Chrono Cross is a time-traveling story, but it often feels more like a ghost story, though it’s rendered in dazzling ocean colors, giving each pre-rendered background the vibe of a tropical coral reef. One day, teenage protagonist Serge tumbles through a portal to an alternate world as he picks up shells on the beach. The world has a different history: its version of Serge died as a child, and his epitaph is written on the coral above the waves. In his quest for answers, Sergi meets a raucous Australian-accented girl named Kidd, and joins the search for a sinister cat-headed man himself who is looking for something called a frozen flame.
The journey, which sees you traveling back and forth between worlds, is the foundation of a narrative in which each character, place or thing is haunted by its replacement. In one reality, a huge technological complex exists across the ocean. On the other hand, it is in ruins. In one reality, a local has become an accomplished fisherman. On the other hand, he’s an avid hermit who worships straw idols (which you can eventually recruit as a party member). In one reality, a lagoon around a fairy village has been drained, hindering a dragon; on the other hand, they are overrun by goblins driven from their homeland.
Where its acclaimed SNES predecessor, the Chrono Trigger, ran one by one, the Chrono Cross offers a universe without a past: all things that might exist at the same time, causing widespread anxiety when possibilities collide and threaten to cancel each other out, This is the ubiquitous, beautiful and terrifying ocean made by the game. This especially applies to Serge, who walks on the borderline between life and death, existence and anachronism — an indecision that led to one of the greatest plot twists of the PS1 era. But Serge is also a kind of cosmic gatekeeper, each a ghost in the mirror of the other in order to bypass obstacles and reconcile tensions between parallel selves.
Lest all of this sound off-putting conceptual or just plain old-fashioned, know that Cross is essentially a joyous world-saving adventure that alternates pain and absurdity. Check out its 45 playable characters, some of which can only be recruited in your second game: swaggering J-pop idols and witches who imitate previously defeated monsters; moody boy painters who speak Monty Python French; and clown; a skeleton clown where you slowly assemble bones. Switch to your top three teams on a savepoint or world map, these unlikely allies are differentiated by their stats and a configurable grid where you’ll insert spells – “elements” as they are here Known as – and is a unique technical ability. All have individual dramas to reveal the stretch between realities, though the size of the cast means that only a few get the depth of attention you get with party members in PS1 Final Fantasies.
The main story is thrilling, balancing the simplicity of SNES-era text boxes with the extravagant monologues of later 3D RPGs. It takes you to some creepy places. Tower-style dungeons with puzzles, including changing party orders, gleaming flooded forests, and dimensions of chaos, where paths weave together in Escher style. As with Trigger, enemies are visible on the area map and can be dodged, making those pre-boss dungeons a little less difficult to run than in Final Fantasy. The Cross is also relatively light in grinding. You don’t gain experience points and levels from regular battles, but rather useful but not essential boosts. The main story battles earn you something akin to traditional upgrades, choosing stat increases for you based on background variables; these apply to every recruitable character in the game, not just the active party, so feel free to favor or ignore companion.
The remake emphasizes this unintuitive but flexible approach to progression by letting you turn off regular encounters entirely, though you sometimes need to fight mobs anyway because they block the entrance (other than powerups, which you’ll want to do in order to gain new ones). ‘s spell and gear crafting materials, with some expanded monster mashing everywhere). You can also automate physical attacks in battle as you harvest crafting materials, regaining control with a single click.
The combat itself is perhaps the strangest element of Chrono Cross, despite its superficial resemblance to the individually-loaded, party-based combat in Final Fantasy. It’s worth digging into this aspect as I’m still having a hard time figuring out the head or tail of it myself. Unlike predictable rounds or Active Time Battle’s cooldown bars, progression is controlled by an invisible clock. Physical attacks – classified as light, medium or strong in order of decreasing accuracy – and spells or “elements” advance the time and enemies attack after a certain number of ticks.
Attacks and spells also drain your stamina, up to a maximum of 7 stamina per character. You can perform actions on each character as long as they have stamina, mix and match attacks and elements, and even switch between teammates. However, the elementals always cost 7 stamina, so will usually leave you with a deficit that must be paid off before they can act again. It’s best not to drain everyone’s stamina in one fell swoop, because if everyone owes time, the game will jump forward, causing enemies to turn more frequently.
So how do you keep your party black? Well, when characters attack or cast elementals, they also replenish their allies’ stamina, as if giving them a little breathing room. So if one character has negative stamina, you can trick the other character into re-acting by having them perform a barrage of attacks. Combat thus becomes a juggling feat, emptying one character’s stamina and then switching to another character to replenish their tank, although it’s not an equal trade for stamina points, so you can’t adjust stamina back and forth indefinitely.
with me till now? there are more. Physical attacks are also how you access each character’s spell or element, opening up higher tiers on their element grid by increasing the active character’s element level by a variable amount, etc.so also For the sake of stamina, you’re considering if you can level up your character and fire off elements before the enemy can react. As you might expect, the uncertainty of the run order is the key factor here: do you have time to increase the elemental level of a character equipped with juicy top spells, or should you prioritize lower-level healing elements in case What if the enemy is preparing his own demonstration action?
Cross often feels like a visitor from the alternate dimension itself — a sequel to the critically acclaimed RPG that, in practice, is more of a companion piece, reminiscent of PS1 Final Fantasy, but with a very different beast of battle. It’s a riveting epic that mixes sadness, whimsy, and a hint of cosmic horror without, somehow, breaking down into farce…
We’re not done yet. There’s also the matter of element affinity – fire/water, light/dark, air/earth. Characters have an innate affinity that makes them better at use and more resilient to elements with the same affinity. But the use of elements also slowly changes the affinity of the battlefield itself, represented by three concentric circles in the upper left, which in turn enhances the elements of the same affinity. So in addition to juggling stamina points and elemental upgrades, you’re tug-of-war with your opponent on terrain chemistry, trying to work your way around synergy around so that potential match-ending spells do their best damage.
There’s a lot to deal with, and the Chrono Cross isn’t always good at explaining itself. There was a series of comedy tutorial battles early on, but certain variables, such as the actual role of status effects, remained unclear. What’s more, the game doesn’t really force you to understand and master how Stamina, Elements, and Affinity work until you’re in it in a fair way — about 15 to 20 hours for me.
It’s an acquired taste, even the best. As much as I love guessing the rhythm of enemy attacks, I also miss the visible timelines of games like Final Fantasy X and more recently Othercide, which trade suspense for the ability to plan. It’s hard to know if your calculations are paying off in Chrono Cross, again thanks to an overly flat challenge curve; often, elemental levels and stamina feel like pointless inventions. However, if Chrono Cross’s combat system is vague, it could be great when things come together in the form of future bosses, in which case gauging vacancies and tweaking affinities is close range wins and party eliminations difference between. Pulling back from the details, the combat is also a delightful retelling of the game’s theme. Just as the story explores cryptically interdependent parallel histories, the combat system sees time as something bickering between opposing sides, with agent units passing back and forth.
It’s one of Square Enix’s more dutiful visual fixes, the character models get a nice makeover, and the pixelated backgrounds will mostly wither in the glare of today’s HD monitors (to be fair, there’s an option to start with Classic or Enhanced Mode – Up, rounds up those background pixels with enhanced rounding). Frame rates during combat are just as uneven as they were in 1996. Aside from the convenience of skipping encounters, the panacea for the remake is the inclusion of the Radical Dreamers visual novel, another quasi-sequel to Chrono Trigger by Serge and Kid, originally published as Satellite View. Beginning with a mansion robbery, it’s a well-crafted but lively story that’s interesting in itself and how it contrasts or complements the RPG’s events and structure: for example, there’s something like a combat system, but things like attack or defense Such options are narrative branches. One of the basic things I love about writing is that, as confusing as it sounds to explore the maze of traps and locked doors in text form, I never get lost: the description updates to reflect a factual area you’ve already visited.
Cross often feels like a visitor from the alternate dimension itself — a sequel to the critically acclaimed RPG that, in practice, is more of a companion piece, reminiscent of PS1 Final Fantasy, but with a very different beast of battle. It’s a riveting epic that mixes sadness, whimsy and a hint of cosmic horror, but doesn’t somehow unravel into farce, and if the combat system is a bit irritating, accepting it is part of the adventure . The remake isn’t a dazzling endeavor, but the game’s revival in any form is cause for celebration. I’m eager to see how players who got into RPGs after the Chrono series failed.
