Summary
A perfect example of Squaresoft's great talent
The Good
It is hard for me to review Squaresoft's RPGs. Often I simply don't know where to start, what part of the game in question I should praise first. Take any
Final Fantasy, take
Xenogears, take the predecessor of this game,
Chrono Trigger, take even the unknown
Live a Live - they are all works of highest creativity, beauty, and content. At least they are so to me. The thing about Squaresoft is that they almost never recycle their games, no matter how successful they were, and always pay equal attention to various components of a game - invent clever gameplay gimmicks, tell stories in a suspenseful, interesting way, and throw in some eye candy in form of beautiful CG animations.
"Chrono Cross" is no exception - in fact, it is the very manifestation of Squaresoft's talent. This game is a sequel to the famous SNES RPG "Chrono Trigger", undeniably a masterpiece, despite its seemingly typical "cuteness" - deep down, "Chrono Trigger" is a poetic tale with a bunch of great characters and loads of atmosphere. "Chrono Cross" is even more lyrically intensive and complex than "Chrono Trigger", it has its own original gameplay style, setting, and a fresh new story that is nevertheless closely tied to the one of "Chrono Trigger".
The setting of "Chrono Cross" is a semi-medieval world with a touch of sci-fi, especially near the end of the game. As it is often the case in Squaresoft's game, fantasy seems to have no limit in this game, and its world is wonderfully colorful. Complicated mechanical devices together with magicians; realistic townspeople, medieval-style knights and mysterious half-humans; robots, dragons, time-traveling, traveling to a parallel universe, dream that becomes reality, reality that becomes a dream, and so on. "Chrono Cross" drags you into its wonderful world as soon as you start playing the game.
"Chrono Cross" is more oriented towards medieval fantasy than "Chrono Trigger". Particularly classical Chinese elements are more noticeable in the setting (the elemental dragons as the guardians of the world). There are less sci-fi elements, since there is almost no time traveling, which has been replaced by traveling between parallel worlds. The most interesting in the setting of "Chrono Cross" is the subtlety, with which it merges a standard medieval environment with Chinese elements and glimpses of the future.
When it comes to the story, "Chrono Cross" doesn't only match its famous predecessor in terms of storytelling refinements and perfect balance between given facts and secrets, but even surpasses it in those aspects. No one can beat Squaresoft (except perhaps the guys who did the story of
Eve Burst Error) when it comes to storytelling technique: they can tell the most banal story in such a way that the player will stay glued to the TV screen until the very end. Characters and situations develop gradually, being only partially revealed at any given moment, and the story doesn't give away too much in the beginning, allowing more space for development.
"Chrono Cross" tells its story with utmost subtlety. It isn't as blatant in the usage of conversations as Final Fantasy games (partly because of the silent protagonist Serge), and big parts of the story are told silently and remain enigmatic until the later parts of the game. It is not as monstrously complex as the story of "Xenogears" or as passionate as the stories of Final Fantasies, but in terms of balance and refined storytelling technique it has no rivals even among Squaresoft games. Plot twists are brilliant yet natural, and although some of them are quite complex and bizarre, nothing in them feels contrived or artificial. Particularly appealing to the fans of the series are the fine threads that tie the seemingly unrelated story of "Chrono Cross" to the one of "Chrono Trigger". In fact, the most amazing plot twist - the discovery of the true identity of one of the game's main characters - can be fully understood and appreciated only by those who have played "Chrono Trigger". That said, the knowledge of Chrono Trigger's plot is not necessary in order to follow the main story of "Chrono Cross" and the personal story of its hero.
The story itself is wonderfully sad and profound, involving some of Squaresoft's most cherished themes, such as personal fears and conflicts of all kinds. Particularly strong is the deep insight into human being's position in the world; it starts as a seemingly trivial conflict between humans and nature (manifested in the words of one of the dwarves: "everything was fine until you came"), but soon develops into a philosophical tale that has a natural parallel to the story of the main character Serge and his true identity. There is very little of the usual "beat the big bad guy, save the world" cliché in this game.
The trick of alternate realities that is used in the game works a lot like time traveling of "Chrono Trigger" and makes a lot of complicated and fun experiments possible. For once there are
two world in the game, the "real" one and the alternate one, each with a complete set of characters, which of course have totally different destinies and relationships. Early in the game you gain the ability to travel between the realities, which also includes different time periods, and are able to change and to "correct" the future like in "Chrono Trigger". The coolest part is the ability to take characters recruited in one reality into another, and make them meet their own self. One of the game's best side-quests involves making a certain character a better person by showing him his other self, thus forcing him to look at himself in a kind of a "realistic mirror".
The game allows you to recruit a tremendous amount of characters in your party, making it almost a
Suikoden-like experience - 40 possible characters, including a large number of optional ones, and those who can be recruited only after having completed the game for the first time. One would expect that with such an amount of characters there will be no in-depth characterization in the game. Surprisingly, it is not so. Like "Suikoden", "Chrono Cross" succeeds in precise characterization, and most of its secondary characters can compete with the main leads of other RPGs. The "meat" of "Chrono Cross" are its character-related sub-quests. Among some ordinary assignments you'll find great personal stories with convincing psychological background. Check out Fargo's story or the complex Murasame-related sub-plot (that once again involves a fantastic, almost Shakespearean sub-story about friendship, envy, and love), to name just a couple of examples.
The characters of "Chrono Cross" are colorful and charming - just look at Kid with her simple, good heart, careless approach and cute cockney accent. As it is often the case in Squaresoft's games, morally ambivalent characters are the best. Harle, my favorite character in the game, is mysterious, witty, and enigmatic. Serge's antagonist Lynx is great in his "demonic" role, and has a cool appearance - half-lynx (obviously), half-human. I also owe him the second part of my nickname.
Okay, so the story/characters part is great, what about the gameplay? The gameplay rocks too. You don't have random encounters, but that's just an insignificant detail compared to the battles themselves. "Chrono Cross" allows you to assign a turn to any one of your characters at any given moment, which alone opens many strategic possibilities. But of course it isn't all that simple. You can do anything anytime and in any order, provided you have enough stamina. Stamina is an important term in Chrono Cross' gameplay. It is required to perform an attack. The stronger the attack is, the more stamina points you lose. If your stamina is totally depleted, you can't perform any attack at all. So you'll have either to accumulate stamina to perform devastating blows or to do a couple of weaker attacks in a row, and to plan your moves in such a way that at least one of your characters will remain intact, stamina-wise, when it is your turn. Instead of magic, the characters use Elements, which sounds pretty much the same, but is not. Elements fall into the same category as items and should be readied whenever you enter a battle. Naturally, you can cast only as many spells per battle as you have previously equipped. This makes the "summon Bahamut as many times as necessary, until all are dead" strategy impossible, and of course adds some balance to the battles.
But the best aspect of the gameplay in "Chrono Cross" is its sub-quests. You can follow the main story in a standard console-style linear fashion, but you can also take your time and perform the numerous side-quests scattered around the game. It is always cool to discover some optional locations and characters, but "Chrono Cross" adds even more to this: there are several ways to complete the game, and the way to achieve the best ending is anything but obvious. Like "Chrono Trigger", "Chrono Cross" has a New Game+ option, where you can start at a killer level, and face the final boss at any time possible, achieving all kinds of additional different endings.
In case you begin to realize what a fantastic game this is, there is more: top-notch production values. Visually, "Chrono Cross" easily beats
Final Fantasy VII. It doesn't have as many CG animations, but those that are there are gorgeous, and character graphics are far superior to the blocky guys of FF7. As for the music, I guess I just have to mention that it was written by
Yasunori Mitsuda. This is my second all-time favorite video game composer, the first one being Nobuo Uematsu, the wizard behind Final Fantasy soundtracks. A company that has
two such composers employed shouldn't really worry about the quality of music in their games...
The Bad
"Chrono Cross" was never released in Europe, and I had to look for NTSC version on the net. No need to say it costed me double of what it is sold for in US. I simply can't believe why they bother not only to release, but even to fully translate some stupid games for PC, when such masterpieces of video gaming are left beyond the Atlantic and the Pacific! Especially when we are talking of a game which uses only text for dialogue. I guess it is much easier to make a crappy PAL conversion out of it without the need to invite a dozen bad voice-actors to translate the whole stuff to German?!
The Bottom Line
One time I discussed games with a friend of mine, and the moment I mentioned Squaresoft (saying how their RPGs almost always manage to be more beautiful and more convincing than other games of the same type), the friend said: "Well, Squaresoft!.. Of course! What do you want? Those guys are
artists"...
If you are wondering what the hell did he mean by this, pick up a copy of "Chrono Cross". Everything we admire in Squaresoft is right there, in this game.
