Chrono Cross is not a sequel to Chrono Trigger

Gameplayand Story Segregation. Besides I was actually referring to them being a intellectual match for Lavos. The thing can control space time, and they thought hitting it in the face with magic and shiny swords would solve anything? The hubris involved is staggering.

The frist time I finished CT, I had two questions:

1) If Lavos can control time, how is it possible to to use time travel to defeat him. Couldn't he just make that... not happen somehow?

2) Wait a tick, whatever happened to Schala?

CC answers both questions. It just does so very, very poorly.

edited 22nd Sep '11 6:12:11 AM by J.C.Lately

Harem anime are like soccer. They go on for hours, nobody scores, and a million fans will insist that you just don't understand.

The party theorizes about number 1 in the story itself. It's where they start talking about the entity and all that, and think that there might be a second force opening the Gates.

As for 2, she was presumed to have been killed by Lavos until Chrono Cross informed us that that wasn't so much wrong as inaccurate.

I have a message from another time...

The key words in your post being "theorizes" and "presumed".

Harem anime are like soccer. They go on for hours, nobody scores, and a million fans will insist that you just don't understand.

The theorizing and presuming the party did is good enough for me, I really didn't need an entire game just to give me concrete answers to those questions.

And if they really bugged anyone that much then they can go and write fanfiction about it or something. Though in a way I guess that's exactly what Kato did.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:07:07 AM by BetaRay

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

This isn't a continuation of the spirit of the first game though, it's practically antithetical to it. When one of the themes of the first game is

"try hard and don't back down and you can fix the mistakes of the past,"

then

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and every time you try to fix a problem it gets worse, so don't bother"

is not a thematic continuation, even if it's a sequential continuation. "Characters decide to Screw Destiny, Destiny gets pissed and comes back and shoots them in the face" is not thematically coherent if the second part is contained entirely in a second installment, after a first installment that gives no reason to suspect that this is the sort of thing Destiny can or will do.

It's like creating a sequel to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which takes the whole theme of progress, and determination overcoming any obstacles, and saying "Well, you know what they say about the nail that sticks up. It gets hammered down." And then you write a story about how everything does to hell because their actions bring down the everloving wrath of god on them.

Of course, because Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was thematically coherent, when approximately this happened, the characters pulled through by staying true to the ideals of the first arc. Whereas Chrono Cross takes the route of telling you "No, bad, wrong the heroes of the first game thought that way and where did it get them? Dead!"

It's an alien planetary parasite. It's on a completely different scale when it comes to lifespan and the magnitude of the stuff it eats, but it's still an organism like the rest of them. Why should it be able to control space and time? Because that's what's necessary for the plot of Chrono Cross to work, which is why it comes up in Chrono Cross but was never even hinted at in Trigger.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:15:42 AM by Desertopa

...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.

Was it ever mentioned that Lavos could control time? I never noticed any part of the game that hinted at that...

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

Actually I think Lavos is the one who sent the gurus and Magus to different time periods.

What? Lavos can open time gates just like the entity, but it doesn't control time and space. Where did you even come up with that?

No idea why it didn't just send the party through a time gate when they attacked it though.

Umbran Climax◊

Oh, right, I remember that.

But honestly, considering everything that happened in that era, I'm very willing to chalk it up to Mammon Machine / Pendant time fuckery more than anything else.

One of my few regrets about being born female is the inability to grow a handlebar mustache. -Landstander

To the best of my knowledge, Lavos was just a cosmic horror that crash landed and forced humanity to undergo evolution in Trigger. After fusing with Schala, it became the Dream Devourer and then the Time Devourer. You could possibly say that this is due the Kingdom of Zeal with the Mammoth Machine and Schala and whatnot, but having Lavos suddenly be able to warp time and space was pretty much something that was slipped in on the spot. There were no hints of it prior to Lavos coming out of left field at the end of Cross.

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

I'm pretty sure CT makes no mention of Lavos having time travel abilities at all. Ninjas. Ninjas everywhere.

The question of whether or not Schala was dead was the only hanging thread CT had and see my earlier post for how I feel about that.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:39:20 AM by BetaRay

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

Even if Lavos had any sort of intelligence, which the first game doesn't really suggest, it doesn't seem particularly like it opens them on purpose. Certainly it's never shown using them in a deliberate and self serving way in Trigger.

...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.

In other news, Chrono Cross is coming to the PSN in North America

Taking a break from FE1, for the FE8 draft instead

EDIT: You know what? Nevermind. I'm tired of having the same 11 yearold argument about CC. I'm out. Have fun.

edited 22nd Sep '11 8:36:19 AM by J.C.Lately

Harem anime are like soccer. They go on for hours, nobody scores, and a million fans will insist that you just don't understand.

edit: OK, never mind as well. You win, I suppose. But you will never beat me at a contest of passive-agression!

edited 22nd Sep '11 8:38:39 AM by Enlong

I have a message from another time...

Whether or not it's a sequel to Chrono Trigger I guess.

Umbran Climax◊

Let me add another offensive aspect: most of the plot of Chrono Cross boils down to "save Schala." And yet, who is missing from the game? Magus. So apparently, he doesn't get to have any part in saving his sister, despite being *her brother* and having his main goal throughout basically the whole first game being "save his sister," and being one of, if not the, most powerful survivor of Zeal.

Instead, she gets saved by. . . almost completely random other people who have no reason to even know who she is.

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

It's common knowledge that Magus was intended to appear as Guile, but since everybody was a party member except the kitchen sink, they cut out his story and Guile became just another party member. Partial credit for trying?

And then they tried to salvage that by having Alt Magus lose his memory in Chrono Trigger DS after you beat the Dream Devourer. In other words, implying that he's Guile after all.

I have a message from another time...

But even so, unless Cross was to get a remake of its own to tie into what's been established in Trigger DS, that particular plot thread still goes nowhere.

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

Reducing Magus to just another random, unspectacular member of a cast of dozens isn't much better. Maybe if Guile got as much plot relevance as, say, Kid. . .

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

How can you question this when the quote you provided supports it? "beckoned Dinopolis into the past, maybe as a measure against Chronopolis and humanity". In other words, in an attempt to restore the balance disrupted by Chronopolis. The only difference is I was saying that it happened as a natural consequence of the Time Crash and Kid is suggesting that the Planet did it deliberately. Okay, maybe it was a deliberate act by the Planet. The point is that Dinopolis' appearance wasn't "involving their sentient planet being able to invent a dimension where Lavos doesn't exist", which is what you said that I was originally objecting to. There's a difference between creating something wholesale and bringing something in from somewhere else.

You should consider all of what the game told you rather than cherry-picking the information that supports the conclusion that you like. The game talks about Schala as if she were acting in a linear timeline. The game also says that Schala did not exist in a linear timeline while she was acting. There are two possibilities, then: she was outside of time and those that talked about her as if she wasn't were doing so for the sake of convenience, or she was in a linear timeline and those that said she was outside of time were lying. I find the former to be much more plausible.

The thread is about how Chrono Cross doesn't live up to Chrono Trigger's legacy, not "why Chrono Cross is bad". Pardon me for assuming you were drawing an on-topic comparison rather than simply listing various reasons why you don't like Chrono Cross.

Or that he simply doesn't care whether or not Serge gets his body back, just as long as it's after a certain point — such as when he regains control of the Frozen Flame.

Should I refrain from offering explanations except by things directly supported by screenshots from the game, then? Chrono Cross is not the kind of game that explains everything to you directly, but offering any sort of interpretation could be dismissed as a "fan theory" if you want to. The Dragon Gods clearly feel that humanity's mere existence constitutes a form of pollution (presumably because in their world, humans no longer exist, thus making them "unnatural" in their eyes).

I agree completely. I did say that it was abrupt and could have been handled better. I was just saying that it wasn't a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere — ie, a boss that shows up for no other reason than because it's an appropriate place for a boss fight.

Right — sent to the darkness beyond time. She even describes a sense of being in a "void" after she reappears, IIRC. The reason why it doesn't completely rewrite reality (thus erasing Crono & co's memories of her) was because it was a paradox; she only ceased existing because of actions she took, so if she wasn't around to take those actions she wouldn't have ceased to exist. When Crono & co resolved the paradox, that freed her from the darkness beyond time, allowing her to reappear in the timeline.

Serge's situation was a special case. It wasn't actually a paradox, since no actual time travel was involved. The timeline was altered from outside of time (by Schala, in the darkness beyond time), which is why it caused the dimensions to split rather than one of the timelines ending up in the darkness beyond time.

Presumably that's just a good old fashioned Alternate History, where Lavos never hit the Planet for some reason, rather than the result of a paradox or an alternate dimension like in Serge's case.

"Don't try, because you'll only make it worse" is not one of Chrono Cross's themes. I'll just quote myself from my first post in this thread:

"Chrono Cross does not reverse Chrono Trigger's main theme. Chrono Trigger is about seeing a Bad Future and saying Screw Destiny. Chrono Cross is about seeing a Bad Past and saying Screw Destiny. I mean, seriously, the Chrono Cross party murders Fate. Really. It's a big boss battle and everything. It's hard to get more heavy-handed than that."

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

The game never, ever implies before the PS 1 version that these actions are evil. The discussions about the entity only reinforce that the actions of the party are explicitly considered a good thing. It wasn't until Kato got his paws on it that he started introducing the idea that saving the world with time travel is bad.

Then lets Serge and Kidd time travel to save the world because Serge and Kidd are perfect and flawless.

The way he doubles back on his own damn message when it's HIS characters makes it even worse, really.

Yea, they should have let the space monster eat the world and then move on and continue to devour other innocent worlds. Fucking, selfish bastards.

So hey, what did the plot of Chrono Cross boil down to? Oh yea, killing a giant space monster for the sake of a single woman that just so happens to be Kato's blessed character.

Yea, they should have also recruited an onion, a dog, a scarecrow, a mushroom, a Luchador, a harlequin, and a bunny girl. Just for the hell of it.

No it isn't. Balthazar is still screwing destiny to make whatever he wants happen! The main character of the game only exists because instead of following his destiny of dying as an infant, he grew up and lived and SPLIT THE UNIVERSE. The author's blessed Kidd is only saved because they CHANGE HER DESTINY.

But none of the actions in Cross have any logical reason to stem from the actions of the Trigger cast. Furthermore, again, Cross doubles back on its own "moral" by lettings its own main characters commit them because, duh, they're special.

If they wanted to make a game about the consequences of the time travel in CT, it should have had a real connection to the actual events of CT and followed through within the world we were shown. Not slap them on and have us spend the entire game isolated from the massive world we'd been given before. I actually knew people at the time who quit the game before the CT connections actually became apparent because they stopped caring.

So alternate dimensions can just invent themselves now? Poof? That's it?

I find it much more plausible that this is just something that comes off as inconsistent because the writers didn't notice it.

Well there is the fact that my original post which you responded to never mentioned Chrono Trigger in a comparitive sense. Said post was part of a three post response to you saying Chrono Cross could stand on its own merits, i.e. apart from Trigger. So I honestly can't see how you thought we were talking relative to Trigger. Also, when did I say I hate Chrono Cross?

So much hatred.

In either case he kind of just lets Serge go again instead of killing him. Also he only managed to stall Serge for the length of a single short boss battle.

Also: Oh look more dialogue implying Lynx needed Serge alive.... even though he didn't.◊

And FATE regaining control of the Flame shouldn't have taken so long, it should have been a matter of Lynx walking into a room and FATE deactivating Robo/Prometheus.

Yes it is, the problem is that those explanations are horribly placed, dumped onto you all at once, and/or completely dumb.

Kinda like you dismissed me by accusing me of making things up?

But now my problem is that I'm not making enough things up?

I suppose I did not remember the full definition of the trope properly. I apologize.

Oh look, time travel was involved. Yet Serge isn't in an empty void for the entire game.◊

Also, you're getting events confused. You're thinking of the time Serge was poisoned by a panther demon. I'm talking about Lynx's attempt to murder Serge in the past by shoving his head underwater. Which also brings up the fact that FATE could have accomplished her plan without having Lynx steal Serge's body, and instead just stab him in the face.

I agree. CC does come out as generally optimistic, despite a dark spot here or there.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:32:03 PM by JotunofBoredom

Umbran Climax◊

I concede that "Don't try because you'll only make things worse" was a mischaracterization; it would be more appropriate to say that Chrono Cross treated the events of Trigger as bearing that theme. The plot elements of the previous game were altered retroactively to such an extent that Chrono Trigger through the retrospective lens of Cross bears almost no resemblance to Chrono Trigger on its own terms.

edited 22nd Sep '11 7:47:39 PM by Desertopa

...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.