Crimson Echoes, yay or nay?
Yes, it's great, it feels a little off at first (Crono talking and all) and the frog/ayla ship halfway through is... odd (but it's only one sentence and doesn't get mentioned again, easily ignored) but once you get used to it (and maybe read some fan stuff on Chrono Compendium) it's amazing.
They were spot on with their events and theories (all of which were confirmed in CT
S),
is a great Villain (Knocks the queen and Lynx out of the water in my opinion), and all the characters (bar Crono, whose kinda a lovable jerk in CE, for some reason) feel natural and consistent with CT (they also managed to keep their development from CT, they all act more maturely than in CT and their new character arcs feel like further development that builds on their arcs from CT).
Lucca and Robo are especially great in this regard.
They even predicted some story beats in CT
S, namely Magus developing time magic and fighting the dream devourer, Dalton being the worse guy ever who you will hate forever and really wish would just die, and some small stuff.
The game fits perfectly in the expanded lore from Cross/CT
S.
As for the gameplay, it's a bit buggy, all quests and side quests can be completed, though 2 specific quest rewards (the lion helm and shock suit IIRC) don't get added to your inventory, though these are hardly needed and the side quests are good enough just for the extra story.
Use a gameshark code to level up to lvl 15 at the start though, the game is brutal at the start but I've found increasing your level to lvl 15 at the start actually makes the game feel real rewarding, moreso than CT (which, lets be real is really easy after your first run). you'll level up naturally from there and you won't need to grind after that.
It works so well I suspect your supposed to start at that level, they just didn't implement it yet.
As for what version (I've played them all), I'd recomend the 98% leak of CE.
FoE (flames of eternity) doesn't fix nearly as many bugs as they advertise (and added a few more themselves) and the other changes they made are meh at best:
- They made Glenn Human, but his sprite is poorly animated and gltichy and it looks like his legs are broken when he runs. His frog form just looks better. there's a reason the CE team cut human glenn from their game (they were using the same sprites and technical limitations on glenn's frog sprite carried over to the new one, so they had to fit in onto the same sprite dimensions as the frog sprite, which results in the weird legs).
- Glenn also speaks in his SNES Shakespearean accent, but only sometimes, which is inconsistent and jarring when one sentence he's speaking normally but then a line later he's back to his SNES self.
- They changed the tech names to Final Fantasy names, like changing lighting III the thundaga, Spinstrike to zentetuken, ect. Doesn't really affect anything but it's just feels weird.
- Changes a scene to include a bunch of Robos dancing to Luccas theme, wut.
- they also messed the balance up even worse, at the very start of Chronopolis you can by a weapon for Magus with a 25% critical chance and 9999 damage on criticals, plus a whole bunch of other OP stuff. it's clear it was an attempt to rebalance the difficulty of the hack but it was a really low effort attempt. starting a level 15 works way better than what they did.
- They also ban you from their site the second you mention crono99 or the other original devs (and also mini-raided the original dev's site, and slandered them on youtube), but I've seen people here not care/defend this, so w/e.
