this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Great game. Awful sequel.
I agree with this assessment a lot. The art and environmental design is gorgeous. The music is top notch (the battle theme is a bit polarizing though). In terms of production it's seriously well put together, for the most part. But, it suffers a lot of the worst excesses of 90s JRPG design, with a meandering, nonsensical plot and a battle system that's more interested in being fiddly than in being fun. It feels like one of the worst examples of a company just straight up not understanding the appeal of a game and making a "sequel" that could easily have been called something else. As a recommendation for someone just coming off of Chrono Trigger, I can hardly imagine something worse, oddly.
I disagree. As for the meandering, your nostalgia is blinding you to how bonkers Chrono Trigger's story is.
"You turn the corner and you're in a space station now but it's also at the bottom of the ocean and floating up in the sky at all times simultaneously and the guards are knockoffs of this one goofy karaoke cat machine your childhood friend made for some reason, now crash your TARDIS into it so you can go fight cyber god mom before she wakes up the ufo that's using our planet as an egg for the third time, your team is a super Saiyan clone with a samurai sword, the mechanic from dr slump, a cavewoman you abducted, an evil robot with memory loss, cyber god mom's goth son Dracula, tomboy princess and some frog"
The major plot points are "fighting a bridge zombie", "Ozzie's in a pickle", "showing a necklace to some treasure chests", "jailbreak", "oh no time is broken", "genre whiplash", "jailbreak again", "the time machine flies now", "did those two goblins just say by our powers combined", "eyes cream", and "time to kill god x5".
I love Chrono Trigger deeply. But the biggest sin Chrono Cross committed was that they just threw more things at the wall in their nearly identical "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach.
Sidenote: I will fight for Cross's combat system.
Whenever someone makes that claim I just assume they haven't actually played Chrono Cross.
I played CC.
Sure, the story is connected - Kid being raised by Lucca, the Time Devourer being Lavos, Guile being strongly hinted to be Magus, all that thing. But the loads of characters make you look at the big picture, instead of focusing on their individual personalities; the theme (dimensional travel vs. time travel) is different; and the battle system is nothing alike. Those things are actually improvements, but at least for me, they make it that CC doesn't scratch the same itch as CT.
And there's always that lingering melancholy in Chrono Cross that is at the same time beautiful and completely unlike the "happy" Chrono Trigger.
That's why I say that it's a great game, but an awful sequel. It doesn't have the elements that make you say "THAT is Chrono Trigger 2!", but it's fun and in certain aspects better than CT.
In fact one of the goals as stated by the team was that they very explicitly did not want to pump out "Chrono Trigger but it's got a 2 at the end of it".
Yup. In other words they didn't want to pump out a sequel. Even then that's what plenty people expected from CC, since it's "part of the Chrono series", and then got disappointed and an otherwise great game got this "but what about CT..." stigma. (I remember the outrage back then. And the kids distorting it into a SNES vs. PS fight.)
This is an interesting topic now that I think about it.