and the reconfiguring of such into a handheld time machine. Lucca was also working on trying to build prototype androids, and she was far enough along that she could not only repair an actual android, but ''reprogram'' him as well. By the year 1999, humanity was living in domed cities, with technology that had abolished the biological need for sleep. Now, with all this in mind, it's not so unreasonable that the Ioka Village had fashioned, according to the item description, weapons that focused light through a ruby and, later, a piece of Dreamstone, the power source for which would soon cease to exist. |
| 193 | *** He has guns because the cave people invented guns and use them in battle. Why is this even a question? |
| 194 | *** Clearly the Weapon Shop guy in 65MBC is a GadgeteerGenius like Lucca, and it's already established that individuals like that are not bound by TechnologyLevels. If Lucca can work with 2300AD robotic circuitry (not to mention building time-manipulating devices), there's no reason that some Ioka genius can't develop a ruby-based laser gun (especially since Stone Age gemworking is pretty advanced). That also explains the Stone Arm. |
| 195 | [[/folder]] |
| 196 | |
| 197 | [[folder: Mystic Origins]] |
| 198 | * Where do the Mystics/fiends/Mazoku come from? There's no sign of them or anything that could conceivably evolve into them in 65,000,000 BC, but, suddenly, they're there in 19,000 BC, and keep appearing from then on. |
| 199 | ** Aside from the possibility they were engineered by the Kingdom of Zeal, there was a period of 65 million years that something could have popped up. |
| 200 | *** What bugs me more is that humans didn't change at all over those 65 million years. It took nearly that long to build up civilization to the point seen with the Kingdom of Zeal in 19,000 BC? Are we to just assume that society rose and collapsed an untold number of times during that interval? |
| 201 | ** Gentlemen, I believe you two just answered each others' questions. |
| 202 | ** Mystics might just be leftover dinosaurs. That would certainly explain Ozzie's tail. |
| 203 | ** Creatures considered to be Mystics (Kilwala, Nu) have existed since 65,000,000 BC. Check the Mystic Mountains. |
| 204 | *** Nu aren't Mazoku; they're their own species. One of the sages theorizes that Nu are the first species from which all life on Earth is decended; you can read it in a book in one of the hidden rooms in Zeal. |
| 205 | *** But that book heavily implies that the Mystics are ''descended'' from Nu (just like humans are, but there's no reason Mystics couldn't have branched off from them later than Humans did, after 65 million BC - that would explain why Mystics look a bit more similar to Nu than humans do, since they branched off later and are therefore more similar.) |
| 206 | *** Kilwala might not be Mystics, either, as the human in the tavern refers to the piano player as a "monster" (monsutaa) in the Japanese version. |
| 207 | [[/folder]] |
| 208 | |
| 209 | [[folder: JRPG Writers Have No Sense of Scale]] |
| 210 | * Why is the fact that Ayla and Kino are the ancestors of the Guardia royal line treated as dramatic revelation? There's 65 million years in between. Given breeding patterns and probability, isn't there a chance so high it is almost 100% that those two are the ancestors of ALL of humanity, if they have any descendants? |
| 211 | ** The real question is: how did removing Ayla from the time stream by having her join not [[{{Pun}} royally]] mess with the Guardia Line, since their oldest ancestor is now missing from time? |
| 212 | *** Ayla was replaced in the time stream at the end of the game, so everyone's fine. |
| 213 | *** Time travel doesn't work like that in Chrono Trigger, actually. Things don't happen to future times until the time travelers go to the past, change the relevant stuff, and go back to the future. For example: the desert in A.D. 1000 is a desert until you go back in time and make it into a forest; it's not a forest at the start of the game, simply because you're ''going'' to change it into one. Similarly, the Guardia Line isn't going to persist because Ayla is ''going'' to go back to her own time. |
| 214 | *** That's only for changes though. The Guardia line exists from the start of the game because it has always been there regardless of the main characters time travel shenanigans, while the forest only appears when Robo plants it because it only exists as a direct result of the partys time travel. |
| 215 | *** The very few humans existing in 65000000 BC would be the ancestors of all of present day's humanity, including Crono, Marle, and Lucca. Therefore, if Ayla was removed, and this messed with the time-stream, then it's very likely that the protagonists wouldn't exist to remove Ayla - even if they did exist, many of the ''other'' present-day humans would vanish, definitely including the royal line, thus preventing the party from going to 2300 AD, and thus they never reach the End of Time, and therefore they never go to 65000000 BC, so Ayla wouldn't be removed anyway. Basically, Ayla has effect when removed because you get a paradox otherwise. |
| 216 | *** Yes, but it does take an unspecified amount of time for real time temporal retconning to happen (i.e. Nadia didn't disappear until after Crono showed up at the castle). 65 million years of retconning would take 162500 times as long as 400 years. And every time you return to 65 million BC with her, the counter would reset. |
| 217 | ** Paradoxes aren't possible in the Chrono universe. [[http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Principles_of_Time_and_Dimensional_Travel.html Intoducing Time Traveler's Immunity and Time Bastard.]] For those of you who don't want to read a lengthy article from people who have been playing and replaying this game over and over and thinking about it too much for 13 years, I'll break it down.\ |
| 218 | '''Time Traveller's Immunity:''' A time Traveler is immune to the effects of changes due to their actions and to future time travel.\ |
| 219 | '''Time Bastard:''' When the past is changed, the version of that person in the new timeline disappears at the moment he time traveled in the old timeline, leaving only the version of that person with the greatest build up time traveler's immunity.\ |
| 220 | The best way to explain the Ayla Paradox? She isn't the biological ancestor of the royal family. She may, in a sense, be the spiritual ancestor. They may imply she is in the dialogue but, come on, there' no way they could possibly track their geneology over 65 million years. |
| 221 | ** Alternatively, you could just believe that she is already the mother of the ancestors. Yep, just an ActionMom. She is clearly older than everyone else except maybe Magus, and the characters were designed by Akira Toriyama, the one who created [[Manga/DragonBall Bulma's mom]]. |
| 222 | *** But she states that if she had a baby, she wouldn't be chief. As she's chief when you first meet her, she hasn't had kids yet. |
| 223 | *** Remember that the first time you meet, Ayla remains in 65000000 BC after you complete your mission. It's only on a later visit, possibly quite a while later, that she's actually removed from the timestream properly. Perhaps there's enough time to ensure the survival of the species between those two visits. Meaning [[DontExplainTheJoke Ayla and Kino had sex.]] |
| 224 | ** Throwing another theory out there real quick, just because one of the original ancestors was removed from the time stream doesn't mean that there wasn't a new ancestor to step in. The resolution of the game is conveniently low enough for the subtle changes in appearance that would result from a different-person-but-same-tribe ancestor to be simply not visible. When Ayla returned, the original bloodline was restored...to little effect. Which, I suppose, just reinforces the idea that Ayla/Kino as the penultimate ancestors is really not that great a revelation to begin with. |
| 225 | *** Pretty sure the changes wouldn't be subtle. The difference between the later generations from either timeline would be like the differences between progressively more distant cousins. Over 65 million years, that's going to crop up quite a bit. |
| 226 | *** So, if you throw those two ideas together, the very layout of the world would therefore change by removing Ayla, wouldn't it? Maybe Time Bastard is just really efficient and makes a separate Ayla for everytime you leave, bastarding her away everytime you bring her back? Like you said, there are (almost) no Paradoxes in Chrono Trigger. Considering TTI and Time Bastard only make sense if they exist (that is the theories were developed to fill in the flaws in Chrono Trigger's time travel mechanics), there must be some force trying to keep it going correctly. Or, and I just know I'm going to regret this, she has an identical twin who got driven off for some reason and comes back later. I know, no evidence etc. |
| 227 | ** Maybe because the Time Key Lucca made locked Chrono, Lucca and Marle in as stable points in time. In other words, the Time Key worked by taking care of all the paradoxes. Remember, Lucca didn't make it until after Marle went back in time the first time. |
| 228 | ** The "Ayla Paradox" does not ''only'' apply to Ayla. If you recall, Lucca sent Kino into the timestream for the victory celebration in 1000 Guardian Year, making him subject to whatever laws of time Ayla were subject to, just at a different point in the timestream. Hence, if you think that Ayla traversing through time is a problem, ''Kino'' traversing through time would make a ''real'' mess. |
| 229 | ** Given that they both travel through time, could it be reasonable to posit that they would never have reproduced, regardless of any time travel? For example, if Ayla was barren and had to adopt a child, then that child would ultimately become the ancestor of the Guardian line. |
| 230 | ** Or maybe Ayla going to the future wasn't definitive enough? Suppose the Marle example, there was a time paradox because the timeline most certainly would cease to exist if the queen died, but with Ayla, maybe the fact that there was still a possibility for her to go back and play caveman with Kino, and this possibility was enough to keep the timeline stable. In Marle's case, the possibility just wouldn't happen, it was already set in stone the queen would die if you didn't interfere, due to the knights giving up, due to Marle showing up. Of course, if Marle didn't exist and couldn't show up, then the knigh- oh forget this, I need a drink. |
| 231 | ** There's also the issue of the "Frog Ending". Despite having a different ancestor, Marle was virtually identical to her original self, save her tongue. It's possible that the Universe/Entity keeps things as close to the base as possible. Similar to what happens with a Time Beetle in Series/DoctorWho. |
| 232 | *** Don't the villagers comment a lot about her wearing a disguise? Also, shouldn't TTI have protected her from the change in ancestry anyway? |
| 233 | [[/folder]] |
| 234 | |
| 235 | [[folder: The Guards Must Be Inconsistently Lazy]] |
| 236 | * So, on first arrival at Guardia Castle in 600AD, the only thing preventing Crono from being imprisoned (or gutted) by the guards is ''Leene's'' intervention, but Lucca was able to barge right past several guards, into the throne room, and towards the stairwell that leads to the queen's private chambers and nobody bats an eyelash. How? |
| 237 | ** With ''Science.'' |
| 238 | *** And guns. |
| 239 | ** The guards weren't trying to kill him, they were just harassing him. Presumably, after Leene told them off, they loosened up and let Lucca through. |
| 240 | ** She might have passed as a new hand maiden, or as a girlfriend of one of the soldiers in the infirmary. |
| 241 | ** When she meets Crono, she's clearly out of breath from running. One can assume the guards ''were'' chasing her, but went back to their posts when they saw she was with Crono. |
| 242 | ** From the perspective of the medieval guards, Crono is armed and potentially dangerous because he has a sword. They probably wouldn't recognize Lucca's gun if they saw it. |
| 243 | [[/folder]] |
| 244 | |
| 245 | [[folder: Robo Poison]] |
| 246 | * Robo can be poisoned. What. |
| 247 | ** That seems to happen to [[BizarreAlienBiology a lot of RPG robots]]. How the hell does that work out in ''VideoGame/PhantasyStar''? |
| 248 | *** Androids are immune to poison in PSIV, as well as having other non-biological characteristics that are refreshingly exempted from GameplayAndStorySegregation. I think cyborgs in PSIII were poisonable, but PSIII was considerably lacking in polish by comparison. Accuracy wasn't the only thing PSIV did better than CT, either - the combo attacks were far more impressive too, but, of course, that's just my opinion. |
| 249 | ** He can also be healed by spells and by drinking potions. DRINKING POTIONS. WHAT. |
| 250 | ** This is a well-established AcceptableBreakFromReality in [=RPGs=], both western and Japanese. It's not even touched in the story, so it's not even worth arguing. |
| 251 | ** [[WildMassGuessing His system is semi-biological?]] |
| 252 | ** Maybe the poison also happens to be corrosive? |
| 253 | *** And the potions are Electrolitic Fluids |
| 254 | ** My fan theory is that Robo is fueled by human foods which his systems process into usable energy the same way that human bodies do. That same system also allows him to benefit from healing potions that repair his body when they're processed...but it also makes him vulnerable to toxins that other robots would shrug off. |
| 255 | [[/folder]] |
| 256 | |
| 257 | [[folder: Azala's Gender]] |
| 258 | * It's been years since I last played the SNES version, but...was [[LizardFolk Azala]]'s [[AmbiguousGender gender ever discussed]] in that version of the game? |
| 259 | ** I can't remember. But the reptilian male voice I always imagined in my head hit a major record scratch when Nizbel 2 suddenly identified hi- Urgh! ''her'' as female five minutes before her final appearance in the plot. |
| 260 | *** Just because she's female doesn't mean she can't have the voice you imagined. She isn't human after all, and she doesn't have breasts (as you would realistically expect a reptilian female not to). |
| 261 | ** No. Azala's gender is never revealed in the original SNES version. |
| 262 | ** Azala's gender is FridgeBrilliance. In theropod dinosaurs (presumably what Azala is), females are larger than and dominant over males. |
| 263 | [[/folder]] |
| 264 | |
| 265 | [[folder: What Kind of Lame Power Is Water Anyway?]] |
| 266 | * So, Crono gets Luminaire, the "Ultimate Holy Magic", Lucca gets Flare, the "Ultimate Flame Magic", and Magus gets Dark Matter, the "Ultimate Dark Magic". How come nobody gets any "Ultimate Water Magic"? Both of the water users only take their attack spell to level 2 and then focus on healing. What gives? |
| 267 | ** There is an ultimate ice magic used by some enemies in the game, I forget what it's called. Why Frog and Marle don't get it, I don't know. |
| 268 | ** Marle is a healer and stops learning attacks at all after a certain point (which is why she's considered a very low tier character) and Frog learns frog squash instead, probably due to RuleOfFunny. |
| 269 | *** [[GameBreaker Haste]] is low tier? |
| 270 | *** Yes. As bad as haste the spell may be [[GameBreaker Haste Helms]] have that effect on the character permanently and don't make you waste time casting haste. Also, Marle only has single character heals, making Frog or Robo much more effective party healers than her by the time you get haste helms. And since haste, the only thing keeping her useful, is reproduced by equipment she becomes completely useless. |
| 271 | *** You mean helms that become useless (defense-wise) practically immediately? And prevent you from using the very best helmets? Granted, she could still stand to gain better healing and ice techs. |
| 272 | *** No, I mean the helmets with such an overpowered ability that the fact that they have 10 less defence than the helmet with the highest defence means nothing because you'll cut things down before it becomes a problem. Its ability makes it better than any other helmet in the game. Not counting the ozzie pants (because who wants to use em) there are only 4 helms with higher defence in the game, and none of them have an ability that's as useful in ''every single situation''. |
| 273 | *** 1) I'll agree that defense isn't much of a concern here, and that the Haste Mets are much better for cleaning up small fry. However, several of the late game bosses have nasty status ailments they can give you; I'm ''not'' going into those without my status-immunity-granting Prism Mets. 2) Marle does have party heals; they just happen to be dual techs (with enough characters you're pretty unlikely to be without one). Also, Haste plus being a super strong healer means the lack of party heals doesn't matter as much. 3) Marle is a key component of Reaction Bomb 3 (her dual tech with Lucca, not sure what it's called in English), the best non-Magus AOE spell in the game. So yeah. |
| 274 | ** I always thought the dual tech "glacier" was the game's ice 3 spell. |
| 275 | ** If there is an Ultimate Ice Magic, I'd like to see which enemy uses it. It kinda makes the Nu Guardian in the BonusDungeon in the DS release incomplete. He retaliates against all magic with the ultimate version of that spell type: Dark yields Darkmatter, Light yields Luminaire, Fire yields Flare, and Ice gets...Ice II as a response... |
| 276 | *** Queen Zeal's Hexagon Mist is the Ultimate Water Magic. |
| 277 | *** Which was renamed Starburst. Thanks for the info. *sigh* I understand why they didn't give Frog or Marle that spell; there needs to be some variety in the magics, and Arise is a pretty sweet spell in its own right. It just feels incomplete without it. Ah well. |
| 278 | *** Doesn't Marle's clone in the DS remake have Icefall, another ultimate ice spell? Granted, Lucca's and Crono's clones also had ultimate spells that couldn't be learned normally, but it's still something. |
| 279 | *** Icefall was just the Alabaster Shade's name for Ice II, one of the Shade's copies of the spells Marle has under a different name. Just like how the Steel Shade had Thunderfall (Lightning II) and Scintillation (Luminaire), and the Crimson Shade had Shadow Fire (Fire II) and Explosion (Flare). Unlike Steel and Crimson, Alabaster Shade's only special "ultimate" spell was Recuperate/Restores HP (Cure II). |
| 280 | ** My theory: Water doesn't get an ultimate attack spell, because Water is not designed as an offensive element. Water elementalists develop healing and support magic. |
| 281 | [[/folder]] |
| 282 | |
| 283 | [[folder: That last 2300 years makes all the difference]] |
| 284 | * The Sun Stone. Somehow, it sits in a place where the sun always shines for 65 '''million''' years, yet isn't charged up to any useful extent until 2300 AD. Granted, this was for the sake of {{Padding}} out a side quest by making you mess with the timeline in the Middle Ages to change the Present. But from a (psuedo-magical-) physics standpoint, it's a tough pill to swallow: the idea that 1300 years out of 65,002,300 years decide the difference between "useless" and "useful." If you don't want to do the math, I've done it for you: that's less than ''two thousandths of a percent'' of the total time. "Realistically", you should've been able to pick up the Sun Stone in 12,000 BC. Even the 14,300 years between then and 2300 AD only add up to two hundredths of a percent of the 65,002,300-year total time. Here's a fun little [[http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3653449 graph]] to illustrate the ludicrous math involved. |
| 285 | ** I think my fanwanking skills are up to this challenge. The significant change in the world prior to picking up the fully charged Sun Stone in 2300 AD is obviously the rise of Lavos and the destruction of the world. I suggest that the Sun Stone absorbed energy from Lavos's planet-frying rain of lasers, pushing it the rest of the way. |
| 286 | ** The Sun Stone requires to be ''fully'' energised, 100%, in order to do anything. If Lavos was necessary to charge it, why can you complete the quest and also defeat Lavos in the past? |
| 287 | *** Same way Robo exists after you kill Lavos and Lucca still remembers a mother without legs. You time-travel with it, therefore it has [[RippleEffectProofMemory Ripple Effect Proof Existence]]. |
| 288 | *** Robo can easily exist after you kill Lavos - robots weren't specifically created because of the apocalypse, and Robo could have existed in the ''good'' future. The characters ''do'' have RippleEffectProofMemory, but this is possibly a feature of Marle's pendant (and therefore also the Time Key, which was designed to mirror the pendant's functions). |
| 289 | *** It's more just a feature of temporal mechanics as they exist in this game's universe. Robo exists because he time traveled, due to Time Traveller's Immunity; which is also why the party still has the Epoch. Whichever version of Robo was created in the Good Future vanishes from time at the exact same time that Robo first entered the Promethe Dome gate with the party. Which is kind of creepy, now that I think about it... |
| 290 | *** It's too bad for him that he's not from the original timetine. Time Bastard might be creepy in a sense, but it acts impartially, and since the person is sent to the Darkness Beyond Time, at least they don't suffer. |
| 291 | *** Explain how that doesn't protect Marle the first time? |
| 292 | ** What bothers me about the Sun Stone is that it required 65,002,300 years to charge up...but in 12,000BC it's already a known artifact, and people are aware of it needing millions of years to recharge. Did they find it (or produce it) out of nowhere, fully charged, in the heyday of the Magic Kingdom, and then use SCIENCE! to determine how long it would take for it to recharge? |
| 293 | *** Or did they use the power of Lavos, via the Mammon Machine, to charge it the first time and...Wait, did I just posit proof of the 'Lavos rain o' death charges Sunstone' theory? Regular old sunlight takes forever and a half, but the power of Lavos...Wow. Circular fanwanking. Ok, that sounded worse than I intended. |
| 294 | *** Well, maybe it just needs a huge amount of energy. The Sun is the biggest provider of energy, although Lavos having a fit in 1999 AD counts as a few million years of sunlight? Also, the Sun Stone might have recharged since the very beginning of time when it's found and used by Zeal. |
| 295 | *** Going off the question posed above beginning "Did they find it...": why not? In our world, we can do things like use carbon-dating and geological evidence to determine how long things have been where they are. Perhaps they found several fully charged, and some partially charged, Sun Stones, used geology to determine how long each had been in a position sufficiently exposed to the sun, and calculated from there to a reasonable degree of accuracy how long the charge time should be. |
| 296 | ** The problem with this question is that it assumes that the Sun Stone could only have begun its existence at 65,000,000 BC. While that is the farthest back the game allows you to go, it is not necessarily the beginning of time. There could be an addtional 100,000,000 years before that point where the Sun Stone could be sitting around somewhere gathering energy until someone in Zeal stumbles upon it and starts making shit out of it. |
| 297 | ** The original question sounds like he's assuming the planet or Sun Stone should go "eh that's good enough, you can make the Sun Stone equipment now." Lots of things can't be done until it's 100% ready, as ridiculous as they can be. |
| 298 | ** Maybe it's like cooking raw meat. If it's done, it's done. If it's not, it's not safe to eat, even if it wouldn't take that much longer to cook it. Perhaps the Moon Stone requires reaching some sort of critical mass of energy in order to become the Sun Stone. |
| 299 | ** It's also implied in the game by an NPC that you don't ''need'' to charge the Moon Stone to it's full capacity. You can get a Sun Stone even if it's not fully charged, though I assume a certain threshold of power is needed before it can become a Sun Stone. In fact, this would explain why some Enlightened Ones refer to the Sun's energy as tired; in order to truly harness the power of the Sun Stone, you need to let it charge to 100%. Chrono's team does the full charge, but in Zeal's case they just couldn't wait and jumped the gun. |
| 300 | ** Think of the Sun Stone less like a simple battery, and more like an artefact with two stable points. It's on "absorb energy" mode (Moon Stone) until it reaches full charge, when it then changes to "provide energy" mode (Sun Stone) and remains on that until it's depleted. So, a 50% charged Moon Stone is still useless, while a 50% charged Sun Stone is still one heck of a powerful thing. Likewise, a 99.999% charged Moon Stone still needs that little bit of extra juice before it can start doing anything, even if our heroes don't get even close to using 1% of its power. |
| 301 | *** All these answers about how it needs to be "fully charged" are missing the point. ''Why'' does it require precisely 65,002,300 years to fully charge? (Or at least, why does it require somewhere between 65,001,000 and 65,002,300 years, since you can't pick it up in that timeframe?) That is a ludicrously precise requirement for something that is just a natural relic and which therefore has no connection at all to the events that define that timeframe. Certainly it could require more than 65,000,000 years, or less than 65,000,000 years - but the fact that the threshold is ''precisely'' where it needs to be to force you to worry about someone stealing it in 65,001,000 AD years comes across as absurd. The Doylist reason is clear, but since the chance of the cutoff requirement falling ''exactly'' where it would matter for the protagonists is so low, it makes no sense from a Watsonian perspective unless you say [[MST3KMantra "turn your brain off and just accept that it requires that number."]] |
| 302 | *** It being a natural relic is exactly why the amount of time it needs to charge is arbitrary. It cares not for the calendar, it just has a charge capacity, and requires a certain amount of sunlight to reach it. The fact it's troublesome that it gets stolen in 1000 AD is because it's never put back in its place afterwards, and therefore never gets its full charge. |
| 303 | [[/folder]] |
| 304 | |
| 305 | [[folder: Crono's Mom's Weirdness Filter]] |
| 306 | * Why doesn't Crono's mom care when he has strange guests come into his room and sleep with him? 2 girls in his bed? That's fine. A robot and a Frog? Kinkerific! 3 girls coming and sleeping in his bed when he's not there and possibly videotaping themselves for him? I'm just pulling that out of my ass for fun! But, the point is, he is a young teen and his mom seems to not care about him having strange people she's never met stay overnight in his bed. |
| 307 | ** This is the woman who responded to Crono's saving the entire span of history with "that's nice dear, but I wish you'd spend more time around the house". She is clearly not mentally stable. |
| 308 | *** Touche. |
| 309 | *** A possible explanation for said madness is that [[DidYouJustRomanceCthulhu Lavos knocked her up]] [[InterspeciesRomance at some point]], making her [[GoMadFromTheRevelation go at least a little crazy]] from meeting [[EldritchAbomination something so incomprehensibly powerful]]. It also explains why Crono is the only person in the game with spiky red hair (take a long, hard look at the Dream Devourer, and the Time Devourer in Chrono Cross). Yes, I realize that this theory is about as [[EpilepticTrees sane as Gina herself]]. |
| 310 | ** Two girls: DoubleStandard. I can't explain Magus (too old), Frog (furry, even if he doesn't have fur), or Robo (robosexual) so easily. |
| 311 | ** She's not surprised because Crono is just doing the sort of things ''she'' used to do when she was his age. Crono's mom was clearly a perverse sexual deviant in her youth. You wonder why Crono's dad is never around? He's not dead, she just doesn't know who he is among her myriad of conquests. |
| 312 | *** One would think that guys with spiky red hair would stand out in her memory, even in their universe. |
| 313 | *** There is the possibility that he was bald at the time...Someone needs to write this fan fiction already. |
| 314 | *** Oh, really? How come when you introduce her to Ayla, she berates her for not dressing the way that a proper young lady should? I cast my vote for the not mentally stable theory. |
| 315 | *** She could be both. |
| 316 | *** It might be either a case of "do what I say, not what I do" or ChivalrousPervert, just because Crono's mom did all that stuff, doesn't mean she thinks it is right, as for Crono, again double standart, it is okay for a guy get around like that, but not for a girl. |
| 317 | ** I don't think Crono's Mom reads anything sexual into it all. Remember, she's the kind of mom who perpetually thinks Crono is her little baby. She probably thinks these friends are just there to hang out or have an actual sleepover, not, you know, a ''sleepover.'' |
| 318 | ** I'd like to point out that the house is quite oversimplified for the video game screen, as the only rooms actually shown are the kitchen and Crono's room. There have to be other rooms not seen (such as his mom's room); why not a guest room or two? This is supported by the fact that unlike in an inn, you don't see the characters getting out of bed - they just come down the stairs. Clearly they weren't all in Crono's room and the game is just too simplified to show the others. |
| 319 | ** There's also the slight issue of Crono being a fugitive from death row and his mom's reaction amounting to "I heard you were going to be executed! That's awful! Now be careful next time and run along." |
| 320 | [[/folder]] |
| 321 | |
| 322 | [[folder: Dalton Must Be Crazy]] |
| 323 | * When Dalton visits the Earthbound village to abduct Schala, how come everyone buy into his threats to kill her, when he needs her alive to power the Mammon machine? |
| 324 | ** Everyone knows Dalton is so stupid that he might actually do such a thing. |
| 325 | ** FinishingMove . LudicrousPrecision . Personally I was feeling the effects of the [[ForbiddenChekhovsGun Wondershot and Dalton's burp final attack]]. Maybe someone could get a shot off at Dalton but the Wondershot did random damage. So how? Different size bullets? So then, better not take a chance. And anyway Dalton wasn't saying as much but he knew if he were defeated in any way, Schala was going to be eating that final burp move attack. |
| 326 | [[/folder]] |
| 327 | |
| 328 | [[folder: Death to the Fiendlord! Oh, hi, Fiendlord!]] |
| 329 | * Why is Magus allowed into the 600AD Guardia Castle after joining the party? That doesn't necessarily absolve him of his crimes in that era now, does it? If i recall correctly, he can even walk up to the King of Guardia without so much as a single guard being alerted, |
| 330 | ** It may be that no one knows what Magus looks like. Cyrus didn't survive their meeting, and Frog may simply never have told anyone, which is easy to believe based on the fact that none of the castle [=NPC=]s seem to know what happened to Cyrus. |
| 331 | *** Ah, but when you bring the Rainbow Shell to the castle in 600AD, Queen Leene automatically addresses the lead member of your party. "I ask for the sake of Magus..." |
| 332 | *** Keep in mind, though, that you get to rename him, with the default name being "Janus". So the game is expecting a different name, and [=NPC=]s will react accordingly. |
| 333 | *** Actually, the default name for Magus is ''still'' Magus. You can rename him anything else, sure, including his real name, but the default is still the name he goes by in 600AD. |
| 334 | *** This editor assumes that since Magus joins you in the time period before he became their enemy, he never became the leader of the Mystics. Note that if you visit the place his statue was after his joining, it's Ozzie instead. |
| 335 | *** IIRC, the statue actually changes after you defeat Magus in 600 AD. |
| 336 | *** That raises more questions about the time travel logic than it answers about the guards/royalty overlooking Magus. |
| 337 | *** Not to mention CYRUS! You can take Magus to his grave, meaning Cyrus' ghost can meet the person who killed him, the person ''whose name is on his tombstone'', and just... not care. |
| 338 | ** The answer here is simple. They've been fighting Magus' armies, not Magus himself. Nobody's ever seen Magus or even knows his name. In the DS version, nobody on the Guardian side of things ever uses the name Magus; they simply call him "The Fiendlord". When you bring him to the castle later in the game, the party probably just gives them his name, knowing that it doesn't mean anything to them. |
| 339 | *** This goes double as the name Magus is entirely an invention of the English translation. Originally he is never referred to by name; everyone just calls him ''Maou'', "King of the Mazoku." Presumably no one ever bothers to ask his name when he's traveling with the heroes. |
| 340 | *** The thing about nobody ever seeing Magus in person doesn't really seem correct. The fact that he fought Cyrus at all would suggest he occasionally took to the battlefield himself. And it's common knowledge, at least amongst the Gaurdia castle that the Masamune is Magus's weakness and the key to defeating him which would suggest either Cyrus and Glenn had fought him more than once before their final encounter, or other would be heroes using the sword had fought Magus before. Either way suggests that there were knights that had encountered Magus in person and survived to both tell the tale and speak of the sword that weakened him so they would have at least had a general description of their biggest enemy. |
| 341 | [[/folder]] |
| 342 | |
| 343 | [[folder: ...But you're still hungry.]] |
| 344 | * How the hell do the people in 2300AD survive for over 300 years with no food whatsoever? |
| 345 | ** The inns-in-a-booth (Enertrons). Apparently, staying in one fixes you up completely, including a dose of nutrition, which will keep you alive nicely, albeit with an empty stomach. |
| 346 | *** WordOfGod states the above is true -- they are nanite powered devices that rejuvenates and repairs the body, injects artificial nutrients to stave off death (but you'd be left in a very weakened state), and keep a person alive with minor modifications to their philology to repair and heal you. They do have water however so they stay alive using the Enertrons (thus they can not fight as it is indicated they are to weak) and sipping water slowly. |
| 347 | [[/folder]] |
| 348 | |
| 349 | [[folder: I mean, besides the Title Drop...]] |
| 350 | * Why do you ''need'' a Chrono Trigger? You already have the Epoch, which is a '''time machine'''! |
| 351 | ** hey hey, wait, honestly now. The need for a Chrono Trigger was very technically an accident. [[spoiler: Crono gets it handed to him by Lavos]] so evryone goes back to the Darkness Beyond Time and receives info on the Time Egg for their troubles. I beilieeeeve in his excitement to see a creation of his long lost colleague put to use, whether it works or not, he's just talking so fast and excitably about the thing getting to work and he [[ChekhovsVolcano tops it all off]] with "BECOME THE CHRONO TRIGGER". Very similiar to [[spoiler: Lynx's]] little dissertation when he is confronting Serge in Cross. That's a little [[DeadpanSnarker discomforting]] in my opinion. |
| 352 | ** The Epoch is tied to the gates. It can only go to places the gates can go, and since time passes at the same rate on each end of the gate (i.e. if you were to enter the Millennial Fair gate in 1001, you would go to 601), you are required to have a form of time travel not tied to the gates to pull stuff like this off. |
| 353 | *** But the Gate in 12000 BC was disabled - if the Epoch used the Gates, it wouldn't be able to visit 12000 BC unless you found another Gate or managed to open that one again. The Epoch ''possibly'' time-warps by traveling faster than light - it's time-transition involves going really fast, after all. Additionally, all forms of transport to 1999 AD lead directly to the '''Day''' of Lavos. That exact day. The Gates are usually otherwise relative, but absolute time-travel does exist. Also, there is no Gate actually leading to the End of Time - they all lead to other eras, but accidentally send you there. |
| 354 | *** The gate in 12000 BC was just blocked from use. It still existed. Epoch doesn't use the gates per se, but is tied into the gate system such that it can only go to times where there are gates. The day of Lavos is a special case because the only gate going to 1999 goes to that exact day (the only two ways to get there are by gate and Epoch), and it only goes to that exact day so the party can stop Lavos (the Entity is one convienent SOB). Also, absolute time travel is possible (Balthazar had a time machine that was free to travel to any time, gate or no, in ''Chrono Cross''), but Epoch was tied to the gates. Oh, and technically all gates lead to the end of time. |
| 355 | *** If Balthasar has a time machine which can travel to any time, why did he only give the party the severely-limited Epoch? Also, ''no'' Gates lead to the End of Time. The End of Time was first reached by accident, and the party presumably got Gaspar to redirect them whenever they're in a portal. |
| 356 | *** Because the Epoch was built by the Bathazar that was sent to the bad future. He had limited knowldege of time travel and, presumably, didn't know you could build a machine not tied into the gate system. The Balthazar who was sent to the good future (after Lavos was defeated) had the resources of Chronopolis at his command and was able to build one not tied to the gates. In fact, after Lavos' defeat, the gates don't work any more anyway, so he wouldn't be able to make one like the Epoch (the only thing that doesn't work here is they are able to use the Epoch after the gates closed. Maybe it had an imprint of the gate system on it? Either way, I assume it doesn't continue working for long since a dismantled Epoch can be found in the Dead sea in ''Chrono Cross''). And what I meant before was that you can access the End of Time through any gate, so it is a part of the gate system and the Epoch can redirect there. |
| 357 | *** The Gates ''should'' still work after the defeat of Lavos - they're created by Lavos, but should be self-sustaining once created (unless this is a case of [[NoOntologicalInertia No Ontological Inertia]]). Remember that everyone got sent through the Gates at the end. Also, in This Troper's opinion, all time travel goes through some sort of vortex. The Gates are locked pathways through the vortex which are only "wide" enough to take three people through at a time. When four goes through, they fall out of the pathway and drift through the vortex to the "point of least resistance" - the End of Time. They then tell Gaspar to pull them from all the pathways to the End of Time, which is why they end up there for every Gate afterwards. The Epoch, however, is an actual vehicle. If it's using the Gate system, it should be able to easily leave a pathway while in the vortex and go somewhen else - perhaps simply by taking a fourth person on the Epoch. (Also, if the Epoch runs on Gates, why can't it go to Lana's accident? There's a Gate going there.) |
| 358 | *** No, no, no. The Gates were not created by Lavos - the Entity created them so that the party can stomp on him. |
| 359 | *** The Red Gate is...different. The regular gates seem to send you a certain amount of time from the End of Time, rather than to an absolute point in time, causing a SanDimasTime effect. But there do exist special cases, like the Bucket Gate and the Red Gate, that send you to specific points in time. |
| 360 | *** As the previous poster stated, the Red Gate is different and not connected to the Gate system that the Epoch is tied into. And while the Gates do stay open for a while after Lavos' defeat, it is shown in the ending that they don't continue to stay open. Crono's mom falls into one and it closes so they can't go after her through the Gate, so they have to take the Epoch. Also, the Gates were created by the Entity to be used by the party to defeat Lavos, so while they exist due to Lavos, he doesn't create them. (Although he CAN create time gates like the one that pulled Chronopolis into the past, he didn't create the ones in Chrono Trigger.) |
| 361 | *** As a side note about the Epoch leaving the paths: it might be a vehicle, but it's on a track. It can't divert to 1980 AD from a Gate going from 1000 AD to 2300 AD any more than a train going from LA to Las Vegas can divert and end up in Seattle. |
| 362 | *** The Epoch may be on a track, but it can also ''fly'', unlike most trains. Getting to 1980 AD from the 1000-2300 AD Gate, as in your example, should be as simple as leaving the set track (by taking a fourth person), then activating the flight systems and flying to 1980 AD. To avoid the requirement of a Chrono Trigger, simply use the 65,000,000-12,000 BC Gate, take four people, and fly to about four hours before you visited the Ocean Palace (or, preferably, fly to the Ocean Palace and park the Epoch behind the Mammon Machine). When your other selves arrive, slip in and steal Crono. Then take off in the Epoch again. Easy. |
| 363 | *** {{Metaphorgotten}}, much? The train thing is a figure of speech. The fact that it's got wings and a rocket engine has nothing to do with its time-travel capabilities. |
| 364 | *** Exactly. After all, Magus can fly. He can't just enter a gate and fly to 1980. |
| 365 | *** It just occurred to me that I could have avoided this whole argument about the Epoch's time travel abilities if I had just pointed out that the Chrono Trigger can freeze time and the Epoch can't. Oh well, live and learn. |
| 366 | *** Why do you need to freeze time? Why not just move Crono out of the way? You wouldn't need a clone either, in this case. |
| 367 | *** So your plan is to go to when Lavos is unleashing the the most devastating attack in the entire game, including when you're fighting him, one that can oneshot Crono who is a walking god, and try to push him out of the way without getting killed yourself? That doesn't seem too smart. |
| 368 | *** Crono's a walking god now? In any case, yes, pushing him out of the way is absurd. That's why ''pulling'' was invented. You don't even need to go near - there's also a reason why ''ropes'' were invented. Lasso Crono immediately before Lavos launches the ultra-beam of [[DoomyDoomsOfDoom doom]], and yank him out of the way. Easy. Oh, and also - how do you know Magus can't just fly to 1980? He's never tried. |
| 369 | *** You can walk through the game easily just fighting with Crono and not doing anything with anyone else. I've done it. So, yes, he is a walking god. As if Lavos can't re-aim at him. Either way, it's moot because, as we have seen, time travel doesn't work that way in Chrono Trigger. And no offense, but the idea that something that can fly is magically not bound to the rules of time travel that everything else is is the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life. You can put wings on a train, but if it's secured to the track, it ain't taking off. If Magus could go to any time he felt like, we wouldn't see him dicking around in 12000 BC in the ending. He knew most of the gates were closing. He would have went to the end of time, looked through time for Schala, and flew to where she was. |
| 370 | *** Firstly, you've misread something somewhere: being able to fly does ''not'' render you exempt from the "rules of time travel" in any way. These rules you refer to merely restrict Gates, causing them to function as a "time-track" between two relative fixed-times. Flight does not immediately disable the time-track functionality of a Gate, much as train-wings do not allow track-secured trains to fly. If, however, you had a winged train, and then ''removed'' it from the track, it could fly, right? Taking four people on a Gate's track will remove them from the track. Since the Epoch apparently utilises the Gate system, taking four people on the Epoch will free it from the Gate-tracks and allow it to fly to whenever it wants to go to. Secondly, if Lavos can "re-aim" at Crono after the use of a rope, why didn't Lavos fire the ultra-beam of plot-death at everyone else present immediately after erasing Crono? Thirdly, we don't know if Magus can go to any time or not - he never actually leaves the Gate-tracks of time, due to only traveling alone or with the restricted-to-three-people party who are specifically avoiding leaving said tracks. So, free time-travel cannot be tested for Magus. |
| 371 | *** Point by point. Firstly, no I haven't. I said "Magus can fly and he can't go wherever he wants to" and the response was "how do you know? he hasn't tried". Taking four people into a Gates-track does not "remove them from the track". If we're talking about this in terms of trains, it flicks the switch to put you on another track that goes to the End of Time. That's the conservation of time theorem. Since the Epoch uses the Gate system, taking an extra passenger will just make it ''impossible'' to travel to any point ''other'' than the End of Time. Secondly, probably because Lavos is one of the most epically stupid villains in video game history, he has nearly infinite control of time, but doesn't kill Crono when he's a kid or Gate the party to the Earkness Beyond Time. Not thinking is something Lavos is guilty of, in this game and the next. Alternatively, it's because a shot capable of disintegrating Crono drained him too badly to do it again. Helps explain why he's so much easier to kill during any encounter except that one. He would see you push Crono and adjust his aim so it hit Crono anyway. Thirdly, that point is a way to counter the idea that flying lets you go to any time you want. Magus can fly and he obviously can't. |
| 372 | *** Firstly, you did miss the other segments of my argument - for Magus to fly through time, he'd need to leave the Gate-tracks after entering a Gate, and not merely possess the ability to fly. Secondly, if Lavos could aim the direction of the plot-death-beam, he'd just sweep it back and forth over everybody, whether he's stupid or not. The beam is locked in a certain direction, and removing Crono as the beam fires would result in the beam missing everyone as it fires at where Crono ''was''. Because, as you point out, Lavos is stupid, he won't realise that Crono's going to move until it's too late. Lavos can't fire a second beam, at Crono or otherwise, because, as you suggested, he's drained after firing just one. Thirdly, of course Magus can't fly to any time he wants - he's on the Gate-tracks, after all. There's no way he's tried to fly through a Gate while carrying three entities of differing temporal origins, because that's ridiculous. The Epoch, however, is fully capable of flying while carrying four entities of differing temporal origins, although Ayla might need to sit on Robo's lap. |
| 373 | *** As for Lavos, as I've said, the point is moot anyway because you can't go back and stop this the way you are suggesting. You are overlooking the fact that getting "derailed" as it were doesn't free you to go anywhere. Just off the "track" in all directions is the Darkness Beyond Time. There has never been any established way to actually achieve "derailment" other than using a Chrono Trigger to make a one time gate, or, in Schala's case, Lavos using his infinate mastery of time to send her there. (See how stupid he is that he sends her there and not Crono. What a moron. I know it's moot, but isn't it a little weird to say that not using the plot death beam on everyone could be not caused by stupidity in light of this piece of brilliance? :P). But even getting to the DBT is not a good idea because there's no escape other than going back through the gate the Chrono Trigger makes. And, as I said, loading 4 people into the Epoch wouldn't free it to go anywhere. It would make it ''impossible'' to go anywhere except the end of time, as the conservation of time theorum states, you will be pulled to the end of time if you try to use the Gate system with 4 or more people. |
| 374 | *** None of ANY of this takes a paradox into account. The whole point of using the clone of Crono is to make it look like Crono is dead to everyone present. |
| 375 | *** OBJECTION! The prosecution is attempting to apply the trope, "TrickedOutTime", to the plans of the party. However, this is impossible. Consider the actions of the party upon utilising the Chrono Trigger - they arrive, clone in inventory, immediately before Crono is vaporised. They place the clone in Crono's place, sure, but they ''do not'' take the real Crono back with them. The real Crono is merely shoved off to the side, making room for the clone. All those present ''should have seen'' Crono, off to the side of the plotdeath-beam, as well as the clone being vaporised at that moment. As to how Crono arrived on the mountain, the defense points out that the party definitely headed to the mountain - this is fixed, due to Time Traveler's Immunity. If Crono had not been hit by the beam, he'd have come with the rest of the party, correct? Therefore, Crono actually walked up the mountain with everyone else. The flashy lighting and stuff is due simply to artistic license. |
| 376 | *** They arrive, clone in hand, to a place that's ''frozen in time'', place the Crono clone in it's path, then run off through the Gate they arrived through with the original Crono. It was stated in the dialogue that the area was frozen in time, and if Crono survived, they wouldn't have had any reason to climb Death Peak. So if Crono survived from that point on, he'd just live long enough to see Time Bastard wipe his party when they next time travel. If he hadn't died, they would never have had any reason to go there, so even though the party we saw still would, his party would be wiped out by Time Bastard and he'd have no clue what is going on. He wouldn't have climbed Death Peak on his own and wouldn't be at the top when they came from the portal if it worked the way you suggest. |
| 377 | *** Regardless of your argument, the fact remains that the party ''did not'' take the original Crono through the Trigger-gate - as I stated, they simply pushed him aside and placed the clone. The remainder of my explanation is merely an attempt to justify the party still going to Death Peak, despite Crono's survival - Time Traveler's Immunity means they still go to Death Peak, but Crono comes with them. |
| 378 | *** No. Crono's party would all die when Time Bastard got them and Crono would be standing there, scratching his head. He wouldn't have a party to travel with. In either case, we never see ''any'' of the party member's actually step through a Gate to go back to Death Peak, and Marle's dialogue afterward wouldn't make sense if Crono had traveled with them. |
| 379 | *** Paradox doesn't exist in the Chrono series (except one possible mistake near the beginning of ''Trigger''). The reason they don't save Crono like the other poster suggested is that they can't, plain and simple. |
| 380 | *** ...So wait, how is it that a wing and propulsion system designed to move you around in an atmosphere suddenly equal the ability to traverse time at one's will (assuming you've 'jumped the tracks')? I'm not really seeing where the logic is. |
| 381 | *** I always thought Lavos was suppose to be the blind, idiot god, because DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu. That was kind of his thing. He was a GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere that only did what it needed to survive. Concepts like killing Crono as a child wouldn't come to it because it didn't really need to. It's a giant bug, of course it's stupid. I think that's what they where going for. It's not trying to kill everyone out of any sense of malice, it's doing it to live, which is what ''Chrono Cross'' focused on. Also, traveling through air does not equal traveling through the fourth dimension. Those are completely different methods of transportation. |
| 382 | *** I never meant to imply that Lavos ''should'' be smart, just that he ''is'' an idiot. I don't think admitting he's an idiot in any way depreciates enjoyment of this awesome game. |
| 383 | *** It's AAALLLLLLLL very simple. They couldn't just go back and save Crono because that would create a time paradox. Say, Frog, Marle, and Robo were your party at Death Peak, and Chrono, Frog, and Ayla were your party at Crono's death. If they simply went back in time and shoved Crono out of the way, they have the problem of Schala now having to teleport Chrono, two Frogs, Ayla, Marle, and Robo out of the Ocean Palace. Not to mention the fact that they have a spare Frog, Marle, and Robo now. The whole thing is just one giant mess. The purpose of the Chrono Trigger was to completely avoid all of this. Now, they go to a point RIGHT BEFORE Crono dies, where time is frozen. There, they swap Crono with the dummy. Their work done, the Chrono Trigger brings the party, with Crono, back to Death Peak. Hence Chrono's confusion. He was about to be vaporized, now he's sitting on some mountain in the future. Crono never died. Everyone just THOUGHT he did. |
| 384 | *** Messes can happen in the Chronoverse - again, paradox doesn't happen. I figure that the Chrono Trigger breaks all the standard rules of time travel, allowing it to go to a specific point in time (even to go back in time to a point in Lavos' time bubble, which is implied to have its own weird rules) and freeze time. It has to have a Crono Clone because that's how the Chrono Trigger's magic science works. |
| 385 | ** The "derailment" argument is [[{{Pun}} on the right track]] but uses the wrong frame of reference. A [[WallOfText brief primer]] on the development of the Epoch is here, in order: |
| 386 | # The Epoch, as created by Belthassar, only had the ability to traverse in one dimension: Time (T-Axis). |
| 387 | # When upgraded [[spoiler:by Dalton]], it then ''gains'' the ability to move in Spatially (The X, Y, and Z-Axes). This upgrade is limited, however, to motion in the lower Troposhpere. However, it is not ''this'' limitation that is of concern to us here. |
| 388 | As mentioned above, the upgraded Epoch can move throughout time in the overworld. However, the events in question happened in the '''Enclosed''', ''Undersea'' Palace. The bolded word is key. Sure, the Epoch can travel through time and air, but the one time where it is seen breaking through something solid, it can't fly again afterwards. Note that it ''may'' be possible to use the original Epoch's function of Zero-Point Time Travel to breach the Mammon Chamber, yet to do so would require: |
| 389 | # Refitting the Epoch for underwater travel. |
| 390 | # Actually locating the '''[[NeedleInAStackOfNeedles exact]]''' place the battle took place ''in all 3 dimensions'' (I'm assuming they have time down pat). |
| 391 | # If the battle site is deeper than the current ocean floor, weaponry that could "carve" an Epoch-sized hole to the site. |
| 392 | And that all assumes that: |
| 393 | # The Mammon Chamber is large enough for the Epoch to begin with. |
| 394 | # The area where the Epoch lands isn't already displaced by Lavos. |
| 395 | ** So, for everyone up there sprouting about the Conservation of Time Theorem that Gaspar goes on about when you first meet him at the End of Time...why didn't Crono, Frog, the third party member, and Magus all get blasted THERE instead of to the Age of Magic when the gate opened in Magus's keep? Crono from 1,000 AD, Frog from 600 AD, the third party member either being from 1,000 AD (Marle/Lucca) or 2,300 AD (Robo), and Magus from 12,000 BC. Very, very differing temporal origins, those. |
| 396 | *** Because the party took a different gate than Magus did. The party got sent to the 65 million BC gate and Magus to the 12000 BC gate. |
| 397 | ** I think everyone is woefully overcomplicating this. As was stated briefly above, the Time Egg does more than travel through time. It travels to a very specific point in time, and then freezes time, and THEN, most importantly, immediately slingshots back to where it started. At no point in this journey is time allowed to move. This is important because of the giant Eldritch Abomination in the room that will vaporize you the moment you try to push, pull or otherwise move Crono out of the way if time is not frozen. Whether there is or is not another way to reach that point in time is irrelevant; even if there is, it would be suicide for the party to willingly throw themselves into the blast, and on the offchance they actually managed to succeed without getting caught in it, Lavos has already demonstrated he can TPK them without much effort. What's to stop him from just doing it again? |
| 398 | * All of this misses another major possibility. They don't need the Epoch to be able to travel to exact time periods. They have a time machine... and an ''immortal robot''. If it was to save Chrono, why not just have Robo take TheSlowPath from 600 AD to 999 AD and warn Chrono, before the whole adventure starts, to avert his death? For that matter, you can actually do a quest which involves Robo taking the Slow Path from 600 AD to 1000 AD while Crono is dead. During this time, Robo will be working right near Chrono's hometown, and from the entire period from Crono's birth to the adventure starting, it doesn't occur to him to take the short walk over to warn Crono not to attack Lavos in 12,000 BC? Actually, wait, forget Chrono, why not just have Robo take The Slow Path from 600 AD to 1000 AD repeatedly to produce timeshifted duplicate Robos so you can ZergRush Lavos with all of them? It's totally possible to duplicate him -- you can have one copy of Robo on your party while another copy is visible working to restore the forest in 600 AD, so nothing stops them from adding more and more Robos to that loop. |
| 399 | ** Even though it's just a theory, Time Bastard would stop the latter from happening. So long as Robo stays on the path he'll always end up being picked up by Chrono's team. The same could happen again by doing another loop, but then Time Bastard would go into effect when Chrono's party goes to pick up Robo. Assuming there were now two Robo present when the party comes to collect him, this begins to mess with the shift of time in which Robo they pick or which one is theirs. The time in which the party with Robo after the first 400 years time travels next would then remove the Robo with the lesser time immunity (which collects in an entity the more it time-travels and is what keeps the latest entity present, paradox free.) The same problem happens when you take that and start cloning an army of Robos. I'm sure however I must be missing something about the theory, but the same question was asked at the Chrono Compendium which you can read about [[https://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Robo_(Duplicate_Idea).html here.]] |
| 400 | [[/folder]] |
| 401 | |
| 402 | [[folder: Dalton's Fireballs]] |
| 403 | * So, Dalton can shoot giant fireballs, right? Why doesn't he do that when you fight him? |
| 404 | ** He's too busy being a moron. |
| 405 | [[/folder]] |
| 406 | |
| 407 | [[folder: Marle's Fireballs]] |
| 408 | * Why is Marle using a fire spell on the cover of the DS instruction booklet? |
| 409 | ** Concept art? |
| 410 | ** If I remember correctly, it was the same on the original SNES instruction booklet, with Marle being Fire and Lucca being Ice for their Antipode/Sword Slice attack against an unseen in-game enemy. |
| 411 | ** Some pre-release pictures show Crono having "orbs" of fire, water, light, and shadow rather than having a single affinity. Some people speculate that a character could "charge" a particular set of elements and use that type of magic. It was dropped for some reason. |
| 412 | ** This is simple. She isn't using a fire spell on Crono's sword. She, Crono and Frog are using the Triple Tech Arc Impulse. That's why Frog is kneeling on the ground; Crono just leapfrogged off of him. The energy on Crono's sword in that move alternates between blue and orange; it just happens to be orange at that instant. Now, why Frog is there for that particular enemy (Heckran), why Crono is in that particular place (Death Peak, judging by the snow), and why Marle has six fingers? I have no clue. |
| 413 | ** Oh wait, the Dimensional Vortex has an enemy that looks like the Hekran in a ''new'' snowy area. So, justified. Though using Arc Impulse on him is a hilariously ''bad'' idea (it's an ice technique, and the monster is a ''snowbeast''...) |
| 414 | ** Who says Marle ''doesn't'' have six fingers? I don't recall any character ever saying "Hi Nadia, how are you doing? Glad to see you still have five fingers on each hand!" ;) |
| 415 | *** One would think that fact would be mentioned at some point. |
| 416 | *** How do you know it's ''unusual'' for her to have six fingers? Maybe everyone in the setting does, or half the population does, or something like that. |
| 417 | ** Look at [[https://gamefiles.alphacoders.com/boxart/original/front/1255-1.jpg this enlarged version]] of the box art. Marle does not have six fingers. The part that looks like a sixth finger is just the crease of her palm. |
| 418 | [[/folder]] |
| 419 | |
| 420 | [[folder: Robo's Gate]] |
| 421 | * Where would the gate in 2300 AD have led if Robo didn't join? All other regular gates (non-standard gates include the 1999 gate and the red gate) come in pairs. |
| 422 | ** The Proto Dome is almost exactly over Medina when time-jumping with the Epoch. While most Gates are near their counterparts, some do drift...But Pillars opposite to each other are [supposedly] linked, meaning Medina's Gate goes to 65,000,000 B.C. and Proto would have to go the Day of Lavos (which would make for a really short, but hilarious game). Gaspar must have isolated that Pillar in bucket for the Player's protection. |
| 423 | ** Alternately, as [[https://lparchive.org/Chrono-Trigger/Update%2012/ Quovak speculated in his low-level LP]], it would've taken them to the End of Time anyway. |
| 424 | [[/folder]] |
| 425 | |
| 426 | [[folder: San Dimas Time]] |
| 427 | * ''Chrono Trigger'' seems to have adopted a time-travel equation in which time travel is always relative. For instance, if you returned to 1000 AD from 600 AD, on July 6th, and spent a night at the inn, then traveled back to 600 AD, it would be July 7th. Otherwise, your party would be traveling back to the exact same day in 600 AD, every single time. While it makes sense not to have your achievements undone every time, it leads one to believe that every time period exists parallel to each other, and since the gates were created before Crono or the party were even born, the fact that they arrived on certain days, say, to fight Magus's armies, is equated to pure luck. Over-analyzation, much? |
| 428 | ** Presumably, the gates (except for the "Day of Lavos" one) move through time, just like the player. You don't travel to the 600 AD time period itself, per se, you travel to the gate that happens to exist in 600 AD at the moment, and you end up at whichever specific time the 600 AD gate happens to be sitting in at the moment. |
| 429 | ** The Gates are speculated to have been created by an entity (which is implied to be the planet itself) specifically so they could be used to fend off Lavos. The fact they mostly happen to lead to the days surrounding important Lavos-related events (fall on the planet, destruction of Zeal, summoning by Magus, final days of the planet) is not a coincidence, it's how things were planned to happen. The only exceptions seem to be the 1999 Gate (which seems to be fixed on the very day Laves appears) and the 1000 one (which seems to imply the entity specifically chose the present trio as their potential saviours). |
| 430 | [[/folder]] |
| 431 | |
| 432 | [[folder: The Knights Must Be Useless]] |
| 433 | * Why can a few kids with no "special" or "unique" physical fighting styles, and limited, newly acquired magical powers, single-handedly fight Ozzie's armies on the bridge, while scores of highly-trained, heavily-armored knights get one-shotted? On that note, it appears that Ozzie has almost broken through the barriers on the bridge and was on the brink of winning. Since 1000 AD has not been effected in any negative way, one has to assume that the humans DID win on that day, whether Crono and company were present or not, despite how badly the knights seemed to have been losing. |
| 434 | ** Limited or not, those magical powers are just about the only thing that actually ''hurts'' the troops Ozzie deploys to the bridge. That's an advantage they have that the knights do not. |
| 435 | ** I have a theory of my own that seems to make sense (to me at least) when taken into account in certain games. It's my "Normal vs Super" theory: normal humans/creatures/etc. have a very low HP count and attack/magic power, which is obviously evident with creatures at the very start of the game. This would also be true for the soldiers, in a sense. Though they would most likely have a higher-than-normal HP count and whatnot, it would still be only 40 or 50 or so. Crono and gang have the stats that they do through exposure to the elements (super monsters, magic, time travel) that alter them and have them gain more experience in a different way. Or you could just chalk it up to being the Chosen Ones, since that works too. And like the person above said, they have magic, the soldiers don't; my explanation's pretty much for everything else. |
| 436 | ** Also, the reason Ozzie's near-victory doesn't affect 1000 AD is because the Fiends lost the war ''anyway'' historically, so, obviously, the party is not required to do anything to ensure that. Presumably, without the party to get in his way, Magus succeeds in summoning Lavos and gets beaten, just as we saw in the Ocean Palace. Lavos levels Magus' castle (If I recall correctly, it's on a small island), but doesn't bother staying around long enough to do much more than that. |
| 437 | *** In that case, why does the act of Magus getting gated away from Lavos, instead of merely being killed, result in Medina's Magus statue being replaced by Ozzie's? |
| 438 | *** That's fairly obvious. Assuming Magus summons Lavos and Lavos lays waste to his Castle, Ozzie dies there too, since he'd probably be nearby if he wasn't busy tending to intruders (you, obviously). When you meet him later in the game at his Fort, he accuses Magus of betraying the Mystics. Maybe he spread the word to all who would listen after the events at Magus' Castle that Magus was using the Mystics all along (technically absolutely true), resulting in Magus getting HatedByAll by the Mystics in that timeline? |
| 439 | *** This is basically it. The humans didn't win the war on their own merits originally, the most powerful Fiends just vanished mysteriously (because of Lavos), and humanity did a clean-up job. The fact that the troops Ozzie deploys on the bridge are undead (so they probably depend on his continued existence to stay "alive") and are immune to anything but magic attacks is actually a brilliant piece of environmental storytelling, as well as serving as a tutorial for our recently acquired powers. |
| 440 | *** I always saw Ozzie as ANaziByAnyOtherName who manipulated his fellow Mystics/Fiends into wanting to conquer and kill humanity. He hyped Magus up as a DarkMessiah and a figurehead that the Mystics could rally around, while seeing himself as the puppetmaster. Magus let Ozzie do this because he needed Ozzie's resources for his spell to summon and kill Lavos, and didn't care what happened to the humans. When he mistakenly thinks Crono and Frog killed Magus, he depicts himself as the new Dark Messiah and the DragonAscendant for the Mystics. Since Ozzie isn't killed by Magus summoning Lavos the way he is in the original timeline, he's still around to ensure the Mystics idolize him instead of Magus. Further evidence of Ozzie being a fantasy Nazi and a Dark Messiah comes if you visit Medina Village after doing the Ozzie's Fort sidequest. The Fiends are depicted as friendly and cheerful, and the "silly party" music plays in the background. A few humans have also started visiting Medina, and there are plans for a ferry service between Medina and Truce. |
| 441 | ** Also remember that this is the new timeline. The soldiers at the bridge were weak because they were low on ration... Probably because when Crono and team rescued Queen Leene, the King greeted them with royal banquet, and being BigEater StockShonenHero, they ate too much and diminished the food supply! |
| 442 | * yeah, the food supply was definitely an issue in waiting, but that boss zombie Ozzy summoned couldn't have been defeated without magic iirc. |
| 443 | [[/folder]] |
| 444 | |
| 445 | [[folder: Robo's Programming]] |
| 446 | * Why is Lucca's reprogramming of Robo never brought up after the fact? The other R-series treat him as a freak and anomaly because of this reprogramming, and Robo goes into angst because of this. I'm just wondering why Lucca never brings this up. |
| 447 | ** Because she doesn't reprogram him, only fix him. It either was already reprogrammed or its hard drive was harmed before they met, thus removing Mother Brain's previous reprogramming |
| 448 | ** But she does reprogram him, or at least fix it so that he won't attack them. To wit: |
| 449 | -->'''Lucca:''' Hmm... I think I can fix it.\ |
| 450 | '''Marle:''' What!? Fix it? What if it attacks us like the other ones?\ |
| 451 | '''Lucca:''' I'll make sure it won't. Robots don't attack of their own free will, you know. They only do it because humans make them that way. |
| 452 | ** That suggests some amount of tinkering to remove any "KillAllHumans" programming. |
| 453 | ** I kinda figured the KillAllHumans programming put into Robo and the rest of the R-Series was the product of Mother Brain. Atropus goes back to being friendly after her control is removed, so all Lucca really did was restore Robo's original programming. |
| 454 | ** Another piece of evidence for the above is that Robo comments on how the last thing he remembers (1999 right before Lavos levels the place) is a lot of humans walking around. |
| 455 | [[/folder]] |
| 456 | |
| 457 | [[folder: You stay healthy, and we'll stay hungry!]] |
| 458 | * Why didn't the Chrono Crew bring food from the earlier years to feed the starving people from the future? The jerky the crew got from the chef was able to feed the front lines. |
| 459 | ** There's a good possibility they thought 'why bother?', since the entire premise of their adventures is to stop that future from existing in the first place, not to try and rebuild an already-destroyed world. They initially sought to find food for the people before they knew what had actually happened to the future. Still, it would've been a nice gesture to bring food, anyway. |
| 460 | ** It'd be a hollow gesture, at best. These people are starving, alive only because of the Entertron (which ''will'' eventually break down). Any food they bring would last a good five seconds and only end up reminding these poor people, some of whom have ''never'' actually eaten, that there is nothing left for them. Besides that, food is only the most obvious of their concerns: physically and emotionally, the future village is beyond repair. Crono and Co. know full well that the planet simply cannot sustain human life any longer. The only way to save these people is to preventing Lavos from emerging in the first place. |
| 461 | *** Strictly speaking, you're not saving ''those specific'' people; your meddling with the timeline will ensure they're never even born. |
| 462 | * Seriously. They let Robo take [[spoiler: some 300 odd years to restore a forest]] so like, instead of letting him power-down afterwards they should have told him to do a little back and forthing between 600AD and 2300AD with a little bit in the way of foodstuffs . . . what is the trope for that? I will try to find a good one, because right now all I can come up with is some variation of TrickedOutTime I'm imagining. |
| 463 | ** Remember despite the potentially thousands upon thousands of items you can have in the inventory there's a strict mass limit that can go though the Gates, otherwise you get dumped into the End of Time and just 4 people is too much. Presumably in story the characters only travel with their equipment and a few items in their packs. Bringing crates and crates worth of food through the Gates would probably be too much for the Gate limit, nor can they load them all onto the Epoch. |
| 464 | ** Food is not an infinite resource, even before Lavos destroys the world. Taking huge amounts of biomass from the past into the future permanently could cause severe effects on the present. |
| 465 | [[/folder]] |
| 466 | |
| 467 | [[folder: Savior Complex]] |
| 468 | * Why does no one seems to care about the fact that Crono & Co randomly decide they're going to save the world? Yes, this is kinda common in [=RPGs=], but ''Chrono Trigger'' takes this to a whole new level. Lucca's teleport malfunction and they have to go save Marle. Ok. Then, when they do it, they are sent to the future instead of the present. It's still okay since this is justified. And then...they discover that the world went kaboom. Now is the part that bugs me. First, it would be destroyed more than 900 years after their deaths, so...not their problem. Second and much more importantly, what makes they think they can do that? They're just 3 random teenagers with no actual battle experience whatsoever, trying to beat a gigantic larva...thing. I'd say that's obviously a bit out of their league (not to mention, it's never explained why or how they know how to fight. We can assume that Marle and Crono had some kind of training with bows / swords, but why would they do that is completely unknown. For Fun?). It wouldn't be so bad if, later, we discovered that they were the Chosen Ones and the reason for that, [[spoiler: like we do in Chrono Cross, which would be as random as Trigger if not]]. But...no, simply no. |
| 469 | ** With the ability to travel through time, the ability to change the future by affecting the past, and knowledge of horrible, horrible events, ComesGreatResponsibility. They know about the Gates and have a way to use them, so Marle's conscience won't allow her to just do ''nothing'', the knowledge would haunt her for the rest of her life if she didn't at least ''try''. And she knows that the future can be changed, it happened to her, after all. |
| 470 | ** So, what you're saying is that, because it's [[BystanderSyndrome not their problem]], they should just....ignore it? When they know about a serious problem and have some capacity to stop it? That they should just ''ignore'' TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt and let millions of people be slaughtered and allow the destruction of the future and all of humanity because it's only going to happen centuries down the line? No. ''No.'' '''No.''' ''Fuck that noise.'' They can stop it. They know when it's going to happen, they know that they can traverse time to work against it, and they know that if they do nothing, it's going to happen regardless. They may not be able to stop Lavos, but if they do ''nothing'', then Lavos wins anyway. As the quote goes, all evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing. They have the chance to work against Lavos and prevent the apocalypse. The only correct, right, and ''moral'' thing to do is to stop it. |
| 471 | *** I actually sort of agree with the first guy. I mean, I know that in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand to engulf the Earth and destroy all life on it. I'm not doing anything to stop it. The time scale is different, but the principle is the same. |
| 472 | *** However, there are countless scientists out there working on space colonization (even if just at the theoretical level) that will eventually solve this problem should we be around 5 billion years from now. |
| 473 | *** It's funny how much of what you just said can be applied to real life. No wait, not funny... Depressing. |
| 474 | *** RE: [[labelnote:"I know that in 5 billion years..."]]"I know that in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand to engulf the Earth and destroy all life on it. I'm not doing anything to stop it. The time scale is different but the principle is the same."[[/labelnote]] Er, no, it's not. It's not the same thing ''at all''. You can't stop the sun from expanding to engulf the earth, it's inevitable. You also don't have the ability to travel through time. Even if you did, you ''still'' wouldn't have the capacity to do anything about it. It's a non-issue. Stopping Lavos, on the other hand, is entirely possible. |
| 475 | *** Except, as far as they know Lavos' awakening ''is'' inevitable. They're going around time on the ''off chance'' that they can stop something in the future (that is to all appearances just as inevitable as the sun's expansion) from happening in an era that is so far removed from them that they have no stake in it. And lastly, if I did have the ability to travel in time to witness the sun's expansion, I still wouldn't care do do anything to stop it, because the ability to travel to 5 billion years in the future doesn't change the fact that it's something that I have no stake in at all because it will happen far after my death. In the same way when you ask someone what they would do with a time machine, they'd usually change something within living memory. Very few people's response would be "Go back in time and give antibiotics out during the black plague." People on a whole only care about events in the near past or soon to come future. Time travel wouldn't change that. So I still agree with the first guy. It is completely unrealistic to expect that the average person would be on board with running around through time to save people in an era far removed from the time they live when they could just go back to their lives and never have any danger about it. That said it would be a pretty crappy game if they just gave up and went home. |
| 476 | *** On that note, they knew they were severely outclassed by Lavos at the beginning, so they, using their new-found knowledge of time travel, were actually looking for an ''alternative'' method of getting rid of Lavos to avoid a direct confrontation. They originally tried stopping Magus from creating it, until they realised that Magus was only summoning Lavos. So, they were eventually forced into a direct confrontation since they had no other options, but by then, they had managed to become powerful enough and gained enough allies for that option to become viable. |
| 477 | *** The way that Crono and friends avoid the BystanderSyndrome trope is one of the main reasons that ''Chrono Trigger'' is among my favorite games. The party comes off as real heroes because they aren't trying to get revenge on someone for destroying their DoomedHometown, nor are they even trying to stop TheEmpire from taking over or anything like that. They find a problem that literally has no effect on them (in Robo's case, destroying Lavos might even be actively harmful to his existence) and they decide that they need to fix it anyway. The message of ''Chrono Trigger'' is thus a bit more interesting than most of its contemporaries; rather than being thrust into a heroic role by their circumstances, they choose to do something heroic (and in Crono's case, temporarily die for that cause) just because they have the means (time travel). |
| 478 | ** Beyond that, Crono's party ''had'' to do what they did. Nobody who knew about Lavos lived during his emergence. The only reason ''they'' knew about Lavos' power is because they saw a message someone made after the fact. Even if some other random time-traveller hit 2300, they'd have no real way of surviving, let along stopping, the Day of Lavos. With their combination of knowledge, magic, and time-traveling ability, Crono's group was the one force capable of stopping Lavos from destroying the world. |
| 479 | ** Uh, pardon? No battle experience? So, fighting a horde of man-eating monsters, a spine-showering aberration, a battle-tank that spews fire, shoots LASERS, and was more or less made for assault, in addition to the super machines and monstrously strong freaks in the future doesn't count as "actual battle experience"? Sorry, that just doesn't make sense. |
| 480 | ** Your mistake is the assumption that they plan to beat Lavos up. That's not plan A, not even plan B. At first they want to find out how Lavos was created, then stop it, something that foreknowledge and time travel alone would be able to accomplish. Fighting Lavos only really becomes an option after they find out it's not born on Earth, and its arrival is inevitable. At which point they're already magical powerhouses that can beat otherwordly foes. |
| 481 | * In all fairness, the difference between the sun exploding and Lavos taking over is that when the sun goes, all deaths will likely and hopefully be near instantaneous, with little no suffering. Lavos, on the other hand, turns the world into a wasteland, and all deaths are slow and painful. Crono and crew aren't just saving lives, they're preventing suffering. |
| 482 | ** Solar expansion and the end of the world is not going to be instantaneous. |
| 483 | *** Which actually makes the above case stronger. Hopefully by the time the sun expands, humanity would be able to detect it and make the necessary preparations (i.e. colonize a new world, or even slowly nudge Earth into a new orbit to accomodate the Sun's expansion). Lavos' attack was ''sudden'', catching humanity completely off-guard. By the time anyone ''could'' retaliate, it was already too late. That's why only someone with time travel could actually fight against Lavos' awakening. |
| 484 | * The way I figure it, the Chrono Crew are getting involved because they've actually ''seen'' the world be destroyed, and they've seen what gets left behind after the world is destroyed. It's a lot more personal when you've actually seen what happens up close. |
| 485 | * It is almost directly realated to their experience in 2300AD, i.e. humanity on it's last legs (Marle is a ruler-to-be), the environment destroyed, desolate, and barren (Crono can be considered a bit of a nature boy [[spoiler: due to the thing . . . the CAT thing]]), and wasted technology only for killing (Lucca might spit up a little bit (haha, fire get it?)) Then a little foray into the [[spoiler: broken refrigeration unit]] to save some plebes, but oh, wait nooooo. While disheartened, and more than a little dejected, they are further trying to determine just what the Heckran happened around there, to find that something potentially tangible destroyed the world. I think Saviour Complex is trumped by The Logical Next Step (I will attempt to locate the [[LiteralMetaphor appropriate trope]] for this)..... Looks like what I am harping about is surprisingly as simple as LogicalWeakness. |
| 486 | * Why go as distant and incomprehensible as the 5 billion year away solar expansion? Humans won't even be humans by that point. We have a much more tangible and parallel apocalypse scenario with climate change which isn't likely to directly wipe out our species in our lifetime, it could well render the Earth pretty much like 2300 in a thousand years. And yeah, a lot of people care and want to stop that even if it probably wont kill them directly. |
| 487 | [[/folder]] |
| 488 | |
| 489 | [[folder: it IS a nice skirt]] |
| 490 | * When Lucca's mom was being dragged toward the machine that crippled her because her skirt got caught in the conveyer belt, why didn't she just take her skirt off? It seems to this troper that saving your life takes priority over modesty, but maybe she just ''really'' liked that skirt. |
| 491 | ** Maybe the clothes were resistent enough so they didn't rip easily or the scissors and knifes were out of reach. Anyway, both Lara and Lucca were panicking that moment. |
| 492 | ** What is she, a trollop?! No sir! Either her little girl is going to become a sudden genius or she's losing her feet. She's not about to expose her legs for her toes. |
| 493 | ** Maybe it was a dress, so she couldn't take the skirt off. |
| 494 | ** This Troper wears skirts, and can attest to the fact that some skirts are hard to quickly remove - and outright ''impossible'' to remove if something is stretching the material the wrong way (kilts, to name one type of "skirts", are often held together by buckles - you need to pull at the cloth to undo the buckle). And with some types of cloth being impossible to tear by hand, you are in deep trouble if your skirt gets stuck and you don't have a knife or scissors at hand. |
| 495 | ** In real life, people get their clothing tangled in heavy machinery and are pulled in, with resulting gruesome limb and life destroying injuries, ''[[RealityIsUnrealistic all the time]]''. This is the main reason people working professionally with heavy machinery are not allowed to wear loose clothing near the equipment at any time for any reason. It also tends to happen ''very quickly'', much too fast to react. The 'slow drag' is very much a movie and video game trope, which, in video games, is partly justified in order to give the player a chance to react to and do something about it. |
| 496 | [[/folder]] |
| 497 | |
| 498 | [[folder: Good morning, Crono]] |
| 499 | * "Good morning Crono" is used in the advertising for the remake, but the new translation doesn't include the line. It's just odd to not include it in the first place ("Knock you all down" was kept in Dawn of Souls!), but when they use it in ads... |
| 500 | ** A concession? It is only ''one'' line, you shouldn't get so worked up anyway. |
| 501 | ** [[NeverTrustATrailer They relied on one of the few lines people could remember from the original game.]] |
| 502 | ** It fits in with the theme of time travel and changing history, things have changed, and that didn't happen, but we the hero/players remember it happened like that before. |
| 503 | ** Simply put, the people working in advertising didn't get to play the game ahead of time, they were just given some footage and information. Either the person who came up with the tagline was a fan of the original game and decided to use that line, or they did research into the original game to find something to use, in either case not knowing said line was not there anymore. |
| 504 | [[/folder]] |
| 505 | |
| 506 | |
| 507 | [[folder: Arbitrary Headcount Limit]] |
| 508 | * Okay, I get that you can only bring three people at a time through a gate. But why didn't they just use a ferrying system? Something along the lines of: the party travels to designated spot, the person with the gate key returns to the End of Time alone, they pick up two more people, rinse and repeat. That would have surely made their lives easier. |
| 509 | ** Perhaps the travellers need to be in the presence of the gate key when outside their own time period or the end of time. Perhaps if Ayla, for example, was left in 2300AD while Crono took the key back to get the others, she would lose her time traveller's immunity, and time would rewrite itself around her disappearance. Just a thought. |
| 510 | *** No, that would lead to FridgeHorror where all but three members of your party are permanently trapped at the End of Time, forever. And the endings debunk this by making it clear it's possible to get your entire party out of the End of Time ''somehow''. |
| 511 | ** That...makes a disturbing amount of sense. Lucca could have had time to make time keys, or at least some form of time-traveller-immunity-dispensing items after Lavos has been defeated, so she could bring Marle's ancestors/decendant to 1000 AD for the party, but was unable to do it on the fly while they were trying to whack Lavos. |
| 512 | *** It also explains why Marle was erased. She didn't have her pendant or gate key and the universe was trying to rewrite itself based on the changes made, taking her with it. |
| 513 | ** That's just an attempt to give an in-story reason for one of the typical RPG [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]. They didn't really think it through, but I still consider it an [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality Acceptable Break From Reality]]. |
| 514 | ** Honestly, GameplayAndStorySegregation is the only explanation. In the remake's extra quest, there is a moment where your party is imprisoned, and a second party comes to the rescue. Apparently a Gate Key is not necessary to get out of the End of Time, since the portals there are always open, so the full party of 7 could indeed travel together. |
| 515 | * Above extra quest remake notwithstanding (is there a RemakeImmunity trope?) What strikes me as a little whacky with this question is the follow up question: With time dictating the number of party members allowed to participate in a distortion, would this somehow affect the number of Gate Keys that would work at once? Especially, even if they weren't headed to the same destination but, time travelling at the same time? |
| 516 | [[/folder]] |
| 517 | |
| 518 | [[folder: Crono, Guard Murderer]] |
| 519 | * You know, Crono was forgiven rather easily for his jailbreak and alleged crimes after the trial. Granted, he was fleeing for his life from an unjust execution, but he [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking slaughtered boatloads of guards, destroyed the secret weapon, and walked on the Chancellor's back]]. You'd think those guards' families would raise a stink about this, but they all seem to have been forgotten easily enough. Crono and Lucca's parents didn't even seem upset by their children's criminal status. |
| 520 | ** You know that the Chancellor was really a descendant of the Yakra you fought in the beginning of the game looking for revenge for his ancestor, right? Talking to some of the soldiers in the palace after Yakra XIII is defeated reveals that the armored guards the "Chancellor" hired were also monsters in disguise. |
| 521 | ** Even if some of them are human, I personally don't acknowledge death in such family-friendly game, unless it's a PlotlineDeath. I prefer the term `KOed`. Hey, Crono can never kill Gato, right? |
| 522 | [[/folder]] |
| 523 | |
| 524 | [[folder: Forgotten Phlebotinum Lasers]] |
| 525 | * Okay, why in the WORLD don't they use the Epoch laser after they down the Blackbird with it? They know what button activates it, and it is powerful enough to CUT THE WING IN HALF EASILY. So they have a weapon that was added to the Epoch, and they NEVER USE IT AGAIN. You're telling me that they chose to FLY STRAIGHT AT LAVOS instead of USING A DEATH-RAY? Also, why not use it on any other enemy they come across? Did it just never occur to them or something? I would be SHOCKED if it wasn't strong enough to at least damage the black omen. |
| 526 | ** Alright, but implement this in the game how? In-game triple tech? Maybe that's what the omega beam, or whatever Lucca/Magus/Robo's triple tech is called, really is. Cut scene? Doesn't solve the underlying problem; you still end up with "Why didn't they use it here, here, here, and here" if you use it a finite number of times less than the number of times it would take to become boring and overused. MAYBE you could push a button on the world map, have the Epoch fire at the only thing floating at the same height (the Black Omen), and then have a cutscene where the weapon breaks as an Easter egg, but then, is it really worth the effort? No, the only solution here is a minigame. Don't get me wrong, it would be fun to take a break from your RPG and play galaga for a few minutes, the Golden Saucer was my favorite part of [=FF7=], but I think that's just asking for too much. |
| 527 | ** Because they would have fought back? Strong as the laser was, I don't see it punching through Lavos, let alone killing it, and once they get their shot, destruction rains from the heavens. As for the Black Omen - what makes you think it didn't have anti-air weaponry? |
| 528 | ** It might have been a one-shot only thing. The first blast utterly drains the battery and only gives the Epoch enough juice to fly from then on? |
| 529 | * ahem. further I believe no lasers can penetrate [[GodzillaThreshold Lavos' outer shell]] as Lavos was able to overcome re-entry. As for taking a [[AchillesHeel shot at the head]] with the Epoch you say . . . ? Well I couldn't find the specific trope with Luke's comment on how hard it was NOT to hit a target 6 meters across, but, there it is. |
| 530 | [[/folder]] |
| 531 | |
| 532 | [[folder: BC and AD]] |
| 533 | * The whole BC/AD thing. Perhaps a bit of TranslationConvention, but given that the Guardian Line existed for 33 generations in year 1000, I would think that YearZero would be expressed as The First Year Guardian Reign (GY - Guardian Year). |
| 534 | ** Gamers are morons? |
| 535 | ** Do we know what religion, if any, Guardia follows? Possibly, they had their own Jesus Christ. |
| 536 | ** I {{Fan Wank}}ed a bit and [[WildMassGuessing thought up]] what they could stand for: Before Crown and Aeon Dynastic. |
| 537 | ** It's not a translation thing; it was in the original Japanese version. According to the Japanese dialog it's based on the kingdom's founding, not any religious thing; so presumably the creators simply had no idea what our real world AD and BC stand for and simply used them for simplicity, and the translators either didn't notice or didn't think it important enough to change. |
| 538 | ** They could just stand for something else, e.g. "BC" could be "before the crowning" or "before the conquest", referring to the foundation of the kingdom of Guardia. If Latin or its equivalent exists in-universe, "AD" could even stand for ''anno domini'' as in RealLife, but with ''domini'' ("of the Lord") referring to a human historical figure, most likely King Guardia I, rather than a religious one. Or, as suggested above, it could be to do with a religion that the game's text just doesn't go into. |
| 539 | [[/folder]] |
| 540 | |
| 541 | [[folder: Gaspar Must Be Lazy]] |
| 542 | * So, Gaspar is capable of helping the players create an absolutely perfect StableTimeLoop to save Crono (see below). Okay...if he's so knowledgeable about time, then why doesn't he nudge the party into taking steps to make sure they don't cause a major paradox by defeating Lavos ''before'' he destroys the world, thereby preventing the heroes from finding out about everything in the first place ''and'' apparently creating the [[VideoGame/ChronoCross Dream/Time Devourerer]]? |
| 543 | ** ...Because if they defeat Lavos ''after'' it destroys the world, it's kind of a moot point by then? If your goal is to save the cheer- sorry, ''prevent'' the world from being destroyed, it seems kind of counter-intuitive to let the world be destroyed before you save it. Also, the only way Crono and crew find out they need to save the world is by finding it in ruins in the first place. None of the Gurus seem to recognise the band of heroes until well after they've romped through time, so there's no getting around the initial paradox. |
| 544 | ** The Time Egg was the absolute epitome of Gaspar's abilities I believe. He had to pick up his research in 2300AD what he began in Zeal with whatever he could find on hand (although I tend to agree with you, he could [[spoiler: program Nus? what.]] Second the object he created (an inanimate thing) was bound, constrained, as if it had free will, under odd potential and prophetic limitations. He made a thing, that MIGHT work, if it COULD work, if conditions were correct, AND it was a thing MADE to work SPECIFICALLY in that way. Asking Gaspar for more ideas would have caused him to make the face that the expression "what." comes from. I think, though too, taking out Lavos at any time after viewing the destruction footage falls to RippleEffectProofMemory . |
| 545 | [[/folder]] |
| 546 | |
| 547 | [[folder: Magic By Any Other Name]] |
| 548 | * So, if human beings no longer have magic, how do techs work? I mean, you can make a case for Lucca having built a flamethrower, and the sword techs being special moves, but please, explain the healing. |
| 549 | ** 1- Explain the enertron, potions (which they were able to manufacture all the way back in 65 million BC), and Guardia's miraculous hp/mp restoring chef. 2- They had magic, it was just dormant. Spekkio drew out latent power, he didn't (and couldn't) simply give it away. 3- The distinction between "tech" and "magic" seems somewhat intentionally blurry in the first place. Maybe techs aren't magic per se, by ''their'' definition, but for most practical purposes they are magic by ''our'' conception of it, just a lower-level sort of proto-magic. |
| 550 | ** I interpret Marle's Aura as a mutation, either from Enlightened ancestors or from her family carrying Schala's pendant for millenia - just because magic is lost doesn't mean there aren't people who have weird abilities. As for Ayla and Frog, neither of them is completely human. |
| 551 | *** I'm fairly certain that Ayla is completely human, even though she grew up in caveman times. If one were to make the evolution argument, one must remember that the main difference between the humans of 65000000 BC and those of later eras was their lack of exposure to the power of Lavos -- power which gave them magic capabilities in the first place, making it ''less'' likely that Ayla would possess magic healing techniques, not more. And I doubt that somehow primitive humans had healing saliva or something that somehow got lost over succeeding generations, since the effects of Lavos made humans more magical, not less. Since the rest of Ayla's techs are physical in nature (except for maaaybe Dino Tail and/or Charm, though those could still be explained away as nonmagical), her healing still stands out as odd in nature. |
| 552 | *** ''You say'' "more magical," but that's a value judgment that also doesn't map with the technical definition of "magic" in this universe. If healing saliva or any other way in which Ayla's [[HealingHands Healing Lips]] work (PsychicPowers? Not unbelievable) isn't ''magical'' (either elemental or Lavos-derived), then it might well have been lost as humanity evolved into the Enlightened and Earthbound and gained access to the broader powers available through the Elements and Lavos. Alternately (and this is mass guessing territory) healing saliva might be a function of regularly drinking free-flowing Elixir. Point being, she seems to have powers that modern humans don't, and that explicitly aren't Lavos-derived magic. |
| 553 | *** Most of those abilities follow the tropes of psychic or martial arts-style abilities (Crono's Slash/Kamaitachi is obviously the latter.) Marle's Aura would either be a psychic ability or synonymous with ki/chi restoration. |
| 554 | *** Its important to remember that HP doesn't just represent Physical Health but also ability and will to fight, Ayla's Kiss doesn't necessarily directly Heal, so much as encourage and push the target to keep fighting, as well as return their focus(breaking mental ailments) and possibly drawing out poison(a semi-real thing, which would deal with more physical ailments). |
| 555 | [[/folder]] |
| 556 | |
| 557 | [[folder: Yakra the Genre-Savvy]] |
| 558 | * Okay, so this isn't exactly a gaping plot hole, but it sort of bugs me: Crono, Lucca, and Frog hand Yakra a defeat in the Middle Ages. In the present day, his descendant plots revenge. My question: how exactly does he connect present-day Crono to the one who defeated his ancestor? Nobody knows who Crono, Lucca, or Frog are in the Middle Ages, so there's no family line to watch. If he had a physical description and/or a name to go on, his singling out of Crono as the one who humiliated his ancestor makes sense, if you assume he somehow knew about the time travel -- but why would he? Now, if he had focused his ire on the Guardia line, he might go after Crono just for his association with Nadia, but it really seems that he's gunning for Crono in particular right from the start. Does this strike anyone else as somewhat odd? |
| 559 | ** Because Sir Crono is the one who defeated the monsters on the bridge during Ozzie's attack, saved the Queen with the aid of Sir Frog, and, together, they defeated the evil Fiendlord. Who the heck else is so famous, and has such awesome, spiky red hair? Otherwise, it's just a case of 'your ancestor kicked my ancestor's ass, so I'm-a revenge on your ass' type dealie. |
| 560 | *** But the only thing they had done at that point in the timeline was rescue Queen Leene. The characters only encounter repercussions for changes they've already made, not changes they will yet make (CT is admirably consistent about this). The trial was a direct result of Yakra's defeat and the real 600 A.D. chancellor setting up a criminal justice system, which gave present-day Yakra a motive and opportunity for revenge, but not much of an explanation for knowing who to go after in the first place. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the only way it makes sense is if he wasn't after Crono specifically the first time around, he was off on some power trip and/or setting up the stage for his later scheme against the king, making the fact that Crono killed his ancestor just an ironic coincidence -- he didn't know Crono from Fritz. He WOULD have figured it out by the time the second trial rolled around, of course. |
| 561 | *** One possibility - Dalton. If Dalton got sent to the present era a few years ''before'' 1000 A.D. he could have told present-day Yakra about Crono and time travel, as part of his own bigger plans to get revenge on Crono and co. It makes the eventual overthrow of Guardia by a Dalton-lead Porre more believable if Dalton had actually had many years to prepare. |
| 562 | *** But it runs into the same "suffering repercussions for events they haven't yet played a role in" problem as before. |
| 563 | ** Short answer: he wasn't trying to exact vengeance on Crono, at least not at first. He was posing as the Chancellor to exact vengeance on the royal family; we seem him carrying this plot forward when the crew returns to the Castle later. No one knew who Crono, Lucca, or Frog were, but the surviving Mystics/Fiends from the Cathedrale would be able to relay their physical description and any other identifying information to the rest of the army. As vengeful as the Yakra line was, they could have made pictures or statues. Yakra XIII, hateful as he was, would have burned these images into his memory. So, cut to Marle's return, Yakra's going about his business as the chancellor, plotting his vengeance against the royal family, when HOLY SHIT, THAT GUY walks right in the door. He doesn't know how, he doesn't know why, but it doesn't matter because it's THAT GUY. He makes up a bullshit accusation to have him jailed, and when he's found innocent, whips up a bullshit excuse to have him briefly imprisoned, then tries to execute him anyway. He wasn't prepared for Crono; he's acting on kneejerk impulse here, and it shows in how poorly crafted the scheme actually is (the most blatant flaw being how he's going to explain to the king why he randomly executed a man who was found innocent). |
| 564 | ** Simpler explanation: Yakra XIII thinks that the Crono he meets in 1000 AD is the descendant of the Crono of 600 AD. The Yakra monsters pass on their name from father to son, so it's not hard for them to believe that Crono's family would do the same thing. The Yakra monsters also seem to have the same lifespan as humans (given that it's 13 generations for both races) so again, it's not hard for Yakra XIII to wrongly assume that there's a whole ancestral line of Cronos. Also note that if you go to the kitchen in 1000 AD and ask for the "Crono Special", you're told that it's named for a hero from the distant past. So apparently a lot of humans also think that there are two Cronos, and no one outside of Crono's own fellow heroes realize that both Cronos are in fact the same guy who's been travelling through time. |
| 565 | ** You could also deduce, using Fridge Logic, that his surviving mooks overheard the characters talking to one another both in and out of battle. |
| 566 | [[/folder]] |
| 567 | |
| 568 | [[folder: More San Dimas Time]] |
| 569 | * How is it that when Crono and company change something after going through a Gate, things STAY changed on future journeys through that Gate? Gates bring you to a SPECIFIC time. Therefore, when traveling through a Gate, wouldn't everything go back to the way they were the first time they entered the Gate? |
| 570 | ** Evidently, the Gates and the Epoch run on SanDimasTime. No, it doesn't really make much sense. The Chrono Compendium people put together an [[http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Principles_of_Time_and_Dimensional_Travel.html article]] you might prefer to the {{MST3K Mantra}}. |
| 571 | ** The Gates travel forwards in time, just like the player. You travel to wherever the gates happen to be at that particular moment. |
| 572 | ** Think of the gates and eras like a stick moving on the edge of a spiral. It moves all the gates together. Even the End of Time advances after a fashion. That linkage is probably connected to whatever prevents time travel paradoxes. |
| 573 | [[/folder]] |
| 574 | |
| 575 | [[folder: Tricked Out Time]] |
| 576 | * So, we activate the Chrono Trigger. We go to freeze time with Lavos ready to kill Crono. Instead of placing the clone Crono, behead Lavos. Problem solved? |
| 577 | ** Time Egg, actually. We don't know much about it, which is why it's hard to say. Trying to kill Lavos in the Time Freeze would have been a very different act from rescuing Crono. As it was, they used TrickedOutTime, and the event they changed would have appeared exactly the same once they departed and time "unfroze" -- the Crono that is obliterated before his allies' horrified eyes is simply an identical doll rather than the original article. Had they killed Lavos, time would have unfroze with a very befuddled Schala and the others standing before an inexplicable Lavos corpse. That would affect their actions in the immediate aftermath and far beyond. That may well have been entirely antithetical to the Egg's purpose, even assuming it were possible to kill Lavos in such a fashion at all. |
| 578 | *** Well, it's not like killing Lavos on his Day wouldn't change the action of their past selves, being them in the future when looking at the recording of years in the past (still the past being their future). By preventing the day of Lavos, they prevented the actions their past selves took witnessing the Day Of Lavos footage. |
| 579 | *** They could otherwise freely change the past. But we don't know that the regular rules applied to the Time Egg -- we rather have reason to believe they didn't. If it were possible to interact with the environment in the Time Freeze the same way they did everywhere else, why did they have to bother with the doll nonsense at all? Why not just grab Crono and run? But it was vital for them to get the doll, suggesting the "tricking out" part of the equation was absolutely necessary. They used this one-of-a-kind artifact to pull off a very unique feat, so speculating that they could have done something else with it by pointing to what they did elsewhere/[[TimeTravelTenseTrouble when]] is on very shaky ground. |
| 580 | *** ....couldn't they behead Lavos and put an stuffed Lavos head in it's place, perhaps? That'd have TrickedOutTime, I suppose. |
| 581 | *** Crono was set to be obliterated the moment they left the Time Freeze, and they replaced him with a doll. It was a trick that worked because the witnesses to the scene only had to mistake it for Crono in the one split second before it was destroyed. |
| 582 | ** Okay, new time travel rule: When invoking the Time Egg, objects can be moved, but not harmed. Problem solved? |
| 583 | ** But... Lavos has no head. |
| 584 | ** They were being pragmatic. Crono got oneshotted and it was highly unlikely just killing Lavos while he was timefrozen would even work. Would you rather waste your one shot at changing things on a task that you might not even be able to do and risk leaving your friend permanently dead in return? |
| 585 | [[/folder]] |
| 586 | |
| 587 | [[folder: ...But they're STILL hungry yet again]] |
| 588 | * You know, if the Chrono crew can transport enough jerky to feed the front lines, why can't they bring food to feed the starving post-apocalyptic world? |
| 589 | ** Carrying enough food to briefly feed a few dozen knights is far removed from bringing enough food to sustain a post-apocalyptic civilization. Not to mention that they don't need to feed the people in the future; they have the Enertron to sustain them, and are not growing food because growing food sucks. Crono and Co. have more pressing issues than playing food hauler. |
| 590 | ** There's also the issue of what happens to the timeline with all those tons of food vanishing. |
| 591 | ** I'm still of a mind that Robo could have at least contributed a little to this effort before powering-down after [[spoiler: restoring the forest]]. The food supply in the timeline might have been affected manageably if Robo had enough power to include some crop in that re-terraforming. |
| 592 | [[/folder]] |
| 593 | |
| 594 | [[folder: Magic Weapons]] |
| 595 | * How come Ayla is the only one who can fight on the Blackbird before you get your equipment back? Is everyone incapable of using magic without their weapons? And what about Robo? Did they disassemble him or something? |
| 596 | ** Robo's "weapon" is his arms, so, yes, they disassembled him. Or, at least, took his arms off. No idea about the magic, though. |
| 597 | *** Only using magic with weapons could make sense. Considering the earlier entry about tech magic being different (or at least lesser) than Zeal magic, the non-Zealians in the party had such a novice grasp on the concept compared to what the whole kingdom could do that they could only channel their magic through their conventional weaponry. |
| 598 | [[/folder]] |
| 599 | |
| 600 | [[folder: Don't fireproof the house]] |
| 601 | * Taban, Lucca's father, builds increasingly fire-resistant armor and suits for her over the course of the game. According to ''Chrono Cross'', it apparently never occurred to him to do the same for the house. |
| 602 | ** It might not be easy to build walls of a house out of whatever he used to make those armors. |
| 603 | *** The man has this down to a science. All he ever does for you is build stuff that can stand up to flames. I'm blaming Lucca's book collection. It was a messy house full of books and children's scribble drawings. |
| 604 | ** Ummmm, isn't Lucca's house on a damn island? Why was a [[HoldingBackthePhlebotinum sprinkler system not invented]]? This is adding a lot of angst to the [[spoiler: fate of the orphange]]. Were the writers unknowingly ''allowed'' to create this pivotal plot aspect with a simple asinine oversight? |
| 605 | [[/folder]] |
| 606 | |
| 607 | [[folder: Escape from Tyran Castle]] |
| 608 | * Heavy stuff. Here's a lighter one for you. How did Kino get the other cavemen back from Tyran Castle without some Pterans to ride? |
| 609 | ** He didn't. He took the Pterans that Crono and Ayla conveniently left hanging out just outside the door, then returned to pick the crew up off the top of the castle just before Lavos impacted. |
| 610 | [[/folder]] |
| 611 | |
| 612 | [[folder: Find this person... but take your time.]] |
| 613 | * Who is it that Gaspar is saying you're supposed to help, fast? That's never touched on again. |
| 614 | ** Translation error. |
| 615 | ** This. He's ''actually'' telling you to talk to your party members for clues on where to go for the subquests. |
| 616 | ** I always thought it referred to Queen Zeal ([[spoiler:although your party kills her in the Black Omen]]) or Lucca's mother Lara. |
| 617 | ** [[spoiler: Queen Zeal isn't dead. she just teleported away laughing right after summoning following her second defeat(no idea where she went aside from possibly attempting to drain Lavos's energy during the final battle).]] |
| 618 | [[/folder]] |
| 619 | |
| 620 | [[folder: Spoiled Food]] |
| 621 | * Why did all of the emergency shelters in the far future have food that could spoil? Surely there must be some nonperishable food they could use. |
| 622 | ** Those were probably the instantly-consumable stuff. |
| 623 | ** I thought the food storage was basically an expanded food locker (basically a freezer room) that broke down, spoiling the food inside. Since nonperishables don't need special conservation measures, they were probably kept on-hand, so they were the first to be used up. |
| 624 | ** On a long enough timeline, "non-perishable" food isn't. |
| 625 | ** Twinkies don't exist in the Chrono world, and nothing else could survive the Day of Lavos. |
| 626 | ** Perhaps due to an unexpected outside source, like radiation? The food ''itself'' is fine, it's just been rendered inedible. |
| 627 | ** They probably did, but it was eaten long ago. Additionally, in the real world, there's very little truly "impershable" food - there is shelf-stable food, but it still has to be replaced every decade or so. After 300 years, all sorts of things can go wrong that can make most foods inedable. |
| 628 | [[/folder]] |
| 629 | |
| 630 | [[folder: Finding Lavos]] |
| 631 | * So, by 1999 they have 2300 AD Technology, likely after Lucca helped kickstart a technological revolution. Wouldn't they have found Lavos before when they tried to find out what the world was made of? |
| 632 | ** If the game over is any indication, they do know what Lavos is but what do they do next? |
| 633 | ** Notice that every time a civilization tries to contact Lavos in any way, it just surfaces and destroys what made contact, then goes back to hibernation. It's possible that this happened some time in the time between present and the Day of Lavos, and they just decided it was best to leave the thing unprovoked and make it the next generation's problem. After all, the 1999 people did know that Lavos existed, and even knew its name. |
| 634 | [[/folder]] |
| 635 | |
| 636 | [[folder: Pendantry]] |
| 637 | * Marle's pendant is Schala's pendant. Crono and Co. had to recharge Old!pendant to get into to the Ocean Palace. Why don't they give Old!pendant to Schala just before she uses the last of Young!pendant's power to teleport them out of there? She could then use Old!pendant's power to teleport herself out, stopping Prophet!timeline's Dream Devourer from existing. Better yet, why not switch pendants when resurrecting Crono? |
| 638 | ** When do they have the time to do any of this? They have to go though a whole series of hoops to pull off ressurecting Crono, adding Schala to the mix is adding in a wrinkle to the plan, a plan they can't risk changing, since the mastermind behind it is '''dead'''. You try asking a dead guy if it's safe to go outside of his plan to further warp the laws of space/time, after he's turned into a Nu, sleeping beyond the normal flow of time. I tried, all I got was 'Zzzz'. |
| 639 | *** Wait, wasn't saving Schala the ''original purpose'' of the plan? Schala is important, Chrono (as much as his friends might like him) isn't. He could possibly adjust the plan to save Chrono as well, but there's no plausible reason he would set up an opportunity to change the events of that moment in time without making saving Schala (who he knew personally, and who is extremely important to the entire timeline) the ''primary'' purpose. |
| 640 | ** meh, paradox, but also maybe OntologicalInertia and RippleEffectProofMemory. If the party removes the old/original pendant from Schala then the newer/original pendant will ''proooobably'' be removed from their possession. OntologicalInertia somewhat prevents this but the general rule of time paradoxes absolutely does not. If they do decide to just take it tho, no one but they would know of it's existence afterward, assuming the one in their possession ''does'' actually disappear after that. Might cause a tiny time crash [[spoiler: like in Cross]] with the switched pendants in the wrong times and places forever, heheh. |
| 641 | [[/folder]] |
| 642 | |
| 643 | [[folder: Dalton-Porre]] |
| 644 | * Do people actually believe the whole Dalton-Porre thing? I thought that was a joke by the localization staff who was just making a shout out to the Chrono Compendium. |
| 645 | ** It's a reference to ''Chrono Cross''. Depressing, I know. Have a Soda on me. |
| 646 | *** Pour it on my grave. |
| 647 | ** Don't know anything about the translation or about Cross, but in the Japanese it's just a threat Dalton makes. When has he managed to successfully follow through on any of his threats? My bet is he tries and gets squashed by the heroes (yet again). |
| 648 | [[/folder]] |
| 649 | |
| 650 | [[folder: Chrono Cross is Dumb]] |
| 651 | * How the hell could Dalton pull off that stupid Porre plot when he explicitly told the heroes that he was going to do it? They would be expecting it when it happened, or would be able to stop him before he ever got the plan off the ground! |
| 652 | ** ''Chrono Cross'' is basically a really bad fanfic that got made it into a game. Hence, the main cast being Worfed. |
| 653 | *** Except that it was written by one of the main writers of ''Chrono Trigger'', had many of the same designers, the same art director, the same composer, and was published by the same company. Maybe I'm arguing semantics. |
| 654 | *** "Really bad fanfic" wasn't meant ''literally'', it was meant in the sense that it was (ostensibly) written the way badly-written fanfiction is typically written. The fact that it was written by the same writers as the previous game only makes it worse. |
| 655 | *** ''Chrono Cross''[-'s-] plot being good or not is up to debate. If I'm not mistaken I believe the after-game content from the DS port is canon-informant but non-canon; that is to say what we see in certain scenarios like Magus and Dream Devourer, and what characters state like Dalton, is considered canon to the franchise but the method in which the player accesses that information (going through the Dimensional Vortexes) is in itself non-canon. |
| 656 | ** I think with all the oppression shown to be going on there is one kind of off the wall scenario I am willing to accept (plus I am big fan of Chrono Cross soooo....) Dalton gets flung ''somewhere'' near a crucial time in Porre's development and sows enough dissension (or causes enough of a stink one way or another) to rattle Porre enough to cause them to feel that become militaristic would serve them better if there is ever another so-called DaltonIncident, hahaha. But seriously, I would need to double check, but I believe Lynx is responsible for Porre's militarization (as it is only militarized in the one dimension). Lynx's black garb, in my opinion, most closely resembled the style of the Porre soldiers' blue armor. Complimented it like he was some kind of administrative military member. |
| 657 | *** Porre was militarized in both dimensions. The only reason they hadn't taken over El Nido in Another World was because the dragoons were still around to fend them off; in Home World the dragoons had disappeared three years prior to the game so Porre rolled in unopposed. When the dragoons retreat to Fort Dragonia in Another World (leaving the rest of El Nido undefended), Porre takes that opportunity to invade in that dimension too. That said, Lynx is specifically referred to in-game as some sort of high-ranking Porre military officer several times, and it probably would make a little more sense if Lynx were responsible for Porre's rise instead of Dalton (''Chrono Cross'' itself never mentions Dalton at all; that info only comes from the DS port of ''Chrono Trigger''), given that Lynx is actually relevant to the plot of ''Cross''. |
| 658 | *** Lynx being responsible for such a huge change in Porre would run completely contraty to FATE's stated goal of keeping timeline changes to a minimum. It's more likely that Porre was militarized by Dalton, and that was already the timeline Chronopolis was working with, then Lynx just infiltrated their hierarchy to make sure FATE had enough influence in the world's now most prominent superpower to avoid them messing with El Nido too much. Then the events of the game happen, and Lynx loses most of his influence (and flat out dies in one of the worlds), allowing Porre to invade anyways. |
| 659 | * I demand the WordOfGod to explain himself. Seriously, I'm not even sure if it's canon. |
| 660 | [[/folder]] |
| 661 | |
| 662 | [[folder: Time Bastard]] |
| 663 | * Time Bastard bugs me. I see it thrown around a lot as though it were actually canon; in fact, I count eight instances prior of it on this page alone. The problem is, not only is it never suggested in the canon itself, it's actively refuted. Both the scene with the Time Egg and the Red Gate feature two instances of the same person at the same point in time, and in neither case is anyone overridden by the traveler. Magus also spends a significant portion of the Ice Age sharing reality with his past self without any override. Yet the theory persists that if one were to travel to a point in time at which they already existed, they would overwrite themselves. It's a very infectious bit of contradictory fanon. |
| 664 | ** The problem isn't the theory, it's your understanding of it. No one said the rule is that 2 of the same person can't exist in the same timeframe. It's that if someone time travels they build up immunity to time changes as a time traveller, so when there are two versions of them ''from the same point in their personal time line'' existing in all of time, the one with the most time traveller's immunity is the one who continues to exist. The best example is if Crono changes the past in a way that precludes his own eventual time travel, the version of him from the new reality that didn't time travel will cease to exist at the time when the version with Time traveller's immunity originally departed. In both your examples, versions of them from ''different points in their personal time line'' interacted with each other, which isn't something time bastard says shouldn't happen. The games don't use the terms, but the events actually presented in the games are in line with it (except, of course, for the queen leene is missing scenario, which was written before the rest of the game was, and was never changed later in production to be more consistent with it.) Even down to the point that in the original timeline, Janus was in the ocean palace during the disaster, which is how Magus ended up in 600 ad. But in the events of the game proper, Janus is kept away from the ocean palace, but disappears at the time he was destined to be swept away anyway, and Magus' memories do not change to reflect the new series of events. |
| 665 | [[/folder]] |
| 666 | |
| 667 | [[folder: Lucca Ashtear is Useless]] |
| 668 | * Lucca: Made a teleporter, fixed a robot that was 1300 years more advanced than her, yet can't make prostetics or robotic walking legs for her mom? |
| 669 | ** Dammit, Jim, she's a roboticist and physicist, not a doctor! Prosthetics or replacements like that would require knowledge of human bone, nerve, and muscle, and how to hook machines up thereto. |
| 670 | ** True, true, thats why I also mentioned robotic walking legs, it'd have a seat and she can just just control it with levers and such, no connecting nerves or anything like a MiniMecha instead of being stuck in that room all day and be able to enjoy the festival. I know the accident is supposed to be character development for Lucca [[JustEatGilligan but still...]] |
| 671 | ** Lucca´s mom (if I remember correctly) is not very keen to machines since a machine crippled her for life, remember?. Maybe Taban and Lucca did try to build some prostheses or device to help her walk again, but she consciously rejected it due to her bias. |
| 672 | ** Lucca herself admits that walking robots like Robo are not easy to make, even for her. Consider that the only robot she's made so far is Gato, which is at least twice Robo's size and [[WarmUpBoss not very mobile]]. She doesn't start experimenting with Robo-sized or smaller robots until after she met Robo and was able to use him for inspiration. Granted, she ''could'' have made her mom prosthetic legs after finishing the main quest, but given the chance, why wouldn't you just prevent the incident that would have required making prosthetics in the first place? |
| 673 | |
| 674 | |
| 675 | * They should have made Lara some legs after her accident because: |
| 676 | |
| 677 | 1. Lucca had NO idea that one day, years later, she and her dad would accidentally make a time machine. |
| 678 | |
| 679 | 2. Even with the time travel it's a fluke that she managed to travel back to RIGHT before the accident. |
| 680 | |
| 681 | The game never states that Lucca's mother was asked anything about getting metal legs. And assuming her husband & Lucca did & then assuming she refused because she was maimed by one is just that. Though, it's not a wild guess it's still a head-canon situation. It's a bit of bad writing in a great game. It happens. |
| 682 | |
| 683 | Taben & Lucca didn't even make Lara a wheelchair. |
| 684 | |
| 685 | |
| 686 | |
| 687 | |
| 688 | |
| 689 | |
| 690 | |
| 691 | |
| 692 | [[/folder]] |
| 693 | |
| 694 | [[folder: The Long Way Home]] |
| 695 | * Why does Robo need to go back via Gate instead of taking the long way, which would also prevent the "we changed the future in which you exist" wangst? It's been demonstrated that he can handle working then being deactivated for a couple centuries, couldn't Lucca leave him the Epoch to return for repairs after she dies? |
| 696 | ** At the end? Because as much as he'll miss his friends, he needs to go home. He'll also be seeing the fruit of their labors. Robo was also supposed to benefit from the future being fixed. In addition, maybe he'd outlive Lucca and then he'd get too old and she wouldn't be around to fix him. |
| 697 | ** Japanese culture. This isn't his place (or rather time), so he has to return even if staying would make just as much sense to us westerners. |
| 698 | ** Being left on his own for a few hundred years left him absolutely wrecked and in need of repairs that only Lucca (being a genius and having learned the inner workings of future tech already) was able to provide. We're talking about waiting 1300 years here, by that point Robo would probably have rusted to the point of being impossible to recorver as anything but scrap metal. |
| 699 | [[/folder]] |
| 700 | |
| 701 | [[folder: Magic Google]] |
| 702 | * How does Lucca find a gate using the computer? She says that she's doing a search for timewarps, but that wouldn't necessarily yield a result if nobody programmed the computer to track down a gate when someone searched for it. |
| 703 | ** Lucca may know some lateral characteristic of the gates, like temperature, wavelength or electromagnetic signature or the like. She could type in some of those parameters for the computer´s sensors to search. |
| 704 | *** It's also possible that by 1999 AD, they simply understood the basic principles behind teleportation enough to recognize that something was weird about areas where gates would eventually appear, and Lucca knew enough to search for that. After all, she'd invented teleporters 1000 years previously -- people would have had a lot of time to study and refine them. |
| 705 | [[/folder]] |
| 706 | |
| 707 | [[folder: The Fall of Guardia]] |
| 708 | * A couple issues regarding the fall of Guardia, regardless of whether or not Dalton was behind it. First, where were Crono, Marle, and/or Lucca? Crono and Marle should have been the king and queen at that point and the three of them were only five years removed from defeating an EldritchAbomination GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere, yet they couldn't defeat Porre's army? A well-placed Luminaire and Antipode 3 would easily wipe out a small battalion. The text also states that the Masamune was lost at this time. How? Didn't Frog take the Masamune with him back to 600 AD? Was Frog brought to 1000 AD (somehow) to help with the war? If so, then Guardia's fall makes even less sense. |
| 709 | ** 400 years ago is not an alternate dimension. Frog took the Masamune with him back to his time, where it existed for 400 years until the present day. That isn't a plot hole, that is how time works. |
| 710 | *** So we're just supposed to assume that Frog/Glenn gave the Masamune to the royal family for safe keeping before he died? I guess that does make sense, but it'd be nice if it were explained. It still doesn't explain how Guardia fell. Of course, this whole "fall of Guardia" thing was tacked on just to be a tie-in to ''VideoGame/ChronoCross'' anyway. |
| 711 | *** We're not supposed to assume anything. Four hundred years pass between Frog's time and the fall of Guardia. Frog could have had it ''buried with him'' and still left a few hundred year window for the sword to wind up wherever it was during the Fall of Guardia. It could have changed hands dozens of times over the centuries. Four hundred years is a ''very long time''. |
| 712 | *** Given the Masamune is created in 12,000 B.C. and survives intact until 590 A.D. (when it is smashed by Magus), it's not so hard to believe it could survive for another 400 years. |
| 713 | [[/folder]] |
| 714 | |
| 715 | [[folder: Shortcuts Make Long Delays]] |
| 716 | * Why did everyone have to find a different gate to use when they first traveled to 2300? The gate they came from very clearly worked still, in-fact you can actually use it and go back to the present whenever you want. |
| 717 | ** They are kinda sorta on the run and the eras are proceeding in parallel; they probably wanted to either wait for things to cool down, or find a route that didn't take them right next to the palace (and given the conditions, they weren't too keen on the former option). |
| 718 | *** Exactly this. If you actually take the gate back to the present, you'll find soldiers in the forest who surround you just as they did during the castle escape, leaving your only option to jump through the gate back to the future again. |
| 719 | [[/folder]] |
| 720 | |
| 721 | [[folder: Fall of Guardia]] |
| 722 | * So, is there a point to the fall of Guardia sequence? It really seems like it's nothing more than a CruelTwistEnding, and if it's supposed to tie into VideoGame/ChronoCross, it's still seems pointless because it's barely referenced. |
| 723 | ** My best guess is that it was to set up the Masamune's fall to evil and bloodlust, allowing it to appear in CC and give you a powerful weapon. You are right that it's not properly utilized, especially since dialogue implies that Guardia is still an independent nation in 1020 AD, so Porre's invasion doesn't even have much effect. |
| 724 | [[/folder]] |
| 725 | |
| 726 | [[folder: Yakra XIII]] |
| 727 | * Yakra XIII comments repeatedly in the fight with him that he knows all about your attacks, having heard everything from his ancestors. '''How'''? The player inevitably gets far better equipment and techniques (particularly, the ability to use magic) in the interim between fights, not to mention things like triple techs. How did he hear about that? Did the intervening generations of Yakra exaggerate and make assumptions about later developments that were 100% accurate? |
| 728 | ** You might have misunderstood. What Yakra XIII is talking about is human weakness to the specific next attack that follow his speech, those spike missiles he shoot at you and which does a lot of damage. Also, it should be noted that both Lavos and the Lavos Spawns have even more powerful versions of those attacks and man do they hurt. |
| 729 | [[/folder]] |
| 730 | |
| 731 | [[folder: The Black Omen]] |
| 732 | * Why isn't the Black Omen visible from the start of the game? Regardless of how time travel works in the setting, nothing your characters do in 12,000 BC influences what happens there in any significant way, and certainly nothing you do could remotely cause Black Omen to rise -- it should have risen out of the ocean on all iterations whether you were there or not, meaning that it should always be present in every time period after 12,000 BC even at the start of the game (when you'd have no idea what it is.) Yet, inexplicably, it only appears in later eras after you've personally been there to witness the events in 12,000 BC that led to its appearance, even though you did absolutely nothing that would have caused it to appear when it wasn't there before. |
| 733 | ** On the contrary, the two versions of the scene were vastly different. In the new version, the heroes and Magus confront Lavos, causing the Queen to step in on Lavos's side and somehow gain a measure of control over it. Presumably, this results in her not dying when Lavos does its rain of destruction thing. |
| 734 | ** [[NiceJobBreakingItHero Time was heavily altered by various actions throughout the course of the game]], [[FromBadToWorse affecting the decision to make the Black Omen's visibility final.]] During the North Cape dialogue, Magus explained what originally happened there: Melchior, Gaspar, Belthasar, and Janus (who is revealed to be Magus) were sent to different time periods, while the status of Queen Zeal and Schala remain unknown. However, the events of the battle with Magus during his castle caused a massive time warp that sent Magus to 12,000 B.C. and the heroes to 65,000,000 B.C. and the events afterward altered the original events of 12,000 B.C. too heavily, including [[HeroicSacrifice Crono's death]] and the use of the originally destroyed Ocean Palace recreated as The Black Omen. Much later throughout the game, the battle with Lavos's final form revealed that it was adapting its full plans due to its ability to change time during battle. All of this was believed to make Lavos gain more power from the magic-heavy 12,000 B.C. as a preemptive strike had its plans failed; the heroes (and villains) altered time and Lavos adjusted time accordingly. |
| 735 | [[/folder]] |
| 736 | |
| 737 | [[folder: Lavos vs. Tech]] |
| 738 | * You know, for all the advanced technology the world appears to have in 1999 AD, how come mankind wasn't sufficiently prepared to do something about Lavos? If we assume their 1000AD is like like our late 1900s, then they should have had the technology to measure what's going on in the world deep down below (we've studied how earthquake waves propagate, which is how we've figured out the composition of the layers in Earth). You'd think by then they would've figured out Lavos was in their planet and rising sufficiently slow enough to prepare for some course of action other than "ladeedaa, end of the world". |
| 739 | ** Actually, the only aspect of their modern tech that looks like ours is the kitchens. They don't have cars or planes, they don't have office buildings or modern computers, their warriors still use swords and other medieval weapons. Lucca's tech seems a lot closer to steampunk tech than to anything from our world; if the 1999 tech is like futurized steampunk it could explain the lack of sensors for deep in the earth's core. Alternatively, they knew about Lavos, but weren't keeping tabs on it, either because it didn't seem important (being deep in the earth's core) or because they had no idea it was actually alive (being deep in the earth's core and in a deep slumber). |
| 740 | ** We know very little of the actual details of the earth's core today; much of what we do know is extrapolated from our limited sensor readings and knowledge of physics. It's possible they detected some sort of anomaly at the earth's core, but didn't know what it was (since "evil space flea" is hardly going to be the go-to theory for anomalous readings.) Even if they did know, it's possible they just couldn't do anything -- pressure at the core is immense; we don't really have any ability to influence it in the modern day. |
| 741 | ** The director in the game over mentiones "Lavos......." angrily/sadly so he not only knew what it was and what it's name is but he didn't seem that surprised that it ended up destroying the world. So clearly they have identified and detected it by 1999 but either couldn't or didn't do anything about it. Maybe most people and the Governments didn't believe it to be a threat since it seemingly had always been there, similar to how the Black Omen hovers in the sky for thousands of years and nobody seems to mind it since it never did anything. There probably were people who were correctly saying that it was dangerous and a threat by nobody believed them. |
| 742 | [[/folder]] |
| 743 | |
| 744 | [[folder: Lavos vs. Life]] |
| 745 | * I don't understand how Lavos' destruction would spell the end of the world indefinitely. Lavos effectively caused an extinction level event upon landing in 65,000,000,000 BC leading to an ice age that lasted around 64,988,000 years, caused a geographically changing event then, and within another 11,400 years, life was pretty much back to normal. Sure we could say Lavos is sucking out the life of the planet, but wouldn't that have been very noticeable by 1999? |
| 746 | ** Simple. Marle wanted to save the people they had met and talked with in 2300; the idea that the planet might recover on its own given a super long time frame wasn't even a consideration. |
| 747 | ** Also, the awakening in 12,000 was incomplete, before Lavos had fully matured; it's implied (or perhaps outright stated, I forget) that the matured Lavos's awakening in 1999 left the planet incapable of supporting life. Though that's kind of shot down by the existence of life that's not using the Ena Boxes (i.e. the rats and mutants). |
| 748 | *** Lifeforms that survive in extreme conditions are always a given - Earth has bacteria in underwater volcanoes! Still, Lavos attacking seems to be more damaging than Lavos-meteor - the latter impacts one place while raising enormous dust clouds that result in an ice age, the former strikes everywhere with power akin to a nuclear bomb for each needle. |
| 749 | ** Also Mother Brain is exterminating the humans at geno dome, so the end of the human race was near. |
| 750 | ** Don't forget that once Lavos destroys the world, it spends the next 300-400 years shooting Lavos Spawns out into the galaxy. Stopping Lavos not only saves the planet, but any other planets out there. |
| 751 | ** Lavos isn't just destroying the world in 1999, it's ''feeding'' on it. Meaning whatever it's taking in, be it energy, biomass, souls, is not available anymore to repopulate the planet, it's being converted into Lavos Spawn. That's different from all of the other three destructive appearances of Lavos, where it was either just falling on the planet and causing an extinction level event by sheer force (the same kind of destruction a big enough meteor would have caused, as it's analog to the one that killed the dinosaurs in our world) or being summoned ahead of schedule, and destroying the places where the summoning was done just so it could go back to sleep (both Zeal and Magus's castle in the timeline where we didn't get involved). |
| 752 | ** Mother Brain basically confirms that yes the planet will eventually heal from Lavos's awakening and when it does she'll fill it with robots which is why she's exterminating humanity. However all of history and civilization is basically lost and there's pretty much no way the remaining humans would survive Mother Brain's extermination in the end so that would be the end of humanity. So while it wouldn't technically be the "End of the World" it more or less was as far as the party was concerned. |
| 753 | [[/folder]] |
| 754 | |
| 755 | [[folder: Ayla vs. Magic]] |
| 756 | * Why doesn't Ayla ever comment on the fact that Crono and Co. seem to have God-like powers? Lightning bolts from the sky? Raining fire on their enemies? Healing wounds? Shouldn't she be at least disturbed? |
| 757 | ** She can heal wounds too, as well as summon giant dino tails from nowhere. Considering that during their first meeting she saw the party fall out of a glowing blue vortex in the sky and took it in stride, maybe nothing surprises her. Or maybe she'd seen the Reptites do some pretty amazing things with magic (or whatever equivalent Azala possessed) so it wasn't completely foreign to her experience. |
| 758 | ** Ayla doesn't think like a non-pre-historical human would. Life back then was quite simple: hunt, eat, protect yourself, fight, kill. There was no theology, no notion of divine or magic or anything to that effect. If your companion can make lightning rain down from the heavens, all the better, he's strong and that makes him useful. It doesn't go beyond this because Ayla's reality doesn't either. |
| 759 | [[/folder]] |
| 760 | |
| 761 | [[folder: Masamune: Origins]] |
| 762 | * So, let's talk Masamune here for a second, or more specifically, its origins. As the game stands, it was created when Crono stabbed the Ruby Knife into the Mammon Machine, thereby imbuing it with the power of Lavos and transforming it into the Masamune, which then somehow got passed down for thousands of years until you find it again in 600 AD. This would be one of those stable time loops where effect precedes cause. However, that's not the way time travel works in ''Chrono Trigger'' (if it was, the game would be impossible, as history would be immutable). So something had to have happened in the original timeline (the one Magus flashes back to when he recounts his story about how he and the Gurus ended up scattered throughout time) to create the Masamune, since Crono wasn't around to stab the Ruby Knife into the Mammon Machine, and we see in the flashback that Melchior or anyone else didn't do it either during the original Ocean Palace Disaster. If that's the case, then, then how was it created? |
| 763 | ** Obviously, someone else stabbed the knife into the Mammon machine. It could have been any of the three sages, but my personal theory is that it was Janus himself who stabbed the machine, which would explain why the Masamune is [[HoistByHisOwnPetard so effective against him later on]]. |
| 764 | *** The Masamune is effective against Magus because all magic comes from Lavos's influence one way or another, and he's a dedicated mage. It's the same reason the Ruby Knife is effective against the Mammon Machine. |
| 765 | ** If I recall correctly, Melchior being imprisoned and in need of saving was a consequence of meddling by The Prophet (aka a time-travelling Magus), so presumably he was in good standing to do the deed himself in the original timeline. It's not a stable loop, it's a group of time-travellers undoing the changes made by another time-traveller, resulting in a mostly-similar order of events. |
| 766 | [[/folder]] |
| 767 | |
| 768 | [[folder: "La vos" means "Voodoo Shark" in my language.]] |
| 769 | * Ayla says that she named Lavos after two words in her language, "lav" and "os," meaning "big fire." Umm... what language? No, seriously, what language? We've never heard you mention speaking a different language before. You never do so again. We travel across the globe and all of history and pre-history and never do we get any sign that different languages are a thing in the world of Chrono Trigger. In ''my'' language, Ayla comes from the words "ay" meaning "full of" and "la" meaning "bullcrap." |
| 770 | ** [[FridgeBrilliance "English" (or whatever the main cast speaks) was invented by the Reptites.]] When Ayla first meets the party, she overhears them talking in what she thinks is Reptite language, and responds in kind. "La vos" comes from whatever language her people had before meeting the Reptites. |
| 771 | ** What she actually says is that "la" means "fire" and "vos" means "big". Now consider that, even though Ayla can't use magic, she does have an innate resistance to fire magic (possibly meaning that, if she had been born during or after Zeal she would've been able to wield fire magic, since all magic users have resistance to the element they wield), and it makes sense that "la" (as in Ay''la'') means "fire". So there's at least a little bit more linguistic continuity there (maybe "Ioka" or "Kino" or other prehistoric words also have some meaning outside of just being names). |
| 772 | ** I have a different question. When Ayla finds Crono and Frog passed out, they ask about Lavos, and her response is to wonder what they're talking about. ''One'' scene later, the village to the north is destroyed by a large fire set by the Reptites. Yet she doesn't conclude that they, using a term in her own language, might have been trying to warn her about it? That large fire was more fitting of the term "la-vos" than that falling thing. |
| 773 | [[/folder]] |
| 774 | |
| 775 | [[folder: The Guardians Must Be Lazy]] |
| 776 | * Four hundred years, and ''nobody'' bothered to clean the monsters out of the forest that is the ''only'' route to Guardia Castle? |
| 777 | ** They're the weakest monsters in the entire game; presumably, they pose no threat to even NPC knights. Escorts are needed through the forest, but it's probably not considered overwhelmingly dangerous. |
| 778 | ** Don't forget that they only attack when specifically provoked. And everything else aside, the locals may very well consider them ''native wildlife''. They probably just put up a sign saying "WATCH OUT FOR ROLYS" and called it a day. |
| 779 | [[/folder]] |
| 780 | |
| 781 | [[folder: What happened to the Giant Space Flea?]] |
| 782 | * Before Lavos is defeated, what was it doing between 1999 and 2300 and why can't you find it in the post-apocalyptic wasteland? Did it give birth to its spawn then die like some real-life species? Did it slip back into the core of the planet? Or did it launch itself into outer space to repeat the cycle? |
| 783 | ** Pretty much pure conjecture, but it likely completed it's life cycle, reproduced and died. The presence of it's spawn reinforces that, in my opinion. |
| 784 | [[/folder]] |
| 785 | |
| 786 | [[folder: And the Geno Dome does...what again?]] |
| 787 | * Granted, I get it, it's to give a sense of urgency to take out Mother Brain, but...what does the Geno Dome DO anyways? I mean...killing people can be done on site, so rounding them up is unnecessary. Machines are inorganic, so any meat the people would provide is, frankly, useless. All that leaves is a Matrix-ish plot of making people batteries which just doesn't jive up either. I know, I know, MST3KMantra and all, but I just can't wrap my head around this one. |
| 788 | ** The Matrix plot seems pretty close to what's happening, in a slightly more... permanent manner. If you go to one of the rooms in Geno Dome, you can see humans on a conveyor belt. They go through a machine, you hear a scream, and a glowing thing (looks like one of the tablets you find) comes out the other side. I wouldn't be surprised if whatever's coming out the other side there is being used to power the facility/robots in some manner. Might as well get something out of the killing. At that point, the headscratcher is whether it's more energy-efficient to process the bodies or just kill them. |
| 789 | ** FYI, it was suppose to be called the Genocidome. Now I'm wondering who the hell built it. |
| 790 | *** Evil robots? |
| 791 | ** The only thing I can think of is that the Geno Dome is insurance for Mother Brain. Granted, she has robots and droids that can attack humans, but they may not be ''reliable'' when it comes to actually killing humans. If she rounds them up in her facility for slaughter, that's ensuring their deaths. |
| 792 | ** It's basically harvesting DNA. Some people are being killed on site. The ones who are particularly strong, fast or have an affinity for magic are instead being processed into tabs, which are used to power up the robots. Now, think of how many tabs you've used over the course of the game. |
| 793 | ** That explanation doesn't really pan out since all remaining humans aren't capable of fighting and are in small numbers. They have to use the Enetron to keep themselves alive, and even then they're in a severely weakened state. If it was a few decades after Lavos erupted from the Earth though, there might be a case about harvesting whatever good DNA is left from humans. |
| 794 | [[/folder]] |
| 795 | |
| 796 | [[folder: The Nicest Princess Who Ever Knowingly Committed Genocide]] |
| 797 | * I don't understand why everybody loves Schala so much when she's really a terrible character. I guess she's nice and kind and pretty, but when it comes down to it in the end she's either really stupid or so weak-willed that she has to obey her mother even if it means killing nearly everyone in the ''world'' and destroying her entire home country. When she's first kidnapped by Dalton in full view of the party and Melchior, Dalton prevents the party from intervening by stating that "the life of this woman means nothing to me." Crono and co. don't know if he's bluffing or not, but surely ''Schala'' would know. Either Dalton is bluffing because he knows that Schala is integral to her mother's plans and can't be killed off, or he's not bluffing and would actually kill her off instead of obeying his orders. Now, Dalton's dumb/arrogant enough to actually go through with it, but how would that be worse than Schala going along with him? Either Schala refuses to go with him and Dalton backs off, or Dalton kills her, rendering the Mammon Machine and the entire Ocean Palace useless, saving ([[SpaceCompression presumably]]) millions of lives from Lavos's destruction (and she could probably expect to be killed at that point anyway, ''VideoGame/ChronoCross'' notwithstanding). She ''knew'' this. The gurus ''knew'' what would happen if Lavos awoke. All she needed to do was to not go along with her mothers' plan, and no matter what the queen would threaten (or do) in retaliation, it wouldn't be as bad as Lavos awakening. But, no, she goes with him without a struggle, and later obeys all of Queen Zeal's commands to operate the Mammon Machine and summon Lavos. This means that, despite it being Zeal's plan, Schala is ''directly'' responsible for the deaths or temporal displacements of everyone she cares about, not to mention the destruction of virtually the entire world. So either she's a moron, a closet sociopath, or a doormat, but certainly not somebody to be admired as much as she is. |
| 798 | ** The correct answer is "doormat" and it's actually not touched on how she feels about cooperating with Zeal, interestingly enough. I think the key thing here is that players feel bad about her place in life. Regardless of circumstance, saying 'no' to your mom can be hard to do, especially when she's angry and scary and has complete authority. And throw in the fact that Zeal used to be a normal, loving mother, maybe Schala has some unconscious, naive part of her mind that hopes Zeal will go back to the way she was if she cooperates enough? I don't know if that helps you, but that sounds like an angst fic waiting to be written. Additionally, a lot of sympathy comes from fans of Magus, for the effect she had on him, being the only person who cared about him other than Alfador. And let's face it, you can only root so much for a palette swap cat. |
| 799 | ** "...or Dalton kills her, rendering the Mammon Machine and the entire Ocean Palace useless, saving millions of lives... She ''knew'' this." Asking someone to die for the benefit of others isn't THAT easy. You don't have to be a moron, a closet sociopath, ''or'' a doormat to want to live, regardless of the consequences of doing so. "Schala refuses to go with him and Dalton backs off..." Given that he was already trying ''death threats'', it's fairly dicey to assume he'll give up so easily. |
| 800 | ** Are we ever explicitly told that Schala is the ''only'' person who can power up the Mammon Machine. She's probably the best at it, but do we know that Queen Zeal, who is of the same bloodline and a powerful sorceress, cannot use the pendant enough to bring forth Lavos? More importantly, does ''Schala'' know that? Your scenario could have ended up with Dalton killing Schala, taking the pendant, and the heroes all dying in the Ocean Palace. Perhaps she went along in hopes of performing some last minute heroics... like she actually did. |
| 801 | [[/folder]] |
| 802 | |
| 803 | [[folder: Lavos' Left Bit]] |
| 804 | * The Lavos Core is defeated. It explodes and the time vortex behind it implodes and collapses. The screen fades to white, then to black. During the fade to black, the Left Bit of the Lavos Core (the one that healed the center piece and was healed by magic) appears very clearly on screen in silhouette alongside the cast members. What. Why. |
| 805 | ** SNES graphics glitch, I think? It doesn't happen in the DS version. |
| 806 | [[/folder]] |
| 807 | |
| 808 | [[folder: Why does only Lucca get a personal gate?]] |
| 809 | * Why does only Lucca get a gate that lets her fix something in her past? I'm pretty sure Frog has something he'd want to go back to and change, too. |
| 810 | ** This is just a WMG, but consider this: if the Entity is the planet, then the planet is probably grateful to Robo for reforesting such a large chunk of it and wants to help him out. Robo's only real desire is to serve humans, especially Lucca, since she fixed him and cares about him more than anyone else. The planet picks up on this affection after Robo spends 400 years planting and so on, and so it determines that the way to pay back Robo for what he's done is to grant Lucca her greatest desire. When they camp in the woods, Lucca is thinking about the moment when Lara lost her legs thanks to the fireside conversation they just had. The Entity/planet picks up on this and creates the red gate just for her. Since Frog and Robo aren't really buddies (any more than anyone else in the party anyway), and Frog didn't spend 400 years caring for the planet, then the planet doesn't feel the need to help Frog out in the same way (I'm picturing the Entity/planet as a large consciousness that treats its inhabitants less like individual humans and more like we do our internal bacteria: helpful, but usually not noteworthy in an individual sense. Robo is, of course, the exception, since he spent 400 years improving the planet). |
| 811 | ** As for Frog, not necessarily. If you mean Cyrus, by this point in the game, either Frog has avenged Cyrus (by killing Magus), or his feelings about Cyrus have gotten considerably more complex (by forgiving him). If you mean being a frog, Frog "quite enjoys" being one. |
| 812 | [[/folder]] |
| 813 | |
| 814 | [[folder: Why 2300 AD?]] |
| 815 | * Most of the gates have at least some logic behind them. The 65,000,000 BC gate is when Lavos hit the earth; the 12,000 BC gate is the catastrophe of Zeal; the 600 AD gate is when Magus tried to awaken Lavos and failed; the 1000 AD gate is when Lucca's teleportation experiments opened up the first gate; 1999 is obviously the apocalypse. What's special about 2300 AD, though, as opposed to any other year in the timeline? Nothing particularly special happens on that exact year. If it's the date the planet finally died (which seems like the only real option), why isn't there any indicator of that in-game? |
| 816 | ** Actually there ''is'' a slight indication of this; after retreiving Robo from his 400 years of labor bringing the forest to life, Crono and the gang hypothesise that the gates are the Earth's memories flashing before its eyes. Given that this expression happens when imminent death approaches, 2300 AD may be the Earth's last year(s) living. After defeating Lavos, the gates begin to close since it doesn't erupt from the Earth in 1999 AD and reign destruction upon its surface and as such doesn't have its life flash before its eyes. |
| 817 | *** This is a bit incorrect on the part of the planet itself dying, though; Mother Brain specifically states that eventually the planet will recover (in the same way that our planet would recover after a nuclear winter or other catastrophic event barring its complete destruction). I think it's more accurate to say that The Entity itself is actively helping Lucca right the past in gratitude for her altruism, rather than the planet doing the same. As for the idea of the planet's life flashing before its eyes, it could be using humanity as a proxy for that, as humans ''are'' on their way out in the original timeline. |
| 818 | *** Mother Brain never specifies how the planet will recover however; it is inhospitable to nearly all life and the only reason humans are still around is thanks to the Enertron, which will soon break down as well. It's also heavily implied that Lavos's species ravages planets beyond the point of repair before continuing to the next. Couple that with Mother Brain's plans on making her own nation of metal, and it seems more likely that she means "Lavos will die off eventually and we'll be left to make the husk of a planet into our own." Also, while it's never specifically stated what The Entity is exactly, it's more or less implied to ''be'' the planet itself. |
| 819 | ** [[FridgeBrilliance The Lavos Spawn]]. As the OP said, every era is relevant to Lavos in some way. Its arrival, the destruction of Zeal, Magus's summoning, and the Apocalypse. The relevance of 2300 AD is that the Entity wants the party to witness the final stage of Lavos's life cycle so that they can truly understand the stakes. If they fail, it won't just be their own world that suffers. |
| 820 | [[/folder]] |
| 821 | |
| 822 | [[folder: Doan, Last of the Wild Riders]] |
| 823 | * Er, hang on a second. Doan is an old man in 2300 A.D. An old man that, quote, "used to ride ''[his jetbike]'' when he was younger." Through a dystopian wasteland caused by Lavos 301 years ago. I'm sorry, what? Either the world wasn't in nearly as bad shape in the 2200s, or there was some ''Film/MadMax''-esque stuff going on back then. |
| 824 | ** Probably a mix of both. We never get a real glimpse of how things were between the day of Lavos and the day we arrive in the future, but humanity definitely wouldn't have been able to survive 300 years under those specific conditions we see, so things should have been at least a little bit better before. |
| 825 | *** He may also simply have used it to search the landscape for supplies or for other groups of survivors - even if there were no survivors at the other domes, there would have been supplies, spare parts, and so on, which would be reason enough for someone to visit them. |
| 826 | [[/folder]] |
| 827 | |
| 828 | [[folder: Why is everyone so surprised to see the Reptites?]] |
| 829 | * The Green Ambler at the Millennial Fair is either a Reptite or in a Reptite costume, which means A) their appearance is familiar to ''someone'', and more importantly, B) Crono's watched him run around a goddamn track dozens of times by now. |
| 830 | ** Probably the latter, a Reptite costume. Reptites to Crono in 1000 A.D. are like ancient dinosaurs to us now; we know they existed and we have some idea of what they looked like, but we know that such a creature no longer exists and so it isn't much of a threat to us when we see a person wearing a dinosaur costume. Seeing the real deal on the other hand is a whole different ballpark, which is exactly why Crono and the gang are surprised when they see ''real'' Reptites in 65 million B.C. |
| 831 | ** It's the way they're surprised. It's not that they're surprised to see real dinosaurs, it's that the way they react (Marle: "Wh... what are those?" Lucca: "They're all green and scaly!"), it's like they have no idea what a dinosaur even is. Despite having seen one. A lot. |
| 832 | [[/folder]] |
| 833 | |
| 834 | [[folder: Lavos' Apocalypse]] |
| 835 | * I know that we wouldn't have much of a video game save-the-world plot without it, but why does Lavos even need to destroy the world in 1999? He's copied all of the DNA that he want and reproduced. Did he want to destroy all life to prevent competition for his spawn, which might encounter space travelers from the Planet in the future? It would be understandable if he actually needed to devour a host planet's life force or resources to survive and reproduce, but there is zero evidence that he needs either. |
| 836 | ** The likely answer is that there is indeed no need. It's possible that Lavos lacks the capacity to understand what he's doing is globally destructive or that it's not in his best interest, much like an animal; it doesn't know that a human may have no intention to harm even if that human is there to help, it will just attack out of pure instinct and self-defense. Lavos may have similarly viewed civilization on the surface as a threat and attacked instinctively. |
| 837 | ** Lavos doesn't begin reproducing until after the apocalypse. Presumably killing most life on the planet was a necessary step for that part of its development cycle. Like a virus infecting a cell, it infects a planet, coexists with it for a bit, but eventually has to destroy the host to gather the resources to multiply itself. |
| 838 | [[/folder]] |
| 839 | |
| 840 | [[folder: Fighting on board the Blackbird]] |
| 841 | * Normally, only Ayla can fight on the Blackbird, but why? While Robo is reliant on his technology so he may have been stripped of it, all the others have magic. They should be able to throw around stuff like Ice and Fire attacks alongside Ayla's attacks. |
| 842 | ** The real answer is simply GameplayAndStorySegregation. There probably wasn't enough memory/time/a good enough reason to reprogram the entire battle system just for a few fights so that characters could use magic without their weapons, especially since many of, say, Frog's techs also use his weapon, so they'd have to single them out in the tech list. But it does beg the question: why ''can't'' Robo also fight? He can still operate perfectly normally outside of combat. Did they literally ''rip out his hands'' (and if so, why are they still on his sprite)? |
| 843 | ** In Akira Toriyama's official art, Robo has the empty hole on his left arm. Most of the art of his weapons seems to depict them as left-handed or fitting on the left side of his body. My theory is that Robo's design allows him to switch weapon arms as needed, and removing them doesn't seem to harm him. He isn't an effective fighter without them, though, just like the rest of the party except for Ayla. |
| 844 | [[/folder]] |
| 845 | |
| 846 | [[folder: Why doesn't Lucca believe in the supernatural?]] |
| 847 | * If Lucca sees Robo hold up the Masamune after he and Melchior fix it, she'll say that it may force her to believe in the supernatural. Why doesn't she believe in it after all the magical things she's already seen? It makes sense for her to not believe in the supernatural at the start of the game, but by the time the Masamune is fixed Lucca will have seen Yakra's transformations, probably seen Heckran's and Ozzie's magic, probably seen Masa and Mune, and gotten her own magical powers from Spekkio. Crono, Marle and Lucca herself are all living proof that the supernatural is real in the Chrono universe, so it's baffling that Lucca doesn't believe in it after that. If anything, it makes her look like a FlatEarthAtheist. |
| 848 | ** I will check later for the [[ScienceMArchesOn appropriate trope]], but in your defense this is technically a real FourthWall breaker, and an excellent observation. I say it's a real FourthWall breaker because I doubt this can be answered without asking the characters themselves. Assuming magic abilities are something the characters are born with (also assuming Lucca takes monster magic . . . and wait, monster existence as a natural phenomena), Lucca can assume there is a scientific explanation for these things that she just hasn't understood yet. Lucca's character would never see [[ScienceIsWrong science be turned on it's head]]. That's how I read it anyway, like she understands it certainly appears supernatural but there certainly is a scientific explanation . . . (this was later, after some searching) AW! You know what? [[SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness Perfect Trope]] |
| 849 | ** What's funny about this is that Lucca not believing in the supernatural was a completely [[LostInTranslation localization-only]] thing. In the Japanese version, all she says is that the Granleon (Masamune) has an "unknown energy" that she wants to look further into. This could easily refer to some of the things she does later in the game, using extremely rare materials and the like, or it could just be Lucca showing her always-curious nature.\ |
| 850 | [-Also of note, getting Lucca to even ''say'' her line requires a little bit of party-swapping trickery during the Masamune event at Melchior's. So, kudos to the original troper for finding this dialogue!-] |
| 851 | [[/folder]] |
| 852 | |
| 853 | [[folder: Why won't Magus uncurse Frog?]] |
| 854 | * Assuming he joins, I mean? Yes, I get that he's [[TokenEvilTeammate no angel]] and mostly just joining to save his own hide, but you'd think he'd at least have the decency to remove the curse if they're going to have to work together. |
| 855 | ** It ends up happening in a couple of the main endings, only if Magus is recruited. Since he doesn't appear to be present for the transformation, it's likely Magus told Glenn how to break the curse himself. As for why he didn't get it removed sooner; perhaps he chose not to get the curse removed until after Lavos was defeated, as he mentions in Magus's Lair that his achievements thus far are thanks to his transformation. |
| 856 | ** It is quite likely that the curse [[CursedWithAwesome actually makes Frog stronger]] - many of his attacks and techniques are based on it (almost all of them, if you assume his water magic affinity also comes from the curse.) While he wants to be human again, it's reasonable that he'd put it off until the crisis is dealt with. (And of course from a Doylist perspective they weren't going to make a whole second set of battle sprites and a second character design for him.) |
| 857 | [[/folder]] |
| 858 | |
| 859 | [[folder: Lavos' world wrecking attack]] |
| 860 | * Why doesn't Lavos [[WhyDontYouJustShootHim use the world destroying "rain of spikes" spell we see him use to destroy the world in the video]] when the team comes to fight him in 1999? He ''does'' have some kind of "spine rain" attack, but it's obviously far less powerful than the one in the video, as it only affects a small area and would presumably OneHitKO the entire team if it's powerful enough reduce civilizations to ruins. Is this just a massive case of CutscenePowerToTheMax or what? |
| 861 | ** He probably doesn't want to use the huge civilization-ending attack on the party that's right in front of his nose, lest he gets caught in the blast. That or he can't aim it well; like asking the Death Star to aim its huge laser at one X-Wing, sometimes the huge attacks can't hit the small targets. |
| 862 | * If that's the case, why does he just sit there after launching his spikes in the video and hope none will land on him? Indeed, if you watch the video [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B-JRDsSqec here]] some appear to land right on him, implying he's in no danger. |
| 863 | ** After canonically using that attack, Lavos immediately retreats underground both times. It probably spends all of its energy and leaves it vulnerable, a risk not worth taking when there are some guys trying to kill it who might manage to survive the attack somehow. |
| 864 | [[/folder]] |
| 865 | |
| 866 | [[folder: Why The Urgency?]] |
| 867 | * It's already been asked and answered why the heroes would want to save the world in 1999 even though they would be long dead, but as a corollary I am wondering: why they decide they have to stop Lavos as soon as they see the video? Why not spend, say, 5 or 10 years training in 1000 ad so one will be more powerful and more likely to win against Lavos? |
| 868 | ** On a super deep level, it was breaking the FourthWall . Arriving in the decimated future to view proof of Lavos' actions stirs feelings of legitimacy and resolve immediately with the audience, and, therefore, as long as the heroes don't just hang their heads in "Game Over" it's all very easy to follow . . .PLUS! they are unlikely to hang their heads because time travel has been established, and [[CharacterDevelopment they just aren't the types now.]] A less intrusive method would have been to reveal Lavos' purpose/intentions in the BC era. Instead of deciding to face Lavos directly, there might possibly have been a series of alternate offensives at it, before it gained full power. [[spoiler: Maybe even providing a meeting paradox for events in Chrono Cross in the Sea of Eden]]. Now that I think about it, the game could have gone in exactly the same way, only to have added more angst to all the alternate offensives ultimately failing and still following CT as it actually went. |
| 869 | ** I don't think the party started with the idea of "Let's defeat Lavos right now!" else they would've jumped into the bucket as soon as they reached the End of Time. Lucca's first idea was "Let's go back to our own time and do some research," presumably so they could formulate an attack plan that potentially could've taken years to prep for. It was just when they erroneously thought that Magus had created Lavos that they figured they could nip the problem in the bud in 600 AD with the help of Frog (and maybe the Guardian army), and events kinda spiraled out of control from there. The urgency in the plot was less "let's grind up our skills until we're strong enough to defeat Lavos" and more "Let's defeat Magus!" and then "Let's save Ayla's village from the Reptites!" and then "Let's figure out what the heck is going on in 12000 AD!" and then "Let's save Melchior!" and so on. It isn't until after Crono's death and possible resurrection that anybody even considers taking Lavos in a head-on fight, and they've faced so many difficult obstacles by that point that they probably didn't think they needed any more prep time. |
| 870 | *** Wait, wouldn't the fact that Chrono died in one hit indicate that they ''for sure'' need more prep time? |
| 871 | *** Which is what the endgame sidequests exist for, equipping the characters with legendary items to make the odds more in their favour, as well as gaining more power. |
| 872 | *** In addition to the above, all portals aside from the one leading to 1999 run on SanDimasTime, exactly so the tension is preserved for these story progression landmarks. By the time the party decides to take on Lavos, they have concluded that they are now strong enough, and seeing how you CAN beat Lavos, they're right. |
| 873 | ** There's simply no way Magus is willing to wait another five or ten years to fight Lavos. He might be willing to wait however long he travels with the party, since he needs to recover his own powers and acquire his own legendary equipment, but he's so obsessed with revenge that he'd probably kill anyone who suggested training another few years. |
| 874 | [[/folder]] |
| 875 | |
| 876 | [[folder: Life still seem sentient in 2300AD.]] |
| 877 | * I'm surprised that no one asked this yet, or probably overlooked, but the question is: after nearly all plant life has died in 1999 AD, how is it that, in 2300AD, the atmosphere is still ''breathable''? One of the things I've learned in Biology class is when there are plants and sunshine, the plants convert [=CO2=] and some other chemical (I forgot exactly what it is, sorry) into glucose and breathable oxygen. But since no plant life had existed in 300 years, you'd think that most, if not all, inhabitants in 2300AD would've also suffered from suffocation, coughing like smokers and those inflicted with diseases like lung cancer. |
| 878 | ** ''Might'' be forced to {{handwave}} that one - future technology and all that. |
| 879 | ** Actually, no, this is realistic. There is a ''lot'' of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere at any given time. If all the plants died, and only a tiny percentage of animals survived, it is reasonable that they could have enough oxygen left lingering around to breathe for 300 years without running out. Cold and starvation would be much more serious threats and would kill off enough creatures to preserve the oxygen for the tiny number of humans who could live off of stored imperishable food. |
| 880 | ** There's probably plankton in the ocean that is still around producing oxygen. As much as 50-''80%'' of the earth's oxygen comes from the ocean. |
| 881 | ** It's established that Lavos cultivates life on planets. So the obvious explanation is that Lavos ensured there was still oxygen, for reasons only known to Lavos. |
| 882 | [[/folder]] |
| 883 | |
| 884 | [[folder: Masamune: IRL Origins]] |
| 885 | * Maybe I'm thinking too hard about it, but why is a ''European''-style sword named after a well-known ''Japanese'' weapon maker? It would be like if a katana were named "Excalibur" - it makes it seem like Square were treating their Japanese audience [[ViewersAreMorons like idiots that don't know about other cultures, even made-up ones]], and frankly I'm surprised Ted Woolsey DIDN'T change this in localization. |
| 886 | ** Woolsey ''did'' change it. In Japanese the sword is called Grandleon, no relation to the name Masamune at all. As for why he did it, it was probably a reference to the weapon's history in FinalFantasy, not anything to do with the real life origins of the name. |
| 887 | [[/folder]] |
| 888 | |
| 889 | [[folder: No Family Heirloom]] |
| 890 | * So when you return to 1000 AD, the king is on trial for selling the Raindow Shell. He claims ignornace of this, saying that no family heirloom (Raindow Shell) doesn't exist. But why? I can understand if knowledge of the shell has been lost to the years but there is an entrance to the room of the shell on the first floor of Guardia. How could he not know it exists? Especically since the shell and the entrance has existed for 400 years because the shell was given in 600 AD and the trial happens in 1000 AD. |
| 891 | ** Historical cultural relics like letters, sheet music and even entire movie reels that were once considered LostForever have been found everywhere from archives to attics by people who accidentally stumble onto them. Entire rooms, underground passages and even buildings like subway stations have been forgotten and then later discovered by accident. The Literature/SherlockHolmes stories also mention various large mansions that are now only partly used by the residents, who seal off or ignore the rest of the place. It's entirely possible that knowledge of the shell was lost, and the basement where the shell is kept was sealed off and mostly forgotten. When the Chancellor found Leene's document instructing that the shell be revealed at the Millennial Fair, he realized he had the perfect way to depose King Guardia and seize the throne. |
| 892 | [[/folder]] |
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