Giantbomb's Endurance Run: The Third: Chrono Trigger

shadyspace said:
How does Chrono Cross connect to Chrono Trigger? Reading the Wikipedia page just confuses me :lol.
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I think it
Takes place after CT. Dalton comes in and destroys Porre. Crono, Lucca and Marle die. Their time travel messed up some dimensional something or other. Magus may be Guile. Lucca raised Kid. Takes place in the same world.

It's something like that but I haven't played the game in years so I only remember a few things.
 
shadyspace said:
How does Chrono Cross connect to Chrono Trigger? Reading the Wikipedia page just confuses me :lol.
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Takes place in the same world, in a different area populated by settlers from the Zenan continent (where Crono and company are from). It's after (Chrono Trigger ending spoilers)
the Masamune is stolen at the end of Chrono Trigger after the fall of Guardia. Dalton's Golem sent him to a Dimensional Vortex (from CT DS), and he wanted to exact revenge on Crono and co for not letting him be the King in 12000 BC. He helps out Porre to take out the Kingdom of Guardia and he steals the Masamune in the process. Oh, and Lucca raises Kid, who is Schala's clone.

Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross's overarching plots revolve around Schala, Balthasar, and Lavos, though.

Basically... (major Chrono Cross end-game and plot spoilers here):

When Crono was at the Ocean Palace, Schala--rather than teleporting herself and Queen Zeal away like in the pre-Crono being at Ocean Palace timeline--decides to save the party rather than save herself. Thus, Schala is sucked into a dimensional vortex along with the Mammon Machine to the Darkness Beyond Time (er, this was called something else in the DS's English version; I forgot). The Darkness Beyond Time is the place where all discarded timelines go (for example: when Crono and Robo go to 600 AD prior to restoring the forest, then they restore the forest to create a green area in 1000 AD, the previous timeline where the entire place was a desert prior to doing the sidequest is sent to the Darkness Beyond Time since it no longer exists. It's like... the universe's recycle bin.).

Lavos somehow comes to the Darkness Beyond Time after being defeated by Crono and his party. It fuses with Schala to create the Dream Devourer (using the DS extra as canon). Lavo's corrupt nature about destroying existence ended up corrupting Schala's mind and she ended up wanting to destroy all of existence as well. The Dream Devourer matures into the Time Devourer. Serge and his party come to the Darkness Beyond Time using the Time Egg to save Schala and defeat the Time Devourer with the Chrono Cross.

And Balthasar's role? He orchestrated the entire mess and manipulated history just to get Schala out of the Darkness Beyond Time.

(If all of that was confusing, blame it on me being tired as hell.)
 
Know what the funny part is? I left out a lot of stuff, and only summarized the general plot. Chrono Cross mucked things up. At least in Chrono Trigger, Kato had Horii, Kitase, and Tokita helping him out... I do remember Richard Honeywood (Squaresoft's main localization guy (whose first game was Xenogears)) saying that the original text had some plotholes or contradicted itself and they had to work with Kato to rewrite sections or add dialogue to expand on some points of interest.

We should just concentrate on Robo's awesome farming devices for now. >.>

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Dark Schala said:
(If all of that was confusing, blame it on me being tired as hell.)
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That actually makes more sense than most of the descriptions of Chrono Cross' plot have, likely because, as you said, you left out a lot of stuff. You touched on how Trigger and Cross line up, but Cross takes its sweet time revealing that information and even longer before it actually starts trying to make sense of it.

Which is a problem I had with the game. It spends so long drip feeding you the most confusing, boring bullshit and barely makes any use of its cast of characters. Watching the Endurance Run reminded me just how dedicated CT is to making you connect with its cast of seven characters; they all have their baggage, and in a lot of cases you have to help them confront that drama and overcome it.

In comparison, a lot of the party members in Cross largely feel like afterthoughts. Cross would've been a lot better game if they dropped the ensemble cast and just had Serge, Kid and Guile (who, unlike what they decided to do in Cross, would actually be revealed as Magus later on) power on through to the stuff that connects Cross to Trigger while ignoring all of the junk that normally bogs the game down.
 
If they really mean to end the game with the live run then it's going to be a couple hours long. Long dungeon is long.
 
Sega1991 said:
That actually makes more sense than most of the descriptions of Chrono Cross' plot have, likely because, as you said, you left out a lot of stuff. You touched on how Trigger and Cross line up, but Cross takes its sweet time revealing that information and even longer before it actually starts trying to make sense of it.

Which is a problem I had with the game. It spends so long drip feeding you the most confusing, boring bullshit and barely makes any use of its cast of characters. Watching the Endurance Run reminded me just how dedicated CT is to making you connect with its cast of seven characters; they all have their baggage, and in a lot of cases you have to help them confront that drama and overcome it.

In comparison, a lot of the party members in Cross largely feel like afterthoughts. Cross would've been a lot better game if they dropped the ensemble cast and just had Serge, Kid and Guile (who, unlike what they decided to do in Cross, would actually be revealed as Magus later on) power on through to the stuff that connects Cross to Trigger while ignoring all of the junk that normally bogs the game down.
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I hate you and everything you stand for.

Chrono Cross doesn't exist to me without Karsh, Zoah, Greco, Funguy, Norris, Steena, Sprigg, Orlha, Grobyc, Pierre, Skelly... Fuck... all the characters in that game are amazing. Chrono Cross is one of my favorite RPGs of all time. I can't think of many other games I've finished 10+ times. A part of that is all the fantastic characters that are so good even without much development.


Skelly dude. Skelly.
 
Sega1991 said:
That actually makes more sense than most of the descriptions of Chrono Cross' plot have, likely because, as you said, you left out a lot of stuff. You touched on how Trigger and Cross line up, but Cross takes its sweet time revealing that information and even longer before it actually starts trying to make sense of it.

Which is a problem I had with the game. It spends so long drip feeding you the most confusing, boring bullshit and barely makes any use of its cast of characters. Watching the Endurance Run reminded me just how dedicated CT is to making you connect with its cast of seven characters; they all have their baggage, and in a lot of cases you have to help them confront that drama and overcome it.

In comparison, a lot of the party members in Cross largely feel like afterthoughts. Cross would've been a lot better game if they dropped the ensemble cast and just had Serge, Kid and Guile (who, unlike what they decided to do in Cross, would actually be revealed as Magus later on) power on through to the stuff that connects Cross to Trigger while ignoring all of the junk that normally bogs the game down.
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I kinda agree with you, but then again I enjoyed CC's large and varied cast. I think they should've done something like the Suikoden series; they have a main cast of characters important to the story and the rest are side characters of varying importance.. everything works out quite well.
 
slaughterking said:
Six and a half.
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Wait, you're in the same region I am. And 6 and a half hours is 11PM, so the time on the site is actually my/our local time? How convenient.

Keyser Soze said:
The times on GB are usually set to the correct time for the user. Not sure if it is based on a setting for your account, or if it is a IP thing, but the time listed should be correct.
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Didn't see your post. I don't have an account, so yeah, must be an IP thing.
 
Sega1991 said:
That actually makes more sense than most of the descriptions of Chrono Cross' plot have, likely because, as you said, you left out a lot of stuff. You touched on how Trigger and Cross line up, but Cross takes its sweet time revealing that information and even longer before it actually starts trying to make sense of it.

Which is a problem I had with the game. It spends so long drip feeding you the most confusing, boring bullshit and barely makes any use of its cast of characters. Watching the Endurance Run reminded me just how dedicated CT is to making you connect with its cast of seven characters; they all have their baggage, and in a lot of cases you have to help them confront that drama and overcome it.
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Thanks. :D And I agree with all of this. The writing ends up being rather subpar, partially as a result of all the characters involved (ie: it seems as though during production, they were fixated on creating characters to accent the dual-dimension atmosphere), and also due to how messy the plot was. A lot of the game, despite leading up to
Balthasar planning all of the events of the game to free Schala by manipulating thousands of people across time and space
, seemed quite tacked-on, and perhaps 6-7 characters were sufficient enough (ex: Serge, Kid, Guile, Glenn, Riddel, etc.) to convey the overall plot properly and efficiently. There isn't really anything wrong with the Balthasar stuff (though I wish Honeywood had persuaded Kato to clarify certain issues, and make Cross's connections to Trigger more blatant rather than just cleaning up the script and rewriting things so that they didn't contradict each other), but the time it takes to get up to the Dead Sea/Chronopolis point is a little ridiculous.

Chrono Cross feels different because the original Dream Team wasn't working on it as well. While Trigger was a fun foray into Akira Toriyama's world, Chrono Cross felt much different in comparison.
Sega1991 said:
In comparison, a lot of the party members in Cross largely feel like afterthoughts. Cross would've been a lot better game if they dropped the ensemble cast and just had Serge, Kid and Guile (who, unlike what they decided to do in Cross, would actually be revealed as Magus later on) power on through to the stuff that connects Cross to Trigger while ignoring all of the junk that normally bogs the game down.
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A lot of the subplots felt rather needless. One of the ideas was to have the main character befriend anyone he meets in various towns. The original plan was to include 64 characters who had three different endings each (somewhat similar to some of the characters in the Genso Suikoden series), but the game became longer than intended, so they had to cut it down. I think they got overzealous and wanted to pack so much into the game without thinking of how it would affect the main plot and the writing for all of those minor characters fell to other staff writers, while Kato wrote the main plot. In the Ultimania, it's noted that the stuff writing these subplots had some difficulty making their subplots mesh well with the main plot. So in a way, the other playable characters' subplots were essentially tacked-on.

I wish they'd kept the Magus bit in there, though. It would have made for a more interesting plot.

Masato Kato said:
To let the cat out of the bag, in the early stages of development, Guile was indeed meant to be Magus. In our original plan, the true identity of Guile was supposed to be Magus after the events in Trigger. (At the end of Trigger, Magus [a.k.a. Janus in Trigger and Magil in Radical Dreamers] disappeared into a Time Gate to go searching for his big sister, Schala, who was lost somewhere in time.) However, as the game's development progressed and we decided to use such a huge number of playable characters, we decided not to make him be Magus. We thought it was impossible to portray the relationship between Magus and Schala adequately in this game. So we changed tracks, made the colors of the Magus character design paler, and turned him into Guile, the magician. In a way, it's a pity, as I really would like to have seen the valiant figure of Magus come to life again.
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The Radical Dreamers plot, even though Kato believes that it's an unfinished game, is more optimistic and somewhat wraps the narratives of both games up rather nicely. It's too bad that it was rendered as a tale from an alternate dimension in Chrono Cross.

I must make clear that I liked Cross's overall presentation (ex: Honne art, Mitsuda music) and battle system, though I could do without much of the subplots in the narrative in favour of a more direct approach to the storytelling and series' connections.
 
I wanted to like CC but I just hated it so much. I had zero interest in the characters, narrative, and the absence of CT correlations killed it. I made a few attempts but I don't believe an RPG will ever work out for you if you hate the characters.
 
Alright here we go. The moment of truth is finally upon them. Are they bad enough dudes to defeat Lavos?

Stealth Edit: I don't see anything.
 
Jeff's saying they want to end the ER today. I don't think they'll be able to do it without going for another 2-3 hours (depending on number of deaths and what ending they get).
 
Zombie James said:
Jeff's saying they want to end the ER today. I don't think they'll be able to do it without going for another 2-3 hours (depending on number of deaths and what ending they get).
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Can they even get different endings at this point? I thought most of them had to do with how far into the story you got before you beat lavos. They're right at the end now.
 
"Hey Patrick are you ready to take on Black Omen?"
"Ooh, ooohh. I don't like these enemies AT ALL!"
":giggles: AAAAAhhhhhhhhhh...Ultimate Damage! :giggles:"

repeat for 2 hours.
 
backlot said:
Can they even get different endings at this point? I thought most of them had to do with how far into the story you got before you beat lavos. They're right at the end now.
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Yes, depending on side-quests.

Gouda Jouji said:
It appears to be for paid members only, I don't know if that is a glitch or not.
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From Jeff: "Looks like @taswell entered the live event incorrectly into the back-end as a premium-only event. I'm fixing that."
 
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