No One Can Stop Mr. Talking Time's Top 50 32 & 64-Bit Video Games!

It's been said that Chrono Cross is a great game but a bad Chrono Trigger sequel, and I am very inclined to agree. It's got maybe the most beautiful visuals on the system, a story that isn't any more bonkers than most of the JRPGs of the era, an innovative battle system, a colorful cast of characters, and a contender for greatest game soundtrack of all time.

And yet...

There it sits, the fact that this is the sequel to one of the most beloved JRPGs of all time, one that tops many such lists, including our own. How do you follow that up? More of the same? I suppose it would've been okay, but most fans would not have liked that either. It took 16 years and one huge misstep before we got another game that played like Chrono Trigger that people actually liked. Yet while people praise Radiant Historia, it's not generally put in Top 10 All Time lists.

So what do you do?

You kind of have to admire Square's gumption. While going from time travel to alternate realities made sense, everything else was throw-everything-at-the-wall experimental. It did turn out to be pretty good as a gaming experience, barring a couple of lackluster moments. But as a sequel to The Big One? There it was clear that everyone involved was lost and maybe a little desperate, in that they anticipated Kylo Ren's "Let the past die" line and applied it liberally, while still trying to throw in enough callbacks to say "See? You loved Chrono Trigger! PLEASE LOVE ME!" For every perfect moment like the Dead Sea there were two that just made you wish the staff had made whatever the game was supposed to be in the first place.

So Chrono Cross. It's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess. I'm not just talking about the aesthetics, either, though again, that score. That freakin' score.

WisteriaHysteria said: Incredible game all around, taking the ambition of its predecessor and magnifying that ambition 100 fold. A wonderful coup de grace for the PS1, and maybe the best soundtrack of the 32bit Era.​

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I have a ton of memories of Goldeneye. I prefer Perfect Dark now but to deny 007's impact in this era would be lamentable. It pretty much set up how I enjoy FPS games and why the genre doesn't really stick for me now haha.

Someday I'll play Chrono Cross...

Oh hey it's my number one! .... which I'd kind of forgotten I put at number one. This is definitely one of those lists where almost anything in my top 10 could be #1 on any given day depending on how I"m feeling.

But hey, Chrono Cross is amazing. Issun hit most of the usual talking points here. It's not what a lot of people wanted from a Trigger sequel, and yeah, even I remember initially chafing at some of the plot treatment of the old cast, but here's the thing... even before the "parallel worlds" thing was explicitly made the focus in Cross, the Chrono setting was always all about multiple future possibilities. Just because somebody's gone in one timeline doesn't mean they're not getting to live happily ever after in another. I feel like after some space to sit back, it all works and hangs together thematically, even if the immediate feel of the games is often very different.

And otherwise, the game is pretty amazing. Some people feel it bogs down trying to incorporate the huge cast of characters, which I get, but I love them all. The auto-generated accent system for incorporating them into dialog scenes is occasionally clunky but honestly kind of genius and impressive for a game of this era. The battle system is one of the most innovative I've seen, allowing a ton of customization while still letting the huge cast each have a few things of their own and being pretty snappy. (The summon mechanics I'll grant are a little obtuse and tedious, though.) And of course the brilliance of the graphics and the goddamn soundtrack speak for themselves.

If I have one complaint about Chrono Cross, it's that Square Enix hasn't remastered it yet. I find that it looks rough on modern TVs, especially some of the pre-rendered backgrounds.

But I can't really say anything that hasn't already been said time and time again re: graphics, art direction, music, and so on. Wonderful game. #5 on my list.

I had Chrono Cross at #3. Intellectually, I understand the idea of not liking a sequel because it wasn't what you wanted in a sequel, but I'm not sure if I feel that way about any game myself, certainly not this one. I don't feel like it's a "good game, bad sequel", either, aside from the rushed ending (and the wishy-washy-ness about Guile), and I guess the lack of double/triple techs.

4-So said:

If I have one complaint about Chrono Cross, it's that Square Enix hasn't remastered it yet. I find that it looks rough on modern TVs, especially some of the pre-rendered backgrounds.

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I did not know I wanted this, but now I do.

edit: While I'm here, I think I can guess most, maybe all, of the remaining games:
Metal Gear Solid
Ocarina of Time
Majora's Mask
Mario 64
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy Tactics
Symphony of the Night
and...Super Smash Bros.? not quite so sure on that one

Of those, only SotN and MGS are on my list

I actually had to check if I voted for Chrono Cross. I didn't, but that tells you it was at least close to making the list. As already pointed out, as a sequel it's pretty meh, but taken on its own merits, it's a really good game with one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. Seriously, Mitsuda just knocks it out of the park with this one.

chrono cross just looks so great. it's just a beauty. another reason I should get a good crt probably

Chrono Cross is a great game. It's probably my little brother's favorite PS1 era game as well. I dunno if I could ever go back and play it without a robust cheat system built into things again, but nobody can take my memories of playing this game to bits. I think I played it from beginning to end at least 3 times? Which has got to be close to a personal record for me and grindy RPGs.

Something I really enjoy is the setting of Chrono Cross. And not just the beautiful pre rendered background, but this island archipelago as a whole. I really love the constant sea motifs and the cultures depicted here and how they intermingle and are expressed. There's a lot of SE Asian, Pacific Island, and Okinawan influences in the cultures here, and it's just a relatively fresh setting to explore that also just kinda speaks to me on the inside spiritually.

Another thing I really really like about Chrono Cross is the big mid-game twist. Having the main character swap bodies with the villain, and then have to go around and see how your perception of the world changes once everyone begins to perceive and react to you differently is a fascinating narrative exploit that not a lot of games have the ambition or the creativity to properly tackle. And that change even works its way into the game mechanics, as you have to readjust your approach to combat since Serge's light-affinity get swapped for Lynx's dark-affinity in combat.

The game also has one hell of an opening set piece as well. Almost as gripping and intense as FF7's bombing run. Even better than the bombing run, IMO since it's an event that you spend the whole game dreading and trying to avoid, but then have to replay through it once more time anyways.

CC was #9 on my list. What a wonderful coincidence!

Issun said:

And yet...

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Chrono Cross is a wonderful game and thrives on its own merits. I totally understand people being upset in the moment that this or that didn't fit their expectations as a follow up to Chrono Trigger's legacy, but Chrono Cross very specifically doesn't call itself "Chrono Trigger 2" and 20+ years later I think it's time to get over the fact that it isn't Chrono Trigger 2.

Chrono Cross didn't make my list, because it was already chock full of Square Enix RPGs, but it easily could have placed pretty highly if I wanted it to. It's one of the only RPGs I can think of that has a (almost) perfect soundtrack, the art design is exquisite, the graphics are a wonderfully colorful PSX showcase, the story is all kinds of juicy JRPG experimentation, the cast is so large it's hard not to find personal favorites, and the writing is often melancholic and thoughtful in a way Chrono Trigger only hinted at occassionally.

Yeah, I forgot about that one track that's just not great. Too bad it's the track that plays in every normal battle.

I have a policy for game soundtracks - I will never listen to a soundtrack (no matter how great!) until I've played the game. I do not want audio spoilers, or to accidentally associate a song with something other than its origin scene. It has served me well through NieRs and Yakuzas and Fantasies Final.

I have broken this rule exactly once. I purchased the Chrono Cross OST at Anime Expo, knowing the game would be released later that summer. I set it on my shelf, content to wait, knowing I already had the album and could enjoy it far into the future.

But then I got jury duty. And seeing as music was bulky and less portable back then, I would not have my entire library at my disposal in the court house. And Chrono Cross had 3 discs worth of music, after all...

It was the right decision. Though Scars of Time does remind me of municipal hallways last renovated in the 70's and beef dip sandwiches.

I had Chrono Cross at #8 on my list for pretty much the exact same reasons as everyone else.

WisteriaHysteria said:

There's a lot of SE Asian, Pacific Island, and Okinawan influences in the cultures here, and it's just a relatively fresh setting to explore that also just kinda speaks to me on the inside spiritually.

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And Chross did that years before FFX did. (But X did apply that more to the characters than CC did.)

Issun said:

innovative battle system

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I remember hearing that some people didn't like the battle system in CC which always seemed crazy to me. I liked how it made weapon attacks and magic and stamina relate to each other. I also liked how the game let you use excess MP to heal yourself at the end of battle so you didn't have to cart around tons of potions. There was a lot of nice QoL stuff that I wish more RPGs had adopted.

I do wish you could have brought more characters into battle but then I guess it would not have felt like a Chrono battle system. But I still wish the other characters could have contributed in some way (maybe like how it was done in BoF4).

One other lament I have about how overstuffed the game is with characters - there were some neat character ideas and there were so many characters that you could have populated multiple RPGs with them and then they each could have been given far more room to breathe and develop.

Oh and CC also has one of my favorite weird JRPG enemies and favorite enemies of all time - Fossicker.

@Tomm Guycot I feel much the same way about soundtracks. I tend to avoid listening to soundtracks if I know I want to play the game, and conversely I find that even in cases where I don't mind "audio spoilers", soundtracks often don't ring very well with me if I don't have game memories to associate them with.

Man, Chrono Cross. I'm not sure how describe how I feel about this game. I was 15; it was everything I wanted.

I think Chrono Cross is a great sequel precisely because of how little it has in common with Chrono Trigger. To me, the defining aspect of Trigger is not the polish, but the creativity on display— how Sakaguchi and Horii took the opportunity to include all sorts of concepts and ideas they didn't feel they could in their main franchises. Cross may have shed Sakaguchi and Horii, but it has that same ethos of trying new things and goes even further; it is positively bursting with new ideas, doing so much with the basic structure of the JRPG. It may not fully cohere, but to me that's besides the point; that Cross' ambition paid no attention to its grasp is why it's so weird, so memorable and so unforgettable.

WisteriaHysteria said:

Which has got to be close to a personal record for me and grindy RPGs.

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That's another cool thing Cross does, though - it's never "grindy" in the traditional sense, in that your stat gains fairly quickly plateau after each progress-gating boss, so you never really feel like you need to seek out extra random battles. Where it can feel grindy on replays, though, is just in the fact that there's so many dang things to do in terms of character recruitment and getting people's special attacks and various other optional goals, so if you're trying to be completionist over multiple runs I can see some things starting to feel that way.

The late 1990s were perhaps THE biggest moment for fighting games. Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, Tekken and Virtua Fighter ruled the arcades, as well as home consoles, now that ports could ape the arcade versions almost perfectly. There were also console fighters that experimented with what fighters could do. Bushido Blade was one such game, but it unfortunately turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. Super Smash Bros., however, was a different story. It did have advantages that Bushido Blade didn't. It had a full roster of Nintendo characters, for one thing, and that in and of itself would have moved a ton of copies. It also was on a system that was starved for fighters, so fighter fans who had opted for the N64 would have jumped at just about anything.

What really made the game a bellweather for the future of the genre, though, was that HAL and Nintendo played to the 64's strengths, with 4 person multiplayer, a kid friendly atmosphere (you didn't deplete life bars, you just knocked your opponent out of the stage), a battle system that was as simple or as esoteric as you wanted it to be, and while the stages weren't as large as Bushido Blade's, they were still large and dynamic.

So while both games should have had enduring legacies, it's no surprise that, given the circumstances, Smash is the one that endured, and is probably the most popular fighter today.

I didn't vote for Smash, and I'm surprised it ended up in the top 10 - I always just kinda figured Melee and other entries had supplanted it. One place where it hasn't been supplanted, though, is in Kirby's power level. I always mained him, and he is a beast in this version. Ever since then, he's been in the mostly-crap to really-crap tier, which makes me sad. Sakurai needs to push back on this constant nerfing of Kirby!

Smash Bros hit at the almost exact wrong time in life for me to really latch on. I was just beginning high school at a new place where I didn't really know anyone; my homework load was at an all-time high, I had no mobility, and did probably the least amount of socializing I did in my academic career outside of the last year of college. It wasn't until Melee hit the GC that the stars aligned for me to really get into Smash. So it didn't make my personal list, but I'm happy to see it place so high because it deserves it. Best fighting game series there is, period.

Also, easy top 10 advertisement campaigns of all time:

Since I believe Smash Bros. will be the last of such games on this list, I'll just mark the occasion now in saying how important and enjoyed the multiplayer capability of the N64 was at the time for me. It's the only time in my life where I've really interacted with video games as a locally played communal experience, and some of that's due to circumstance of having the social circle around that allowed for that, but also how tailored to that specific experience the console was with its four controller ports and immediacy of play with the otherwise largely detrimental cartridge media. "Split-screen multiplayer" might as well be a concept wholly of that time and place for me, and even if my tastes developed toward other directions I'm glad to have spent time in that ecosystem for the years that support for it lasted.

For Smash Bros. the first, later games in the series would be more mechanically compelling and developed, and larger of scope and focus, but in ways conceptual, atmospheric and aesthetic I don't think they really got better than this. There's a frail sense of experimentation in the sheer idea of the game, and the framing device of secret toys-to-life skirmishes goes hand in hand with the polygonal sharpness of the presentation. The more modest scale of characters involved translated to more specificity in the material surrounding them--Break the Targets would have another personalized go at it a game later, but Board the Platforms never returned. More than anything I think the series has been completely incoherent and confused by its own audio direction since Hirokazu Ando's departure after Melee, and the integral nature of his contributions is heard in here with the whimsical, lackdaisical and even moody arrangements and original material supplied to the game's soundscape in ways the later loud and scrambling anthology efforts could not hope to match.

Kirin said:

there's so many dang things to do in terms of character recruitment

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This is an element that I wish CC would have handled differently.

In contrast to Wisteria, Smash hit at the exact RIGHT time for me. I was finishing my first year at college, and my game-playing girlfriend was one of four siblings in her household, for whom Mario Kart had grown a bit long in the tooth. I was also starting my fledgling game development team, and Smash bragging provided bonding for my remote team (You vs. 3 lv9 CPU Links was our comparative battleground).

When some of us met up at Anime Expo that year, Smash provided the perfect hangout device.

Plus, the heavy EarthBound referencing (I mean it's in the name) provided a renaissance for the forgotten RPG, which gave it some much needed visibility that has never stopped snowballing in the 22 years since. Which is kind of insane. My personal Smash anecdotes:

* prompted a playthrough of EarthBound for said girlfriend
* Said development team created a Mother 1 remaster, including an EarthBound battle bg demo on Gameboy Color. It made it all the way to Japan and we got an official rejection! "They will stop."
* Many many many priceless memories of choosing Ness against folks who had never even seen him in the game, then destroying them.
* After a very bad day at Anime Expo, our mandatory roommates wanted the beds - sending us to the floor. I challenged them to Smash (1 on 2) for the room and I won. I very much won. See above.

EDIT: It's fun to watch the intro and remember a time Smash was trying to figure out what "character based fighter with Nintendo brands" even meant, before it was "Smash Bros"

Tomm Guycot said:

Many many many priceless memories of choosing Ness against folks who had never even seen him in the game, then destroying them.

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Ness-picker...

Tomm Guycot said:

In contrast to Wisteria, Smash hit at the exact RIGHT time for me.

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If I had been three or four years older, or Smash Bros had come three or four years later, I would have been all over it. As I was with Melee. It just literally came at the wrong place and time for me in my life. By 1999, my N64 was almost completely boxed and closeted, and as much as it looked really cool (I loved those commercials!) I just couldn't justify spending what little allowance I had on a multiplayer game when I had nobody to play with.

i voted for smash. #16, but i didn't think too hard about most of the numbers outside of the general "top 10", "the next 10", " a few more games i want to shout out" and it definitely could've been higher just as easily. we hadn't had any game consoles from my lifetime when i was growing up and i didn't even recognize like half of characters when i first played it, but i was still hooked from the first match at a friend's house. it's just a fun game that felt fresh and approachable in a way that no other "fighter" i'd played to that point had, even if it took a while before a lot of the actual references hit.

certainly, melee is a faster game, with better stages in my opinion and lots more stuff in general (including several of my favorite characters in the series, particularly bowser, ganondorf, game and watch, marth, and zelda), but even after it came out i've had lots of good times playing the first game. i still think it has the most fun version of jigglypuff, for one thing, and the single player modes are really great, both the character-specific minigames as Peklo mentioned and the overall design of the arcade mode which does a lot of clever stuff with the battles, like the kirby squad where each one is a copy of a different character. and i also agree that the overall aesthetic, and the "toy" conceit (which melee also made a nod to before it-and really the entire concept of an audio and visual aesthetic particular to smash-pretty much vanished from the series) is really special. that's not at all to say there's no appeal to the maximalist, almost "museum" design concept at the heart of the later entries, just that i think those elements bring a certain appeal to this first entry in particular that's never become truly obsolete. a weird, beautiful game.

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i played chrono cross in 2005 or so, i think. definitely a lot of the individual elements stand out-a beautifully produced game with square showing off some of their best work on the platform, and a really innovative and important localization effort on top of that-though as a whole i didn't feel like it left a huge impression on me beyond the music, and when i tried to play it again a few years later after i got a ps3 i didn't make it all that far. not sure if it's a game i don't really like that much, or just one that i didn't give myself a chance to fully "get". i think i'll try it again soon, it's certainly well past time, and with all the talk of the series' (if you want to call it that, anyway) 25th anniversary last year it's felt like something i'm "about to do" for quite a while now...

I figured Smash would rank but I didn't expect it to land this highly. I suppose I would hold the game in higher esteem if I played couch co-op but the online capabilities of the Dreamcast and every system thereafter was revelatory for me. "So I can play multiplayer and not have to share the screen or have someone else physically present?! Sign me up." If you were the type of person who enjoyed company and letting people into your house or going to other people's houses, I have a strong suspicion Smash landed better, but I stopped being that person during the SNES era.

The "party game" tenor of the game irritates me, and I prefer my fighting games to be fightin' games, but I do dearly love the sheer Nintendo-ness of Smash 64 (and the other Smash games). The experience is just very much not my jam, no matter how very well-crafted I think the game is.

I have never played the original Super Smash Bros.

4-So said:

I suppose I would hold the game in higher esteem if I played couch co-op but the online capabilities of the Dreamcast and every system thereafter was revelatory for me. "So I can play multiplayer and not have to share the screen or have someone else physically present?! Sign me up."

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I'm conversely the opposite. Decades later I am still chasing the high of couch co-op/mp. In my mind, social gaming is at its best when you're in the same room and can physically interact with people. Doing it online is a pale imitation, since you lack the ability to see what your friends are up to, see the reactions on their face, and can't interact with them physically in any way. It's pretty weird and dehumanizing actually. And I've noticed that lacking that face-to-face contact, even gaming with friends tends to be more toxic when online, not just with randos. Since you don't get to see your friends frustrations or emotions immediately and it's easy to abstract and ignore each others frustrations when they're bottling it up and not knowing as easily when you've crossed a line until it's too late. Online gaming will never be able to fully replace in person interactions from playing on the same couch or in a LAN party, and that realization is what caused me to kinda just stop playing a lot of online mp games to begin with in recent years. So I covet and treasure these couch-mp experiences like very little else. Other similar titles I played from this generation like Mario Party and Mario Tennis were also pretty grand, but Smash and Mario Kart takes the cake.

Yeah this is a whole other discussion, but I'm honestly both intrigued and apprehensive to wonder how growing up with not-in-person online as the primary mode of multi-player gaming (and a ton of non-gaming interaction as well) is affecting the current generation of kids.

Kids these days have way more in-person multiplayer gaming than we ever did. Everybody has iPhones and chromebooks to play games together in class and at lunch/recess. It kinda makes me jealous!

My kids mostly play online because there's where people are, especially in The Year of Our Covid. It's easier for an 11-yo to hop online and talk to his friends than to bother mom and dad for a ride to someone's house or what have you. I can probably count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of times I've watched my kids play couch co-op. Online though? That's the standard.

At the risk of de-railing the thread...

For myself, I'm not a social person but I do enjoy multiplayer. The vast majority of the time, though, I'm not getting on coms, certainly not talking to randos. My interest in the online multiplayer space is because human beings are quirky and random and they can do unexpected things, so that's fun. But at the end of the day, they may as well be really sophisticated bots in terms of my engagement with the human being on the other end. My lived-in moment-to-moment experiences have the tone and tenor of a single player game- but I do it online with other people. Maybe with an MMORPG I'm going to give a little bit because that's how you have to do things to really get anywhere, but something like Overwatch or Battlefield? Nah, I'm just there to perform and GTFO. I'm not into chatrooms with unbelievable GUIs (games).

This makes me sound far more of a curmudgeon than I really am. I just really value my alone time while simultaneously enjoying multiplayer experiences more than a lot of single player ones. /shrug. (I think there's a difference between the ideas of multiplayer and social gaming, re: how we view these things. The lens there is different, context is important.

In any case, I can only think of three more N64 titles that might make the list. Interested to see if they do. Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Majora's Mask.