So Late The Party Is Over: Chrono Cross

R

Richiban

Member
So, I found this game for 15 bucks yesterday and have just started playing it.

The Jury is out right now, and I'm deciding whether or not to continue.

Am I just being biased by comparing it to Chrono Trigger or is it a lacklustre game?

The battle system is confusing the hell out of me, though I seemed to have gotten the hang of it a little more this morning as I was playing before work.

The opening cut scene showed some promise.
 
The battle system isn't that confusing. Just start with weak attacks and build your way up to stronger attacks. When you get a combo going, it raises the % of the attacks.

I thought it was a good game, though it had some faults. Too many characters and I only used like 5 of them anyway. Although I have to give them props for having different dialogue for each character, must have been hell for the translators
 
Pros
Nice towns and worldmap
Fucking awesome music
nice graphics/art style (on emulator).

Cons
Boring characters
Average battlesystem
Bad storyline

Conclusion
Overall an average RPG. Get ePSXe emulator and PSX emulator cheater, use cheats to beat the game fast.
 
definitely not a perfect game.

I like the battle system though, but it seems incomplete to me.

I think the game has poor art direction, and in general with few exceptions poor extremely character design.

I was baised the first time I played it, but its not a bad game. Never finished it though.
 
I loved this game so much. I would say the most underrated RPG ever and quite possibly the best soundtrack of any game ever.
 
I would say that Chrono Cross is pretty far from average in nearly every respect, but not always in good ways. I love the story and music . The Battle system can also be fairly strategic, at least until you get too powerful, but where Chrono Cross fails, it fails badly. The excessive number of bland, uninteresting characters is exacerbated by the fact that there are no strong characters to feel attached to, especially because the only character who is never optional is a mute in a heavily story-driven game.
 
I loved it. The soundtrack is one of my absolute favorites of all time (up there with CT and Atelier Iris Eternal Mana).

I agree that there were too many characters, though. More characters means you sacrifice character development (except for the main characters). There were a lot that I never used.
 
Yeah, the soundtrack was great. Although, heh, I'm convinced they ripped off an Apocalyptica song for the overworld theme.

As for the rest of it, I thought it was well done. Personally, I've never been impressed by too many RPG stories (or any videogame story for that matter), so I didn't care too much by the ton of characters that everyone bitches about. They had a couple interesting spots that related back to CT and that did enough for me.

The fact that it dropped EXP and random battles was a real breath of fresh air. I remember having a really hard time playing FFIX after CC. The battle system was kind of neat too, just being able have some mild amount of strategy, even if it was that important.
 
Richiban said:
Am I just being biased by comparing it to Chrono Trigger or is it a lacklustre game?
Click to expand...

I really think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had a different name. That was too much to live up to and it didn't even come close.
 
Yusaku said:
That was a good year for Square.
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Yep. I remember when they were releasing like 1 game per month that year. Vagrant Story, Front Mission 3 and Chrono Cross was good stuff
 
Doom_Bringer said:
Pros
Nice towns and worldmap
Fucking awesome music
nice graphics/art style (on emulator).

Cons
Boring characters
Average battlesystem
Bad storyline

Conclusion
Overall an average RPG. Get ePSXe emulator and PSX emulator cheater, use cheats to beat the game fast.
Click to expand...

BAD STORYLINE!?
I thought it was one of the best parts of the game...
The whole thing with FATE was pretty shocking
And Lynx was damned cool, didn't see it coming...
 
Beautiful Music

Shit characters (and there are too fucking many of them!)

Story makes NO GODDAMNED SENSE

Should have spent the money making a sequel to Chrono Trigger instead of a remake of Radical Dreamers
 
The story is kind of cool when you realize:
it's actually about a clash of two different endings from CT: the normal ending and the reptite ending

But the characters sucked. I figured I wouldn't have minded all the characters since I like the first 2 Suikoden games, but they seem to at least give the Suiko characters more distinct personality beyond just funny accents. IMO the game would have been a lot better with 7 or 8 playable chars and the rest just important NPCs.
 
I like the art and music, but everything else wasn't very good. I liked some of the characters, but then you could never really get attached to any of them. And since you couldn't get attached to them, you'd wish you could at least be able to switch between which ones you want to use a lot at will. But a lot of the time whole groups of characters were blocked off from you, and they aren't carried over to New Game+, and you were forced to use certain (often dumb) characters at different times (I suppose this is why you couldn't get attached to any of them)

There seemed to be little point in stat/attack development a lot of the time. It pretty much took care of itself, so it often felt just redundant and pointless. Characters had some signature attacks and all, but it wasn't worth it to unlock them and when you did it was unrewarding as it is. I think that's the overall lack of character depth seeping into the battle system. And the storyline is soooo confusing. Just go to gamefaqs and read the storyline faq or the chronology, I can't make any sense out of it and it's too complicated to even really want to.

I really wanted to like it, everything was so beautiful and it had big potential, but it was just overall too mish-mash and the characters didn't deliver. I think the makers needed to realize that it isn't the situations (like
getting caught by a big bug and working your way out of it's swamp, or sneaking into a robot-guarded castle
) that make things endearing and interesting, but those you go with and what those situations show you of them. In a similar manner complexity in a storyline is only good to add depth and breadth to a clear overall message.
 
I loved the game. It was not perfect (the story fell apart on the second CD), but it's far above everything Square has done this generation.
 
Crono Cross is in the traidition of Crono Trigger (which it is a sequel of) and Zelda.

The main character is mute for a reason, because you are the main character. This is not far from the mute Mario in Mario RPG, the mute Crono in Crono Trigger and a mute link from all the Zelda games. It isn't meant to be a story driven RPG in the way the Final Fantasy games are, the Crono Trigger games are from a different mold in this respect.

It was absolutely my favorite RPG of the 32/64 bit generation. The music was wonderful.
Too many characters, yes, but unlikme most of you, I identified with the main character quite a bit. But maybe that's because I projected myself onto him.
 
Wuster said:
Crono Cross is in the traidition of Crono Trigger (which it is a sequel of) and Zelda.

The main character is mute for a reason, because you are the main character. This is not far from the mute Mario in Mario RPG, the mute Crono in Crono Trigger and a mute link from all the Zelda games. It isn't meant to be a story driven RPG in the way the Final Fantasy games are, the Crono Trigger games are from a different mold in this respect.

It was absolutely my favorite RPG of the 32/64 bit generation. The music was wonderful.
Too many characters, yes, but unlikme most of you, I identified with the main character quite a bit. But maybe that's because I projected myself onto him.
Click to expand...

I don't buy that excuse of you being the character. You are playing the game through Serge's eyes, no one elses.
 
The best thing about the game was its music.

Actually, that's about the only thing about the game I liked. :/ What a pathetic follow up to a truly great RPG.
 
I liked it, the story and characters were average but they were not generic some of the charactes had nice quirks (Harle). The battle system was a welcome change to me and the music was probably the best of any psx rpg. The only thing that was truly bad was the ending...it seemed underwhelming and
wtf is with the live action Kid in the city
 
I don't buy that excuse of you being the character. You are playing the game through Serge's eyes, no one elses.
Click to expand...

Not an excuse. Since you obviously can't put yourself into the game, any game where the hero is mute and is injected into the story in such a way that he or she behaves like a 'blank slate' is pretty much you playing through their eyes. This is no different than playing Link in the Zelda games, which is widely regarded as an extension of the player in the game world and not a full fledged character in the classic sense.

Serge may have a more fleshed out backstory behind him and exist in a much more intricate story, but he's more or less the generic 'hero' type character of a heroic adventure and was intentionally designed to be that way. Crono from Crono Trigger was the same and Serge is based from that precedent.
 
Richiban: You should definately continue playing the game.

The battle system confused me at first, but when I got the hang of it I realized it kicked ass.

I wouldn't say the storyline sucks, or is bad, it was just very confusing. Maybe I'm not the brightest bulb out there, but there were plenty of places, ESPECIALLY nearing the end of the game, when I hardly knew what the fuck I was doing, or why. I'd have to say that the storyline wasn't very compelling, either, and I didn't care for the characters at all. I loved the characters and story from the first game, so I was hugely disapointed in this regard.

The fun battle system, amazing and nostalgic chrono trigger inspired locales and character designs and music were easily enough to make the game enjoyable for me, though.
 
Best RPG on PSone and my favorite RPG ever. Loved every fucking thing about it. And it deserved every single ten it got.

Character Designs were gorgous, destroy everything in Trigger as much as I love Toriyamas art in it, not to mention the spectacular art direction, levitated by some of the most gorgous graphics on PSone, the fantastic battle system whose only flaw was a cumbersome camp interface, a great story and great replay value.

Slays chrono trigger in every respect.
 
Wuster said:
Not an excuse. Since you obviously can't put yourself into the game, any game where the hero is mute and is injected into the story in such a way that he or she behaves like a 'blank slate' is pretty much you playing through their eyes. This is no different than playing Link in the Zelda games, which is widely regarded as an extension of the player in the game world and not a full fledged character in the classic sense.

Serge may have a more fleshed out backstory behind him and exist in a much more intricate story, but he's more or less the generic 'hero' type character of a heroic adventure and was intentionally designed to be that way. Crono from Crono Trigger was the same and Serge is based from that precedent.
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If I do not get to control some aspect of this character that is supposed to be me, then I do not consider it me.
 
Originally Posted by Coin Return:
Does it deserve the 10 that GS gave it?



Yes.
Click to expand...

Chrono Cross is a 10. Let's find out why:

Pros:
Top Tier graphics for the PS1
GORGEOUS music by Mitsuno-san. (You. Torrent site. Frozen Flame. Now.)
Good characters, (They had a psychic Lucho Libre priest! End of argument! :P )
Innovative, tight battle system. (At the time, many RPG's were incredibly staid)
Excellent plot that seriously knocked my socks off, (Have trouble with it? Ask, and I will explain. I do that for FFT all the time.)

Cons:
Not like Chrono Trigger, but since the team lost mucho talent between Chronos, that's understandable but not a hindrance, seeing as CC stands on its own two feet nicely.
 
Hello GAF! I like to be an idiot! said:
"Hello GAF! I like to be an idiot!"

"Will be purged sooner or later"
Click to expand...

WTF :lol :lol

Anyway I refuse to play this game due to the change in character designs. A CT game is not a CT game unless Toriyama is doing the character designs. Fuck you very much SE for not letting AT do the designs and giving the game those shitty ones in instead.
 
isamu said:
WTF :lol :lol

Anyway I refuse to play this game due to the change in character designs. A CT game is not a CT game unless Toriyama is doing the character designs. Fuck you very much SE for not letting AT do the designs and giving the game those shitty ones in instead.
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Cue- but everything looks like Dragonball Z argument.

The character art and design was fine.
The only problem with having more characters were that most were shallow but a few like Glenn and Co made up for that.


Okay explain this what is up with the
'real' Schala\Kid ending? Is she looking for Serge in an alternate dimension or what?
 
So because you didn't get to play with a couple of Dragon Ball Z characters...forget it. It's hopeless.
 
Fresh Prince said:
Cue- but everything looks like Dragonball Z argument.

[/SPOILER]
Click to expand...

Ding ding ding.

Noboteru Yuki>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Akira "hay guys all my chicks look like Bulma, Arale, and and 18" Toriyama
 
Chrono Cross was just lackluster overall-- the soundtrack was its only saving grace. The character designs were outright gaudy and the only thing distinguishing the main characters' personalities were gratingly annoying accents. The story was a jumbled mess of random events peppered with Chrono Trigger references that I was too bored to care about.

I'm amazed I managed to play through the entire game but I did. I kept clinging to the hope that it would eventually get good. It didn't.
 
Always list this in my top list of games, normally first. Loved it to bits when I first played it, and I still listen to the soundtrack this day.

I've always wanted to play it again , wonder if it can stand the test of time.
 
Kweh said:
Always list this in my top list of games, normally first. Loved it to bits when I first played it, and I still listen to the soundtrack this day.

I've always wanted to play it again , wonder if it can stand the test of time.
Click to expand...

It can. I played it through again recently for the 3rd time, really great game.
 
If I do not get to control some aspect of this character that is supposed to be me, then I do not consider it me.
Click to expand...

You control all aspects of the character. He's the only person you can't swap out from your lineup.

In any case, what I was trying to get at was the 'Link' model to the adventure hero. Like C. Trigger's Crono, Serge goes through a Campbellian 'hero's journey' and in these sort of journeys, the male hero (usually it is a male) is a empty 'blank slate' type character where boys who are hearing the story from the village elders can project themselves onto those roles. Obviously as stories, the main characters need not be mute, but in a game, one way to allude to the hero is to make him such a way that he is merely a puppet extension of the player in the game world to create a similar effect.


This mute hero motif was implemeted quite deliberately and Crono from C.T. was the same and it worked for both games in what they both tried to achieve.
 
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