15 Silver Points Was Never Enough ~ Chrono Anniversary Thread

[Mogri]

I'm not pushing back on any point specifically, but I am curious: what do yall think of with the term "convoluted storytelling?"

I feel like "convoluted storytelling" is a hallmark of the 32-bit era, where boundaries were greatly expanded versus the old hardware and reach exceeded grasp as often as not.

Chrono Trigger is a time-traveling pulp adventure whose plot doesn't invite much scrutiny. How does time travel work, really? Don't think too hard about it, that's how. Lavos kills the world in 1999 AD, and everything you do is in the service of preventing that. The cast is "Chrono and his friends" along with a token representative from each time period (with Magus eventually repping 10,000 BC). You bounce from setpiece to setpiece, and aside from Lavos itself, conflicts are generally resolved within a dungeon or two of when they first appear. There are basically two major plot twists: Magus trying to kill (not summon) Lavos, which is revealed hot on the heels of beginning to suspect Magus to begin with, and Chrono dying, which is undone at the player's earliest convenience. This is not high-concept storytelling.

Chrono Cross, on the other hand, opens in media res in a setting that won't make sense for something like 10 or 20 hours. I honestly don't remember. (Aside: I really like the intro, and I really really like that the intro has randomized party members, although it's not something you can appreciate on your first playthrough.) In comparison to Trigger's several time periods (six? eight? in that ballpark), it has only Home World and Another World, and you'd think that would streamline storytelling, but somehow, it's pretty muddled -- in retrospect, it's hard to remember what parts of the game happen in which world. If the premise of Chrono Trigger is "an adventure through time," it delivers on that and then some. If the premise of Chrono Cross is "an adventure across parallel worlds," then I wish they'd done more to differentiate them. I get that the difference is meant to be whether Serge lived or died, and it wouldn't make sense for everything between worlds to look different, but I think it does the game a disservice that it's so subtle. Chrono Trigger was never a subtle game.

And maybe that's why Chrono Cross disappointed so many people. It's full of brilliant ideas: Serge as the fulcrum on which the worlds turn, the recontextualization of the prior game's time travel as the destruction of entire timelines, and the incredible, gorgeous environments, to name a few. But it's such a departure from Chrono Trigger, a game about time travel that does not ask you to examine the consequences of your actions.

Also, there are only like five double techs in the game. What's up with that?

 

[Wolf]

About a year or so ago, I wrote entirely too many words in celebration of Chrono Cross. It's a game I turn out to have had a lot of complicated thoughts on. I've never started and finished it in a single "run"; I always get distracted somewhere in the middle by something shiny, and then come back to it ages later without a clear idea of what I was doing or, perhaps more importantly, what I have done. I should rectify that, now that I'm older and theoretically more patient.

 

[Zef]

I mean, I can describe the ways in which I feel CC's plot to be "convoluted", but I honestly DO like the game and I don't want to come off as nitpicking or backseat-driving the narrative. There's two standouts, though...

As mentioned above, Serge's life and death is supposed to be the fulcrum of the adventure. His absence led to Another World being generally better off than Home World despite having sombre overworld music. Why, though? Well, you don't really get to find out the "ghost" of Robo exposits at you at the end of the penultimate dungeon, and up until then Serge is being manipulated left and right and the player is thrown into an ocean of hints and surrealism and postmodern storytelling. And in order to preserve said mystery for 30-odd hours, and/or prop up the answer once it is given to you, the narrative has to come up with worldbuilding, background twists, and characters that exist only for that purpose and have no meaning of their own.

But, OK, you DO get an answer as to why Serge, a boy manipulated by everyone he ever met from the morning he woke up and was told to kill lizards, is the keystone of reality. You took a very fortuitous route to get there, which sometimes veered far, far away from the game's central themes, but you got there. And the answer is Lavos. It wasn't because of the influence of Serge himself on the world, it wasn't because Serge was important because of who he was, what he did, or how he related to other people; it was because of how other people, good and bad, used him as a nameless vessel of their own agenda regardless of his personal attributes, and said agendas all lead to Lavos. But wait, wasn't Lavos destroyed? We got the balloon ending and everything! And that's where the narrative twists itself even further to justify how Lavos came back, what its current form is, and how that ties into the last dangling plot thread from Trigger.

(Honestly I often wish for a fully-voiced version of Cross just to hear someone utter the term "daughter-clone" )

And that's before we get into Lynx, but like I said, I don't want to appear like I'm giving an autopsy to a game I honestly do like and enjoy. But in general terms, like I do with Xenogears, Kingdom Hearts, the FFXIII trilogy, the entire Drakenier non-game backstory (and hoo boy did Taro come up with a lot of unedited backstory there), I think the issue of "convoluted narrative" is when you focus so much on explaining things that don't need to be explained, or that serve little purpose to your overarching themes, that you leave the actual important things unfinished, and the audience (naturally, in the process of understanding a narrative) tries to use the overexplained parts to explain the underexplained ones.

 

[Lokii]

That's a really great breakdown Zef. Thanks! It def satisfies what convoluted means in this context and in larger JRPG story structure. I agree with Mogri too that as the genre moved into the 32-bit era the ambition that went hand in hand with the technological advances created additional challenges to the central question of "how do you tell a story in a RPG," a question that's already super difficult to answer!

 

[Torzelbaum]

Also, there are only like five double techs in the game. What's up with that?

I assume it's because Square didn't want to make 990 of them but had to make at least a few.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

But like, they could have made a few more than that.

 

[Zef]

And they could've made Delta Force a little easier to obtain by NOT using Razzly for it.

There's like three dozen Innate Greens.

And they picked the one with the most convoluted Lv 7 Tech requirements.

Which you have to fulfill within the first 2 or 3 hours of the game.

And you won't find out if you succeeded until the very end of the game.

But I'm not bitter.

Nope nope.

I've never seen Delta Force but I'm not bitter.

Nope.

 

[Kirin]

In said podcast, Nadia mentioned how "Life ~ Faraway Promise" begins with a reference to "Schala's Theme" and it's been 20 years and I had never picked up on that holy shit.

You should track down and listen to Kenley Kristofferson's Into The Score podcast episode(s) on Trigger and Cross, they are absolutely fantastic and dive into all the subtle musical callbacks. (This is from like 15 years ago or something but I *think* they're still online somewhere...

 

[Pajaro Pete]

i love chrono cross's implementation of double and triple techs, it's like when you have such a massive cast who all say the same thing in every cutscene because their dialogue is just run through an accent generator, double and triple techs would have been a neat way to show how these characters actually interact with one another and give them a bit more personality beyond "this guy is french and this dog has a lisp" but then they decided not to do any of that

 

[Lokii]

Got to the Dead Sea. Absolutely spectacular. Worth the price of admission alone.

 

[Lokii]

Miguel down in four tries, which was outright lean compared to the dozen or so required to best Garai. I didn't remember Garai being such a roadblock but it took me lots of tweeking with characters and elements to find something that worked. Miguel I knew was coming so I was reasonably well prepped coming in. He still stomped me with that surprise meteor storm/holy light combo. Progressive attempts and the element shuffling to refine my strategy was really fun. I like how these bosses are almost becoming puzzles.

As a fight its absolutely wonderful and so demanding, a nail-biting capstone to this surreal and impactful Dead Sea setpiece, which as an echo to Chrono Trigger's destroyed future and Lavos reveal, absolutely lives up to expectations. The stage design here, for lack of a better term, is maybe the highlight of Square's pre-rendered background games. The area recalls Chrono Trigger's 2300 AD future in a lot of ways, including having to move through mini-sections of destroyed urbanscapes to give an up close view of the destruction. Here the apocalypse is imagined as the startlingly beautiful "Time Crash," where a high-technology future city is caught in a single moment of time, a moment where some aspect of this disaster had caused the ocean to come flooding in and freezing mid-tidal wave. You run along frozen waves and through toppling buildings, harassed by psycho-robots all the while. There's even a big monitor you can turn on and learn about Lavos just like the Chono kids did! The areas are twisty, interesting to explore, and are jammed to the joints with eye-candy. These backgrounds are perhaps the height of what square was doing with pre-rendered design.

At the end you get the startling revelation that whoops those 2300 AD echoes are a preamble to the big one: even though Chrono Trigger's 2300 was obliterated, an apocalypse, one of an eternally frozen moment, is still going to happen; and if only one thing is certain, it's that this is absolutely Serge's fault. That you just ran through this small piece of this apocalypse is so, so cool.

Top it off with great boss fight and mwa! mwa! Chef Kisses all around!

 

[Rascally Badger]

I had forgotten how difficult Chrono Cross can be when you are playing it legit. I beat it multiple times on the PS1, but every time after the first was a NG+.

 

[Pajaro Pete]

i remember garai being an absolute bastard my first time through but on from scratch replays being not that difficult, i chalked it up to on the ignorance of youth (a lot of games i've revisited as an adult have been waaaay easier - the final boss rush of xenogears was a huge roadblock to me as a youth, for example), so it's nice to see that It Wasn't Me, after all.

 

[Positronic Brain]

Speaking of the Anniversary, guess what merchandise from that I found half-price off, brand new?

It was a stroke of luck - I was looking for them becasue they're not available for streaming in Spain, but then I learned that the third disc is not available digitally, so I went looked into a physical copy and I found this sold and distributed by Amazon Spain, of all places, two years after its release. Bless Europe and their ignorance of the Chrono franchise, as their loss is my gain.

 

[Kirin]

Daaang, that's pretty sweet!

 

[Falselogic]

Nice find!

 

[narcodis]

Fffffffuuuuuck I am jealous!