Chrono Trigger

The DS version's additions are basically a mon game of the Tamagotchi sort, a Bonus Boss and ending that connect it to Chrono Cross, and a forest full of endless fetch quests, which is probably the closest thing to hell that I can think of.

It's been 3000 years…

One thing that Chrono Cross had going for it was that it had some weird alternate endings.

I think the weirdest one was the one where Serge stays in the Lynx body and spends the rest of his days leading the Demi-Human village, with implications that he's hooked up with Harle.

Chrono Trigger also had some pretty weird endings too. Especially the one where Marle becomes a frog because Frog hooks up with her ancestor Queen Leene.

Edited by M84 on Dec 11th 2019 at 10:00:09 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised

For me, the weirdest ending will forever be the one where Crono actually speaks.

@Jovian: I wasn't evaluating Chrono Trigger and FFVII based on visuals, dude. :P I was going by stuff like how engaging the combat is, or how engaging I found the story- stuff like that. Graphics only matter to me insofar as how well they let me see the game I'm playing, and that's less about quality and more about how you present what you have.

but HOW?

So, everyone's okay, with labelling Kid's unexpected survival from Hydra Poison as Guide Dang It!?

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It's only that in the sense that it's not immediately apparent that it's a branching story, and then you get warned before taking that route.

You get warned?

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My point was less about the graphics specifically and more that they're basically making an entirely new kind of game. The jump from 2D to 3D requires the developers to frame scenes differently, imposes different limitations on things like the animations you have available to convey emotion, etc. The fact that CT was the tail end of the 2D era meant that the developers had lots of experience with the format and were able to apply more polish to it as a result. Meanwhile, FFVII was one of the (if not the) first 3D games that the developers worked on, so they had accordingly less experience and less polish on the final result.

The general consensus seemed to be that no, it's not a Guide Dang It!, because the method for getting the other route is just "pick the other dialogue option", not something obscure or unintuitive, which is what Guide Dang It! requires.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If you try to say something outrageous like "I don't think I can save Kid with the blood of an extinct monster" then Speedo Fuckfacington throws a hissy fit and steals Kid's amulet from you after you reiterate this.

Then his mom joins you in his place because Korcha is the worst.

Edited by RodimusMinor on Dec 11th 2019 at 10:40:23 AM

I do think it is pretty obscure and unintuitive, in the sense that I don't think a first-time player would have any reason to think this one decision point you're not even really saying no to is going to change what characters are recruitable well into the game. That being said, I think the page's current bullet point under Guide Dang It! just saying some characters (Leena, Glenn, Pip) are tricky to recruit seems adequate without getting all strategy guide mode about it.

Edited by Unsung on Dec 12th 2019 at 7:16:51 AM

Might there be a different trope for branching points that aren't obvious? That feels like it should be a thing.

Analysis.Story Branching seems to agree with me, but not sure how reliable it is.

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Another thing that bugs me about Chrono Cross is the character design. Just about every character has...questionable fashion sense. I didn't think it was possible to make more badly dressed characters...at least until I saw Seymour in FF X.

Disgusted, but not surprised

So a few years ago now I bought Final Fantasy III off Steam and I enjoyed it a lot. I have played and beaten pretty much every numbered FF game to date an I thought one fact that made FF 3 really stand out was its magic system. You see, there wasn't just a universal MP pool, spells were divided into ranks or tiers. There were eight levels of spells and each Job Class had a set number of how many times it could cast a spell from each rank. Random made up example is Black Mages could use Tier 1 spells like Fire 15 times, Tier 2 spells like Fira 10 times and Tier 3 spells like Faraga 5 times or 15/10/5. The more powerful Magus kinda reversed it with having more uses for high ranked spells.

When praising this system on a forum, I was told this is called Vancian Magic and is a holdover from when FF just ripped off Dungeons & Dragons.

In any event, I love Vancian Magic and when thinking about games with VM it struck me that my favorite battle system of all time is very similar. True, in CC you recharge everything after a battle but ALL abilities are on the 8 rank grid with each character having more or less number of uses of each rank just like if they were a class. Also like Vancian Magic it requires preparation and strategy beforehand so you use all your "spells" efficiently since once you use them in battle they are gone until afterward.

God Chrono Cross is great. It has my favorite magic system ever and I didn't even realize it. (I played CC before FF 3 or D&D)

Edited by Nikkolas on Dec 22nd 2019 at 6:24:29 AM

I had no idea you could leave Crono dead. When I played CT I revived him because I figured it was mandatory to beat the game.

The end game options in Trigger can be surprisingly meaningful sometimes. In most games you'd have no choice but to take the broody, violent, but ultimately well intending former villain and let him join your party.

In Trigger you can let Glenn have his vengeance and kill Magus once and for all if you want.

Hi, like all of you I'm a Chrono Trigger fan. The game is, in my opinion, the best RPG of all time. I was surprised to see the large amount of hate for Chrono Cross here, however... which makes this place something of a safe haven for me! Though, I'd rather just not talk about that disgraceful abomination that calls itself a "game".

You guys were talking about the decisions in Chrono Trigger, like leaving Crono dead or killing Magus or whatnot? Yes, it's one of the things that still makes the game special, even after it was constantly ripped off by every other RPG in existence. For my latest playthrough, honestly, I'm considering just skipping all the sidequests at this point. I've resurrected Crono, saved the forest (and Lucca's mother), killed Ozzie and co., but honestly, I'm really just in the mood to go and fight Lavos. Since the game has multiple endings, what happens if I just skip all those sidequests? Do I still get the best ending?

Another day, another forum.

Guess I'll be intruding on this safe haven then, because I found Cross far more enjoyable as a game.

To each there own, obviously, I have heard plenty of people enjoyed Cross. I just... man, I hate it so much...

Another day, another forum.

Can we discuss how awesome it was to use Magus?

That is all.

I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.

Chrono Cross - great music, unique gameplay, terrible writing. I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

Unlike, say, a good Fallout game, Chrono Trigger's endings depend mostly on when and where you kill Lavos in relation to the main story, which is why most of them can only be achieved on a New Game+ (and why so many of them are gag endings). The sidequests that open up at the end of the game are more about getting powerful gear to help you win that fight, and giving some characters closure, than affecting what happens after you beat the final boss.

What's going to have a more dramatic impact on which ending you get is whether you face Lavos by flying the Epoch to 1999 AD, or if you confront it via the End of Time's bucket or battling through the Black Omen (if you have Magus with you, I'd recommend the Black Omen route).

Current earworm: "Awe of the Unknown"

People's biggest problem with Chrono Cross at the time was that it just didn't look, play, sound, or *feel* like more of the first game. It's a decent game in its own right (great music and backgrounds, I like the number of characters if not necessarily their designs — and I don't like the writing much either, but I guess the translation could factor into that?) — but it's not the direct sequel a lot of people were hoping for. Despite using some of the same locations and characters, it arranges them in such a way that it's not even much of a spiritual sequel. If it was an entirely setting world altogether, it wouldn't have hurt the game much, and might even have made it more popular, if the constant comparison from kids with the original Chrono Trigger still relatively fresh in their minds wasn't hanging over it.

I got no nostalgia for CT nor do I think it deserves he love it gets. FFVI is the other big time SNES hit which I played long after it came out yet I did find its hype pretty warranted. CT....I guess it was okay but GOAT? No way.

Good music, though. But CC has it beaten there and in terms of gameplay, too.

Inevitably nostalgia does play a major role in why CT is so beloved. As someone who does still love the game, I will say that it's somewhat overrated, and that if you weren't a kid watching Dragon Ball and saving up for Squaresoft games in 1995, it could never live up to the hype. And having not played Chrono Cross when it came out because I was disappointed by how it looked — that game does get a bad rap. It does have a lot of variety in its gameplay, and fantastic backgrounds and music, and while I don't really like the character design or writing, they're not really bad. There is a pretty interesting plot going on between the two worlds — it's mostly the dialogue I don't care for.

Specifically the way the characters are written to be fairly interchangeable in dialogue (with the gimmick of the dialogue substituting their various tics and accents). It's an interesting concept, but I found it... unsatisfying? Just too many characters that don't really feel very distinct, despite all the work put in, because it's all rote and kind of peremptory? Whereas even if the non-optional characters in FF 6 have all that much actual dialogue, they feel more themselves even in the moments when they're silent.

CT, meanwhile... I do think the plot holds up, once it gets going. Not so much the fair or the first trip through 600 AD, but once you get to the future, the end of time, prehistoric times — it's slow-moving, character-heavy, and thoughtful, and while I don't think that would work for everyone if they played it today, I do think it would still work for me. I mean, somewhat inevitably, given that this was one of the games that shaped my tastes.

The gameplay is nothing special now, but it's also hard to really communicate how revolutionary it was at the time. The importance of movement and positioning, the way your strategy had to change based on your party and thus the techs you had available. It very quickly became old hat, maybe nothing all that new to people with actual computers even at the time, but for a lot of that generation of western players, it was their first exposure to that kind of gameplay. Likewise, the kind of proto-loyalty quests that CT had. FF 6's were better, but they were still unusual at the time for CT.

So yeah, it sticks with the nostalgia crowd for reasons like that. It was their first (not their first first, probably not their first RPG, but a lot of other notable firsts), and it's not a bad first to have.

Plus time travel. I'm a sucker for time travel. I know a lot of people hate it.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 20th 2021 at 10:16:41 AM

I don't have nostalgia for Chrono Trigger. I just happened to play the game and find it to be one of the best games of all time. I can understand why it seems so lame to many, with modern RPGs doing everything they can to "be like Chrono Trigger". The game has flaws. I didn't enjoy the prehistoric era, it felt like it was just tacked on because it was a game about time travel. But that's the biggest problem I can think of. What can I say, I'm just a fanboy, I guess.

Edited by AwdryFan on Feb 19th 2021 at 12:20:59 PM

Another day, another forum.