Chrono Cross is not a sequel to Chrono Trigger

Then again, you could probably count on two hands the number of party members in Cross who actually had a good deal of importance to the story. Doesn't mean you can't try to fill in the gaps from what other games have established, though.

"Oh no, Sanji's Chronic Simprosis!" - Kou The Mad

No, Harle is the 7th Elemental Dragon God that makes up the True Dragon God.

The other Dragon Gods created her to covertly screw over FATE and steal the Frozen Flame.

Really, read my character descriptions. They may be sarcastic, but they're true. Okay Harle actually represents the Moon and not France, but honestly the moon doesn't even do or mean anything in Chrono Cross as far as Elements go and later on we find out the true 7th Element is Sound anyway.

edited 20th Sep '11 7:43:53 AM by JotunofBoredom

Umbran Climax◊

The only thing really important about the second moon is that it kind of pops up between Trigger and Cross and no one mentions it at all. It's things like that where I think that Trigger and Cross take place in different timelines.

Not Three Laws compliant.

Regarding the Guile = Magus thing, that's Kato retconning again. He explicitly took out Magus in Cross and gave the reason being that Magus would "distract" from his own characters. Furthermore, there's problems with the Cross canon because of the removal of the connection in the shipped game.

Guile has been Magus in Radical Dreamers though.

RE: Dalton's uselessness, I just don't buy that the guy was able to pull of something on the scale of what we're expected to swallow on a group of people who literally did the impossible and changed the course of history by beating a giant space monster into oblivion. It's just more of Kato devaluing the original cast to make his characters better in comparison.

I know about Radical Dreamers and all of its plot twists. I'm just saying that, in lieu of the extra content in the DS version, saying that Magus = Gil/Guile is still palpable regardless of Kato's wish to shoehorn the Trigger cast out of the game in favor of putting his characters in the spotlight.

And yes, I agree wholly on Dalton. It's just hard to stomach that kind of development given everything that the party goes through, including defeating a cosmic horror that causes The End of the World as We Know It. They could effortlessly beat Dalton in their sleep. Yeah yeah yeah, he could sneak attack them, but still.

"Oh no, Sanji's Chronic Simprosis!" - Kou The Mad

Magus= Guile?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNnkh883Vmk

It makes so much sense!

edited 20th Sep '11 11:25:25 AM by Demongodofchaos2

Watch Symphogear

DS does have a surprisingly hard fight with Once-King Dalton...

I have a message from another time...

That's not much of an excuse. All it means is that his jarring growth in power happened earlier than people thought it did.

Umbran Climax◊

DS is also used as an excuse to further retcon the original game to fit the sequel. It's like George Lucas, really. Except at least he's devaluing his own creations.

LOL, win. Though of course the clip reminds me of how bad the cutscene framerate quality was in the PS 1 release.

And again, I say that DS really just makes me believe that there's a timeline with a happy ending, like SNES Trigger had before Cross.

I have a message from another time...

But the ending of Cross combines all the timelines.

It's not really clear what survived and what got erased forever.

Umbran Climax◊

Clearly anything related to Trigger got erased if Kato had his way.

Stop supporting Capcom. Now.

Fate wasn't sent back to the past to prevent its being sent back to the past from causing a paradox. Chronopolis was sent back to the past accidentally (or as part of Belthasar's Xanatos Gambit — I don't remember that bit, but I'll take your word for it), and then once it was there, they used it to prevent a time paradox.

The reason Serge could travel between the worlds is because he was missing in one, and this imbalance let him slip between the two dimensions in places where the barrier between them was weak. (Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.) The reason that the Terra Tower was pulled into El Nido was that Chronopolis' appearance via the Time Crash caused a similar imbalance; the Terra Tower was the equal and opposite reaction to Chronopolis.

'Cept Schala was sort of outside of time... er, at the time. Saying that something happened "before" something else when talking about something that doesn't exist in a linear timeline is a bit silly.

Most of your character summations are just snark, so I won't bother to respond to all of them, but this one stood out:

The whole point is that he wasn't "thoroughly murdered". Crono & co killing Lavos causes a time paradox. They decide to kill Lavos because they see the Bad Future, but killing Lavos prevents the Bad Future, so they never decide to kill Lavos, resulting in the Bad Future. Paradox.

No, but I think that their appearance is the biggest reason why most people who play the game think they're dead. Think about it: why would they show up as kids younger than they ever were in Chrono Trigger (much less how old they would be in Chrono Cross — which is 20 years later — or at whatever age they supposedly died, which would be somewhere in between)? The chibi-CT cast are there as stand-ins for timelines that have been destroyed by paradox. Think about where they show up — the Dead Sea, for example. It always has to do with paradox'd timelines. Why do they take the form of the CT cast? It makes a better Player Punch that way. Theory of Narrative Causality and all that. This really seems to have worked too well; people get too hung up on the fact that it was the CT cast rather than anything else.

Because Lavos was Fusion Dance'd with Schala. She had access to part of its power. It was her telling you to kill Lavos. Fighting from the Inside, of a sort.

If you do the final battle the "right" way, then you de-Fusion Dance Lavos and Schala, killing Lavos and releasing Schala. Since you were fighting Lavos in the "darkness beyond time" (ie, where paradoxes go), killing it there resolves the paradox caused by Chrono Trigger in favor of the "Lavos dies" version of events (releasing it would've resolved the paradox in favor of the "Bad Future" version of events) and lets Schala escape to go... somewhere. (The "good" ending didn't make any sense to me, either.) If you just bludgeon the Time Devourer to death without doing the Chrono Cross element-song thing, then you kill both Lavos and Schala, meaning that the paradox still ends with "Lavos dies", but Schala dies too. Either way, with Lavos/Schala no longer mucking about with history from the darkness beyond time, Home and Another worlds recombine... presumably with the best bits of each, because Schala's cool like that.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Yeah, I know. That was me being obviously sarcastic.

How can you be arguing this if you don't even remember the axis on which the entire story spins?

Yes, and all of this is based on the fact that his existence is what caused the dimensions to split in the first place. Didn't you think it odd that the hole connecting the dimensions is the beach where Serge almost died? It wasn't a coincidence. When Kid saved his life(more time travel shenanigans set up by Belthasar) his survival caused a paradox that split the dimension in two. That's why he was pulled through.

Dinopolis, on the other hand, had nothing to do with the dimension it showed up in. To call it the same as the circumstances between Serge and Another World is just patently false.

But the plot makes it so that she affects and perceives the timeline in a linear fashion(an Exposition Fairy even refers to Schala having traveled through time, within a non-dimension where time doesn't even exist).

So, uh, thanks for bringing up another inconsistency I guess.

Not to mention the game explicitly explains that Schala only decided to save Serge only because he was crying. You can't fill this plothole with timey wimey logic or fan theories when the game outright says something else.

That doesn't at all explain why the time devourer exists, especially since there are a bunch of other paradoxes caused by CT that don't end up trying to eat all of time and space.

So yeah, you're just bring up more ways the game contradicts its own logic(though, to be fair, Chrono Trigger is just as guilty of being inconsistent about time physics).

This is yet another moment where the game spells out for you how something happened. Oh and "thoroughly murdered" was an exaggeration, beaten to near death is a much better description.

But by that point of the story Schala had long been completely corrupted by Lavos' influence and wanted the same things it did.

Yeah, I know the thing about the endings. You could have just said the part about the "best bits" and left it there(which even then is only a theory because the player never gets to find out what the new timeline is like).

Why not? Snark or no, they are legitimate complaints.

edited 20th Sep '11 5:42:00 PM by JotunofBoredom

Umbran Climax◊

Serge gets pulled into Another World to correct an imbalance. The Terra Tower gets pulled into El Nido to correct an imbalance. Sounds like the same thing to me. The only difference (other than scale) is that the Terra Tower was a one-time thing, while Serge can travel back and forth because the imbalance pulls him into whichever dimension he's not in at the time.

When does it say that? I mean, yes, it says "Schala saw this, then she did that", but that's only because you can't talk about anything without implying a linear timeline. Language breaks down without it, but using it for convenience doesn't mean that it's an accurate description of what Schala was doing in the darkness beyond time.

It exists because a paradox was created. It's simple.

Well, none of the other paradoxes involve an obscenely powerful world-annihilating alien creature Fusion Dance'd with a magical time-traveling princess. Presumably, being badass counts for something, even in the darkness beyond time.

Yes, she was corrupted, but she was fighting against it. That's what Fighting from the Inside means. The fact that she couldn't stop herself doesn't mean that she couldn't get Serge to stop her it.

Not... really. You make fun of Serge for having the same characteristics as any number of other RPG protagonists (Heroic Mime Ordinary High-School Student with multiple Love Interests), Kid for the phrase "daughter-clone" (one awkward translation does not constitute a legitimate complaint about the character), Harle I'm not even sure what you're complaining about (her being French?), Lynx for something you make up entirely (seriously, he spends the entire game post-body-switch trying to kill Serge), Dragon God ditto (he wants to destroy Chronopolis because Chronopolis kicked his ass after the Terra Tower got pulled into El Nido and has kept him sealed in a can ever since — it's got nothing to do with an environmentalist message), and the Time Devourer I already talked about.

edited 20th Sep '11 8:16:13 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Umbran Climax◊

Let's dial back the personal stuff and quit it with the bold all-caps.

I don't think it really could have been brilliant. Chrono Cross had an interesting premise, which had a lot of potential, but even disregarding the jumble of themes and underdeveloped characters, the core plot simply lacks coherence. To make sense, Chrono Cross would have to have been a completely different story.

I do think Kato was overambitious, and one of the things I learned in the process of writing a review of Xenogears is that Kato collaborated with the lead writers on it. He may have gotten his inspiration to work on a complex and winding story from his work on that, but Xenogears, deliberately confusing though it was, had a coherent story that was worked out years in advance and built up from there.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

Xenogears was also someone else's baby, and thus there was someone to reign Kato in. Plus it was technically the first game and thus there was no pre-existing canon to stomp on.

Note that he still used Xenogears as another potshot at the Chrono Trigger cast though - Lucca shows up in the game just to get killed again.

True. By the end of the game, it's difficult to say what was actually accomplished, let alone define the plot.

FATE is built up as a great evil, but the only purpose it had was to keep up the status quo. The only influence it has on the outside world, aside from a rambling cat man, is the save points and it's never made clear exactly what those do for anyone in-story. At one point it succeeds in everything it wanted, yet proceeds to do absolutely nothing but wait for Serge's small army to barge in and kill it. Why? Because it wants Serge to "teach me what it means to be alive" or some pseudo-deep nonsense. The only reason you care about it is because Lynx constantly goes out puppy kicking for no real reason. Even revealing that he's Serge's dad transformed into a slave means nothing because Serge is incapable of reacting and the battle continues with no change.

The Dragon God, who is somehow both the sentient, trans-dimensional biocomputer of the planet (or some such) and an offshoot of an alternate universe Reptite civilization, does nothing but ramble on and on about how Humans Are Bastards and spew the meaningless environmentalism message this game is determined you see. Just like it's opposite number, it achieves all of its goals, yet proceeds to sit on its tail and wait for Serge to kill it. Harle, one of the only characters with any importance to the plot is revealed to be a part of this thing, but that amounts to giving it he Macguffin, then vanishing off the face of the earth.

Both factions have completely nonsensical motives and backstories that are only revealed in confusing infodumps the last section of the game. We killed both of them, but it's still not clear if anything of importance actually changed.

Then there's the Time Devourer. The Big Bad, and entire reason this mess happened. It's existence isn't even hinted at until the very end of the game and its origin still makes no sense. They don't really give us a reason to care about saving Schala or do anything to build up the anti-violence theme (which is still BS considering that you must be violent even to make the magical Deus ex Machina song work). Then we get "treated" to an utterly obtuse Gainax Ending spewing psychobabble at us to sound "deep". Everything else in the plot is utterly meaningless and never really brought up outside of short sidequests.

This kind of thing makes the story seem like pretentious rambling. The Dark Id said it best: Chrono Cross is poorly written Chono Trigger fanfiction. They needed an editor badly.

edited 21st Sep '11 5:21:25 AM by Geostomp

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" Futurama, Godfellas

Man, now I feel like I need to play through Chrono Cross again and keep track of it under the Synopsis.Chrono Cross tab or something. It's been long enough since I played it last that I remember that there are answers to the issues you're raising, but I can't properly remember what they are.

Maybe I'll take a break from my new-game backlog and go back to replay Chrono Cross.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Man, reading this thread makes me so glad that Radiant Historia exists. Everyone should just go play that instead arguing over this Chrono nonsense.

You are not alone, and you are not strange. You are you, and everyone has damage. Be the better person.

It hasn't been a long time since I played Chrono Cross (I replay my games a lot,) and I can say with confidence that trying to make sense of the plot requires a huge amount of rationalizing.

I'll credit it with providing a solid enough gameplay experience that I've bothered to play it again, which I haven't done with any games that aren't at all fun to play.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

The simple fact that we're arguing how Cross' plot should be interpreted shows how ambiguous, overly complex and Gainax-y the game is.

Awww, but that's the wimpy way to try and win arguments like this.

I have a message from another time...