Video Game / Crimson Echoes

The cogs of fate turn once more...

"The Dream of Zeal is alive!"

Sargon (to Melchior and Belthasar)

Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes is a Fan Sequel to Chrono Trigger, taking place before Chrono Cross. Through a series of fateful events, its formal release to the public in May 2009 after five years of development was cancelled when the developers reported that Square Enix supposedly sent them a Cease and Desist letter.

Though the project was cancelled under fear of litigation, the incident led to massive backlash in three forms, one consisting of fans of both the series and the project railing on Square Enix for shutting down the project, another consisting of skeptical fans thinking the whole thing was a publicity stunt for attention (in particular, noting inconsistencies with actual C&Ds sent by Square Enix and the plethora of non-C&D'd projects based on Square Enix properties), and a third consisting of copyright-supportive fans and legal brains railing against the modders for using Square Enix's stuff in the project. It generated significant coverage in high-profile gaming blogs that led to the mod getting notice from Slashdot and Google News.

Eventually, a months-old and seriously-buggy alpha was leaked in late May and spread virally online and in file-sharing, and then a comprehensive playthrough video of the entire 98% complete beta version of the game was uploaded in many 10-minute segments on YouTube. A copy of a beta version that was 95% complete^note (Its completion percentage was confirmed by Flames Of Eternity developer "Giro" - who used it for the FoE project from then on.) was leaked to filesharing sites and Reddit on January 17, 2011.

A different team started an alternate project consisting in modifying Crimson Echoes, with a slightly different story and events. The project is named Chrono Trigger: Flames of Eternity and has the tagline "The Rage of the Ages burns for Eternity...". You can find a copy of it here.

If a Trope already applies to Chrono Trigger proper, it probably shouldn't be duplicated here.

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Crimson Echoes provides examples of the following tropes:

• Accidental Misnaming: As a result of some unclear change during the five-year Time Skip, Glenn no longer likes being called Frog, and thus his default name is changed to "Glenn" to reflect this. Of course, since Hello, [Insert Name Here] is in effect, you could rename him "Frog" anyway, and set up the following:
  [party1]: Frog!^note [party1] refers to the first person, or leader, of the party. In FaustWolf's playthrough, it was Crono.
  *cue "Frog's Theme" as the player confirms Glenn's in-game name as "Frog"]
  Frog: Don't call me that! My name is Frog!
• Accidental Murder: Schala gets hit with this in Magus' Flame Trial, but it may or may not be an illusion. Prior to this, the Frozen Flame sent the real Schala to the Darkness Beyond Time to create the Dream/Time Devourer.
• Action Girl: Ayla, again. This time with bigger, badder techs!
• Action Mom: Ayla gave birth to a kid during the Time Skip, a quiet kid named Noah.
  • In Flames Of Eternity, since Kino was not killed off, a second kid is added, named Lea, who invents the game of Backgammon.
• Actually a Doombot: Kasmir has survived his many years as Fiendlord by using illusions of his image instead of showing up himself. It's not until the penultimate battle of the game that he's finally fought in person and put down once and for all.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: During various points in the game, the audience perspective shifts between the separated party members.
• Artifact of Doom: The Frozen Flame, obviously. Lots, and lots, and looooots of DOOM.
• Author Tract: King Zeal is said to be one, calling out the party for their alleged misuse of Time Travel to change history, revealing the Awful Truth the audience learned in Chrono Cross: each timeline nullified by a change to history is shunted into the Darkness Beyond Time and slowly ceases to exist, while the inhabitants are left ignorantly wondering what has happened to their world.
• Back from the Dead: Schala is revived at the very beginning. At the end, Magus catches King Zeal as he falls out of the Darkness Beyond Time after the Final Boss Battle and heals/revives him.
• Badass Army: The Vanguard, started by the equally as badass Glenn.
• Badass Boast: Magus proclaims his determination with "Death... is nothing... to the Reaper!" as he succumbs to the cold and his poorly-treated injuries from over five years of searching for Schala on his own.
• Badass Normal: Sometimes it seems like Agent 12/86 is getting more done than the player's party.
• Bad Future: Happens twice. First the Vanguard Timeline, because the Masamune never became a Hero's sword; then the Reptite Timeline, because Lavos was destroyed in Prehistory and the Frozen Flame resonated with the Dragon Tooth in 1 Million B.C. And it's telling that King Zeal is responsible for both.
• Big Bad: Unlike Trigger and Cross, it's not Lavos, but rather King Zeal. Unlike the rest of his family, he's even able to control Lavos... probably.
• Blatant Lies: The members of Project Xamoltan claim to observe historical events and never interfere, contrasting them with our heroes. However, the very first time we see a Xamoltan, he's directly participating in and interfering with a historical event wiping out humanity and sentencing Marle to death. Of course nobody from the current timeline is aware of this, and since it's never brought up again it may just be a Plot Hole.
• Breather Episode: The party in prehistory, which comes after the restoration of the original timeline after its swapping with the Reptite one. However, another Wham Episode follows...
• But Thou Must!: Most of the time the player is offered a choice of what to do, the end result is the same regardless of what he picks.
  • When asked to save Ayla or attack the Big Bad, the hero will actually refuse one of the choices and pick the other anyway.
  • Subverted in the Mystic-Porre conflict in the Middle Ages: whichever of the three options Glenn chooses (support the Mystics, support the Porreans, or remain neutral) will have a direct and obvious effect on the game's future, while having more immediate pros and cons as well.
  • There's also a particular case in a side quest: you can either allow Cedric to murder a good man so he can annex Choras into Guardia, or if you intervene, Agent 12/86 refuses to let you return to Chronopolis until you fix the timeline by poisoning that same good man.

• Catchphrase: If you watch the YouTube videos, whenever something shows up incomplete or erroneous, one of the developers will usually have a note pop up: "Uh... 2%!" Sadly no longer the case with YouTube's annotations having been removed.
• Character Development: All the main characters, even freaking LAVOS, get this.
• Character Focus: Each playable character gets at least one chapter in the spotlight, during which they are the Hero You Can't Drop. Developer notes indicate that they didn't want anyone to be specifically considered the main character. (In pursuit of that, they even went so far as to avert Crono's silent protagonist habits.)
• Continuity Porn: To the original game, both sequels, and as of Flames of Eternity, the DS version.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to Trigger, this game is MUCH darker. Partly the result of Grey-and-Gray Morality.
• Deader than Dead: Anyone sent to the Darkness Beyond Time. Like King Guardia XXXIII. Schala is sent there, but survives.
• Deadpan Snarker: In game, many characters, most notably Crono, Lucca, and Magus. In real life, most of the editing team, to the point where it seems like they're almost MST3King FaustWolf's playthrough of the beta.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Kasmir's reason for helping Zeal in the Darkness Beyond Time.
  Kasmir: I have no place in time anymore. This feels productive.
• Determinator: King Zeal. And it runs in the family, since Magus also qualifies.
• Deus ex Machina: Literal example. The Entity, using Crono as a vessel after his mishap in the Dreamtime, seals the Sun Stone so that its power can't be used to restore Zeal.
• Developer Room: The Crimson Echoes staff from the Chrono Compendium have their own special room, and make individual cameos throughout the game.
• The Dragon: Dalton is fished out of the Dimensional Vortex and gets to make good on his threat to use Porre to destroy Guardia. Later, Kasmir takes over this role, especially after Dalton dies.
  • Dragon with an Agenda: That's not to say Dalton doesn't have his own endgame in mind, by the way. He wants a land to rule, and if he can't rule post-Zeal Antiquity, he'll settle for Porre in the Present.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Four characters from Chrono Cross appear in the Present:
  • Norris is revealed to have a brother, William Ishito, who mentions joining Porre's "Black Wind" unit to keep an eye on what Porre is up to after the lab is destroyed.
  • In the Choras Inn in the Present, we see a young Toma XIV trying to get a freaking drink since he's too young to know alcohol's bad for you, only for the barkeep to offer him exclusively non-alcoholic soft drinks.
  • Luccia and her brother, who created Grobyc, are the children of the head researchers of the Porrean lab where Toma XIII and Coyopa are imprisoned. The parents are killed when the lab goes boom.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: The disregard practically everyone has for timelines that are not their own. This is eventually addressed as a serious ethical question.
• Fan Interquel: Takes place between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, in 1005 A.D. the year Guardia fell.
• Flanderization:
  • Possibly with Magus, whose only purpose in life and in breathing is to find Schala, and even when she's found he won't stop obsessing over her. Some people may find his obsession over Schala... unsettling.
  • Inverted with Ayla, as she actually developed a personality.
• Foil: The Xamoltan, a trio of Reptite time-travelers from an alternate timeline, serve as foils to Crono and friends. Especially their desire to only go back in time to observe, study, chronicle, and learn, while Crono's party does so specifically to meddle and attempt to "improve" the future of the timeline.
• Foregone Conclusion: If you've played Chrono Cross, you may already be aware of a lot of the plot twists that will eventually come around, such as Guardia's fall or the existence of the Reptite Timeline. The fact that the game manages to bring these events about, and not come off as a rehash, is part of its appeal.
• Future Imperfect:
  • Toma is not happy to find out his own museum got its information so cringingly wrong.
  • Happens twice in the Cedric sections in 1 A.D. When Marle meets Cedric for the first time, he's just a weak, scrappy leader, compared to the powerful founder of Guardia that she learned about in history class. Subverted in that the timeline she finds him in has been corrupted by the reinsertion of the Reptites, so he's trying to defend a dying human race opposed to conquering the known world. After the Reptite timeline is destroyed, and the original timeline restored, her second time meeting him, she isn't too pleased to learn he's actually a bloodthirsty conqueror, instead of the hero history claimed he was, or that his feud with Porre was because Porre's clan thought he was taking things too far.
• Generation Xerox: Toma from the Middle Ages and Toma XIII in the Present. Why this carries over from Trigger is that Toma XIII is promoted from interesting detail to plot coupon, as Toma I helps save his descendant from the Porre lab.
• God Save Us from the Monarch!
  • King Alphard Zeal, father of Magus and Schala, tries to (A) restore Zeal in Antiquity, which would Ret-Gone Guardia, (B) kill Lavos in Prehistory in revenge for its destruction of Zeal, which would also be Ret-Gone'd alongside Guardia since it was because of Lavos that the people of Zeal gained magic in the first place, and (C) get revenge on the party for killing his wife the Queen, even though they already killed Lavos in 1999 A.D., which Alphard felt was too little, too late. It's implied he may be under Lavos' influence via the Frozen Flame, to some degree of awareness of this plight, but either doesn't care or underestimates how much control Lavos might be having on his logic and actions.
  • Marle's Flame Trial shows her future as a terrible monarch obsessed with blaming Porre for her father's death ^note (The real murderer was King Zeal. Plus, Belthasar mentions that His Grace was gonna be dead soon anyway, and in her grief that version of Marle could have convinced herself that Porre somehow killed him.) and letting Guardia slip into ruin in the meanwhile. The game is deliberately vague as to whether this is an accurate prediction of Marle's future, or just a Mind Screw by the Frozen Flame. But, in any case, it probably drove Marle to relinquish Guardia's throne without protesting much. She may have thought that, if it was really her future, she was still in time to change it and avoid even worse suffering to her people.
• Good Morning, Crono: Par for the course, as it's Marle waking up Crono so they can attend a meeting with Porrean delegates at Guardia Castle.
• Grand Theft Me: After Crono is thrown into the planet's primordial energies in the Dreamtime, The Entity eventually uses him as a vessel via these energies, which last long enough for it to seal the Sun Stone's power before fading, ceding control back to Crono. Word of God says this is the in-universe reason why Crono can now talk.
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: The second half of the game is drowning in it. There is a distinct vibe of "nobody is right here, even if we think we're trying to do the right thing". King Zeal calls out the party on it in a long-winded Author Tract shortly before the final battles, and even the creators admit some of them would have sided with King Zeal over Crono and the gang. Aaaaand then there's DALTON...
• Heroic Mime: Averted, as (unlike in Chrono Trigger) the hero Crono does speak in this game. Quite a lot.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Once Toma Levine comes to Chronopolis and goes all What Does This Button Do? on everything, most of the staff becomes nowhere to be seen, citing "sudden headaches".
• Level Grinding: Kind of a necessity at the beginning, especially during the "Magus Chasing Dalton" arc, as the first boss is surprisingly tough if you don't. Luckily it's only a fifteen-second walk between the Beast Forest and a free HP/MP full restore and an item shop. It gets better quickly, though.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: When Marle is captured by the Reptites, she's put in the prison beneath Dinopolis and left to rot. When Crono finds her skeletal remains over 1,000 years later he goes berserk, killing two (innocent!) Reptites in his grieving rage. He and his friends then go back and prevent it all from happening.
  • This scene is changed in Flames of Eternity to Crono managing to hold himself back and roar at the innocent Reptites to Get Out!
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: King Zeal and Sargon hold this belief about Zeal, with King Zeal wanting to restore it due to finding Guardia lacking, and Sargon, upon receiving the Sun Stone and instructions from King Zeal, spouts this line when he is opposed by the Gurus and the party, the latter half of which is the page quote.
  Sargon: When a citizen of Zeal is faced with trying something majestic or playing it safe, we choose to try. The Dream of Zeal is alive!
• MacGuffin: The Dragon Tooth. The PCs are sent to track it down and steal it to power Chronopolis in place of the weaker Dreamstone and before that, the stolen Frozen Flame, but other than being a power source and "Reptite artifact" it never really does anything. It's even destroyed for a time, due to a temporal mishap, though this gets Retconned off-screen shortly after; the developers admit when they wrote the script for its destruction they had forgotten the reason the party went after it in the first place was to find a new power source for Chronopolis, and Hand Waved Agent 12 tracking it down and saving it from destruction off-panel.
  • In Flames of Eternity, the issue is given a better resolution by showing Agent 86 handing over the Dragon Tooth to Belthasar in the party's presence.
• Master of Illusion: Kasmir. Glenn has trouble taking him down because most of the times he's fought him it's been a fake. This even extends to the final fight against Kasmir, when he changes the background to scrolling clouds.
• Mind Screw: The Flame Trials. They are all deliberately vague, according to the developers, and it's left up to player interpretation as to whether they're accurate portrayals of the various characters' situations or merely illusions of their fears and worries conjured by the Frozen Flame to mess with their heads. Ayla's Flame Trial averts this, as she's the only one in the party with enough clarity of heart/mind to see through the illusions.
• Missing Main Character: The fangame forces you to fight solo with Marle for a single chapter. The developers admitted that Marle was not intended to be a solo character.
• Mood Whiplash: The Fall of Guardia. Also, the Reptite Timeline flips the game's previously upbeat nature upside-down.
• Mr. Exposition: Belthasar and Mother Brain/FATE.
• The Nothing After Death: The Darkness Beyond Time. Even a Chrono Trigger cannot resurrect those sent there.
  King Zeal: To the Darkness Beyond Time. Forever Zero, Eternally Null. Entire possibilities, subsumed into a temporal Netherworld.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero
  • Marle nearly allows what is to become Guardia to be conquered by a corrupted Antaeus Porre when her shout, meant to warn Cedric of a surprise attack, ended up distracting him and allowing Antaeus to knock out Cedric and steal the Frozen Flame.
  • King Zeal calls out the party for constantly changing history left and right when they were fighting Lavos in Trigger, since each annulled timeline was sent to the Darkness Beyond Time. Lavos himself does it to Crono at the end of Crono's Flame Trial.
  • Agent 12/86 blocks access to the Gate leading back to Chronopolis if the party prevents Cedric's murder of Cambyses Choras, as history was changed to have a Choras-run kingdom instead of the Guardia they know. In order to return, they have to poison Cambyses' drink.
• One-Winged Angel:
  • Antaeus Porre gains one when he steals the Frozen Flame from Cedric, which Marle duels to ensure Guardia is still founded.
    Antaeus: A thousand fires have sparked within my mind! I see everything! I know all! And I know this — you must perish!
  • King Zeal takes advantage of his fated merger with Lavos to turn it into a Fusion Dance instead, with him in full control, as the Dream Lord.
• One-Woman Wail: The song played during the battle with Antaeus Porre features this.
• Optional Boss: In Flames of Eternity. you can fight at certain points in time through hidden portals against foes from the original and its updated rerelease for the DS. And yes, you can actually fight Lavos as the Dream Devourer after the final fight. He is found at the Leene Square just like in the New Game Plus of the original game, but not as strong from the DS rerelease
• Parental Abandonment: Crono's father is killed in the Fanon backstory. Schala and Janus' father was taken by Belthasar, who also faked the death of the latter as he remembered it in order to prevent undesirable changes in the timeline.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • The first area of Huacan Factory with the Acids and Alkalines. Nerfed quite a bit in the 98% beta, but left intact in the alpha and subsequent rebuilds.
  • Modnar Forest, a side area near the end of the game populated with a unique element to the Chrono series... random encounters. The enemies there aren't too hard and they give on the order of 4000-6500 experience points per battle, a great way to level up for the final dungeon.
• People Jars: Magus, when captured by Dalton. He escapes when the party meets King Zeal in the Ocean Palace ruins.
• Random Encounter: In Modnar Forest only. If you pay attention, you'll notice they aren't really random but triggered by a timer — in fact, you can even stand still after one of these fights and you'll get into another one after a little while. Still, one of the many impressive feats of additional coding in the game.
• Ret-Gone: At one point, all of humanity is driven extinct by the emergence of a new parallel timeline.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Existence: Time Traveler's Immunity states that anyone who time travels is fated to arrive even if their departure is overwritten, and the more you time travel, the more TTI you have. In Trigger this was why Crono and Lucca are still able to both remember that Queen Leene was supposed to be rescued and that Marle existed, as well as act to restore history. In Crimson Echoes this is why Sorin shows up in the Reptite Timeline despite the timeline being rewritten.
• San Dimas Time: Hand Waved by stating that the stationary Time Gates travel forward through time at the speed of the normal passage of time. And if someone goes back in time to a year that the Gates don't "currently" exist in (even if they existed there when the characters were five years younger), Gates cannot be found. This has the effect of ensuring that events in all Gate-connected timelines are happening at a concurrent speed from and equal interval to one another, so that time actually elapses while time travelers are away for the same duration as other people wait for them. This form of San Dimas Time is only averted using a Time Egg (one was originally used to save Crono in Chrono Trigger). Lucca and Belthasar can make imperfect semi-stable Time Eggs, but only Gaspar can make perfectly stable ones.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Expect to die. A lot. Less in Flames of Eternity, but the enemies are still strong.
• Shout-Out:
  • Early in the game, a woman in Medina Square sings the opening lyrics from "And Forever", the ending music of the anime The Big O. She later belts out (in Japanese) "Kaze wa Mirari ni Fuku", the ending theme to Trigun.
  • In his last moments, Dalton says one of Grimmjow's greatest lines.

• The chapters regarding the Reptite Timeline, where Lavos was eradicated in Prehistory and humanity never rose to power with magic or technology, thus resulting in a Dinotopian civilization centered around reverence of the power of Nature are appropriately entitled "An Emerald Dream".
• And there are loads more references to Naruto, Bleach and Gurren Lagann in the game as well, as these three inspired some pieces of ZeaLitYs own beliefs, like Might Guy's "Springtime of Youth" catch phrase, quoted by the Mistress Of Kitchens in the Present.

• Sketchy Successor: King Zeal believes Guardia to be this to his own kingdom, ranting to Melchior that it lacked the ambition that defined Zeal's greatness, even going so far as to demonize such ambition as hubris and considering the Fall Of Zeal to be Laser-Guided Karma. This is why he decides to restore Zeal in Antiquity by giving the Sun Stone to Sargon with some instructions.
• Side Tracked By The Golden Saucer: The Colosseum in 2305 A.D. and Choras Casino in 1005 A.D.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In Chrono Cross, Crono and Marle were implied to have been killed when Guardia fell. In this game, Guardia still falls but Marle doesn't try to fight back for the throne, instead going with Crono into the Dreamtime to help deal with the aftermath of King Zeal's meddling. Lucca, though, stays behind, as her fate was sealed in Cross.
• Sudden Interquel Death Syndrome: Kino. Apparently this was so the creators could tease a Glenn/Ayla pairing.
  • Averted in Flames of Eternity, probably because killing him off was rather pointless. In return, he and Ayla get an extra kid named Lea who invents the game of Backgammon.
• Suddenly Voiced: Justified as the role of Main Character is not with one person this time, Crono finally gets his own lines. Ironically, this is also Justified in-story with how the Big Bad's secondary plot is quickly foiled.
• Technicolor Science: The Vision Serpent, in an attempt to recreate the hologram effect that Mother Brain had in Trigger.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Mystic Knights. After a game of having their butts kicked by the heroes, Ozzie, Slash, and Flea pull themselves together and kick a lot of butt in their reappearance, Justifying their Optional Boss status in Cross.
• Tricked Out Time: How King Zeal is still alive even though his one(!) mention in Chrono Trigger stated he was dead. Belthasar went back and recreated his death with the obvious exception of King Zeal ACTUALLY being dead. Considering King Zeal's Face–Heel Turn afterward, one can't help but think this was a TERRIBLE idea.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Lucca, shown during the Flame Trial.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Belthasar in King Zeal becoming the threat he is in this story.
  • Marle nearly avoids accidentally becoming this by taking down Antaeus Porre herself and allowing Cedric to take credit for it after her shout ended up distracting him and causing Antaeus to knock him out and steal the Frozen Flame.
  • In a twist, Glenn is this by founding the Vanguard, which becomes corrupted by its mission to preserve order. Even worse, it Foreshadows some pretty nasty revelations about Belthasar in the process.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: But he was so strong he didn't really need to. King Zeal is fought three times through the game: a Hopeless Boss Fight at the beginning, an optional fight that doesn't count plotwise later, and phase one of the final battle with the same stats each time. Of course, he gets a One-Winged Angel form, too.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Belthasar. From the point at which the party (plus Schala, minus Ayla) is finally fully collected to Chronopolis, you see the building of the insane Gambit Pileup that is Chrono Cross with his relentless desire to "fix" everything that goes wrong in the timeline, regardless of the consequences. This is Lampshaded both by Melchior in his everyday conversation — "Keep an eye on him, he's under a lot of stress lately" — and later when the group meets Gaspar.
  • A case could also be made for King Zeal. He genuinely wants to restore the kingdom he ruled in Antiquity, but is too vengeful against both Lavos for destroying it in the first place, and the party for killing his wife, and unimpressed with both Guardia, as Zeal's successor nation, lacking the ambition that defined the latter, and the party killing Lavos themselves in 1999 A.D. as by then it was too little, too late, in his eyes.
  • In a way, the player party qualifies as well. Unlike their Reptite Timeline counterparts the Xamoltan, who limit themselves to using time travel for learning and observation, Crono's group specifically uses it to change the past, inadvertently dooming every alternate timeline they create and then unmake to the Darkness Beyond Time. invoked
• Wham Episode: The Fall of Guardia and the Reptite Timeline.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Your characters get called out quite a few times, whether it be your foil asking how you can destroy a timeline and the countless people that would not be born because of it or Glenn yelling at Crono for murdering two random (innocent!) Reptites in a fit of rage after finding Marle's corpse.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: King Zeal. In spades.
  • Marle might have counted, given what we see in her Flame Trial, but since the developers intentionally made it ambiguous, we can't include it.
• Written by the Winners: Marle was not happy to find out her ancestor Cedric Guardia, aka King Guardia I, was quite the bloodthirsty asshole and not the hero the history books claimed, or that his feud with Antaeus Porre was because the latter thought he was taking things too far, or that this is all because the Frozen Flame messed with Cedric's head, which is cemented when Antaeus was corrupted by the Flame after stealing it from Cedric.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Averted. Glenn no longer speaks in old-esque English, and his dialogue is closer to his style in the original Japanese Trigger. Completely played straight in Flames of Eternity, however, in the spirit of Ted Woolsey's translation.
• Your Days Are Numbered:
  • King Zeal knows he will eventually be unable to resist the call to merge with Lavos, so he decides to restore Zeal in Antiquity, kill Lavos in Prehistory so it can't destroy Zeal, and kill the party to avenge his wife's death. Even in the final battle, he tries to spin his fate to his advantage, creating his One-Winged Angel form, the Dream Lord. Even further, he knows this is true of all existence, as the Dream Devourer will eventually evolve into the Time Devourer and consume every timeline. Restoring Zeal, in his mind, will let humanity live in blissful ignorance, too busy with fulfilling their ambitions to notice their inevitable Cessation of Existence. Cue Belthasar's... "plan"... to counter that fate.
  • Yaluk knows her species is doomed to extinction in the coming ice age shown in Antiquity, and knowing the world she was born in is gone, chooses to ease the pain of the Reptites' inevitable deaths as best she can. In the ending, Ayla stands at her side, as an extension of her promise to Azala not to forget them.

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