Chrono Trigger

I'll keep that in mind, thank you.

Anyway...progress!

What in the world is going on in this game??? I hope this....modern(?) Chancellor is an evil demon in disguise too because holy hell, I don't think it gets more 'Kangaroo Court" than what I just saw. You'd need actual kangaroos to make it more absurd and stupid.

I did like that everything I did in the Fair was brought up though. That's pretty interesting. I have no idea if it changed anything or if my selection of dialogue during the "trial" affected anything either but it was still an unexpected and pleasant surprise. And i didn't mean to eat that one dude's food. I was just mashing X in tried-and-true video game tradition.

That first boss, Yakra, wasn't a pushover either. I'm guessing spamming Double Techs is a no-no for boss fights since it looks like that dude always used his attack-all move in response to that. I would guess a lot of bosses will have that gimmick. Lucca died my first attempt before I learned not to just spam D Ts. Well that and also I didn't use Frog's healing magic. I didn't think I'd need healing for the first boss of the game.

edited 26th Aug '14 2:24:43 PM by Nikkolas

I heard that one of those jury members will randomly pick "guilty", even if everyone else picks "not guilty". If so, it's rather annoying.

I'd say that boss fights are only place where it's really worth it to use Duel and Triple Techs. So I wouldn't say you shouldn't use or spam them, you just needed to pay more attention to healing you HP.

edited 26th Aug '14 5:48:25 PM by KuroBaraHime

I picked up this game on a whim one day for the DS cuz I had heard good things. One of the best game purchases I've ever made. It was amazing. Usually I'm hesitant about trying things with insane hype because I tend to be disappointed, but not this time.

...I was.

Well i ahve to say I'm already more enthralled than I was with say, FFVI. Now there is a case of too much hype souring me on a game.

Actually, Yakra's counter is related to his positioning, not the type of attack. He counter attack if he is near his attacker. You can use dual tech on him with no trouble if you take care of waiting for him to move first.

As said, bosses are actually the best target for Dual and Triple techs. You just need to be careful. Heal yourself often, and be sure to figure out the bosses patterns before committing too much of your turn.

I've heard this was a bug on the SNES version that was fixed for the DS. Not sure, though.

About the game's combat system. I really love it myself. It is quite a cool way to make the JRPG fighting system more interesting yet still familiar. I wished more games used it.

Lol I actually dislike CT's battle system and just prefer old school turn-based over it. Being attacked while surfing through menus is just dumb and if you put it on wait it makes it a bit better but you can still get regularly attacked. I think Grandia's battle system works a lot better.

ATB is partly what hurts my enjoyment of FF.

Personally, I wished the ATB system was entirely turn-based. Just like how I wished Final Fantasy was entirely turn-based.

I think my disappointment at the HUGE amount of love it gets is due to Seinfeld Is Unfunny. That, or backlash against Chrono Trigge fans who despise one of the greatest PSX RP Gs, Chrono Cross.

Why would you ever put an ATB system game on anything other than wait?

Maybe if you find wait too easy? I generally play FFVII and Chrono Trigger on active at max speed.

I did play CT on wait last time, but that's because it was New Game+ and enemies constantly attacking for 5 damage was more annoying than difficult.

The game gave me a choice to use Wait or Active before I started it and so I chose Wait. Wait is always how I first play a FF game until I get used to the mechanics.

"Actually, Yakra's counter is related to his positioning, not the type of attack. He counter attack if he is near his attacker. You can use dual tech on him with no trouble if you take care of waiting for him to move first."

I guess I really need to get better at figuring out enemy positions and stuff then. I'm just not used to having to factor in that... I mean, even if I'm not mashing X, I still race through the menus when I know what I plan to do. it's a reflex born of trying to get fights done as quickly as possible. I know I want to do this and this so i do that and that and factoring in where the enemy is just isn't normal for me. Hopefully practice makes perfect.

Got my first Game Over thanks to that boss in the sewer in...2300 AD I think it was? His stupid little minions the second time around constantly kept doing this move that hit everyone in my party so I decided just to focus on the big guy for a bit then kill off the two little guys and before he could resummon them I had killed the main boss. Oh and we also got our first peak of Lavos. I more or less know the entire deal with Lavos already but I'm sure there are a lot of finer details I don't know about so looking forward to learning all about that.

So our heroes are resolved to save the world and prevent the grim fate of mankind. Only, remember that whole tinkering with the past thing making Marle blip out of existence? If we prevent Lavos from destroying the world, does that mean Robo will never have been built? I didn't get a good grasp of where exactly he was form or what he was built for. I guess from the other robots and Robo's words he was built to guard that factory but what was the factory for? Was it just some regular human-structure so Robo will be created anyway even if we prevent the current future or whatever?

Time travel gives me a headache.

Not a whole lot to report...just some dungeon crawling and Robo probably had the only character development he'll have for the entire game. He's gonna be rusting in the End of Time probably while I use everyone else.

Time travel rules are weird. You have that initial grandfather paradox stuff with Marle, but then later on you go traipsing about in the near or distant past, altering stuff in 1000, but it's like the changes effect everyone but your party.

There is an option to pause the combat while you are at the menus, you know. That is really just a minor part of CT battle system. I know nothing about Grandia, though, so I don't know how it compares.

This is also a counter move, though not one positioning related this time. It is about the two little bits. If they are alive when you attack the main body, they will counter. It is not bad when there is only one, but if there are both than it is rather nasty.

You mistake (about the character development, I mean). Each character have at last one side quest through the game. Not that this might convince you to use Robo. I usually kept him in the bench myself. I always found him too slow to my liking. Lack of magic doesn't help either.

edited 27th Aug '14 4:11:00 PM by Heatth

Well, _Ayra_ doesn't have a sidequest. That's the one exception.

She gets two main-story quests though, so there's that.

Robo can be quite useful, depending on the party. Also, he gets the game's first Triple Tech, with Frog and Crono.

that's kind of splitting hairs, as he gets a bunch of moves that are magic-like, as in they're elementally based and hit magic defense, and draw from the same MP pool as everything. I think he can toss out every element except Water, albeit with varying proficiency.

His heal beam is also nothing to sneeze at, especially when paired with Marle.

edited 27th Aug '14 6:35:38 PM by Enlong

You can play with pretty much any combination of characters you like. The game is pretty forgiving.

Robo gets a decent amount of character development. The purpose behind his creation is a late game sidequest though. It's basically the same story as Terminator 2 except without the time travel, ironically.

I know that this was unheard of at the time in an RPG but I wish that you could swap out characters in battle, like in Final Fantasy X (my other favorite RPG).

edited 27th Aug '14 6:57:52 PM by ElementX

It's cool Robo will have some development. That's probably a long ways off however.

I think I can already see why fans of Chrono Trigger don't like Cross. Cross is a ~super serious~ game if I'm getting it right. All about existential themes and whatnot. Chrono Trigger seems extremely light-hearted. Fiends chilling at the bar talking about how much they want to eat humans while whacky music plays, now I'm back in super-olden times and just got wasted with a cave woman and Lucca and yeah. Unless this game does a total 180, I don't foresee this game coming close to Contemplate Our Navels.

Not that it isn't enjoyable because it is. Just some of my pondering about the massive divide in teh fandom.

Speaking of which, a guy wrote a TL'DR read elsewhere about time travel in these games. I thought the temporal and spatial workings of the series were kinda...lax or left up to interpretation. One reason I decided to finally play this was I glanced at a few discussions on this very site apparently going into how Chrono Cross is actually related to Trigger.

Hell, some posts I've read here and there suggest that the DS version of Trigger is a separate timeline from the original game if anyone here has heard that, er, theory or whatever you wanna call it.

As for my report on Trigger, it's fun and all but I'm kinda waiting for the plot to really kick into gear. Sure we have a "goal' in the loosest sense of the term but there's no urgency or drive. We're kinda just wandering about trying to fix the Masamune for some reason. Oh well I guess the reason is so Frog will cheer up but that's still doesn't seem to have anything to do with the larger problem here.

Also I guess it doesn't help I'm kinda ahead of the plot in terms of the whole Lavos situation. The heroes think Magus made it but I know better. Kinda hard not to know the whole deal with Lavos when you hang around RPG boards for years and years.

I'm kinda hoping we meet Magus soon. Maybe then the game will kick into high gear.

edited 27th Aug '14 7:04:32 PM by Nikkolas

I'm the one who suggested that DS continuity thing. Mostly because a bonus dungeon kinda gives the heros some foreknowledge that would make some of Cross's backstory probably not happen.

As I recall, one of the main complaints about Cross is that it mercilessly killed off the entire cast of Trigger in the backstory, undid all their successes, and basically insulted anyone who had fond memories of its predecessor. Personally I think it was a pretty mediocre game on its own anyway, but mostly I just wonder why they didn't just make it a new IP entirely.

Well the reason you're trying to fix the Masamune for Frog is so he'll help in beating Magus since, as you said, the heroes think he made Lavos. Actually since you can fight Lavos at any point after you reach the End of Time, the game is kind of a bunch of quests to make the party stronger to fight Lavos and find out some more about it.

Basically, while Chrono Trigger certainly left some things unanswered, Chrono Cross leaves a lot of things extremely vague. It's easy to see why most people think the game killed off the heroes of CT and had Guardia invaded, since that's where most of the evidence leads. But there's also plenty of evidence that suggests the complete opposite. The ending is also almost as vague as Final Fantasy VII's ending. Almost. It's all very confusing.

I still prefer it over Chrono Trigger. I just feel the things it did do right (battle system, characterization, the setting, music) was done better than in Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Trigger didn't leave anything unanswered. It was an open and shut fantasy story about a teenager saving the world from an alien parasite. The only vagueness came from Chrono Cross making the setting much more complicated than it had ever been in the first place. If you approached Chrono Trigger as a prequel to Cross than it would obviously fail because it was never meant to be that. The Cross storyline simply has nothing whatsoever to do with anything in Trigger, and linking the two at all just makes everyone unhappy.

Also the gameplay sucked, imo.

edited 27th Aug '14 8:35:05 PM by Clarste