Instead of dancing around the fact that this is a sequel to chrono trigger let’s embrace and define what made made it special to everyone because it's hard for me not to talk about it when comparing and contrasting. To someone who might not have played a lot of RPGs, pretty much everything about the game would stand out to them and realistically they wouldn't be able to realize what actually made it special because they haven't played the games that lead to it's creation, namely final fantasy and dragon quest. I'm not going to act like trigger had an incredible story or cast of characters, because it didn't. It was fine it had it's moments and it wasn't bad by any means but it was refined, a word I could use to define the entirety of the game. I'm also not going to act like a lot of what trigger did wasn't done before, because pretty much everything was done before and it's a common misconception and because of the lack of knowledge people have everyone acts like it's the best without actually realizing it, or at least that's the conclusion I came to.

It's important to look at chrono trigger as a meta-analysis for rpgs which sounds extremely fucking pretentious and trust me it is but it means combining the efforts and work of many others work and making it one big easily digestible whole for everyone to enjoy. I loathe yapping about trigger as much as i do like and respect it but i had to get it out of the way before i started talking about this gem

What confused me about chrono cross is that all i've ever heard about it is a bunch of 50/50 bullshit where people either love it or hate it. I'm sitting here playing this fucking game and all im experiencing is what made trigger special and then some. By that i mean the meta-analysis bullshit i mentioned except it expanded on it and made everything it did even better. I'm talking about the extremely minute shit like running from boss battles, something I wouldn't have even noticed until I accidentally pressed the button and feared that I wasted a turn, only to find out that it backed me out of the fight and pulled up the menu screen so I could reorganize my magic and heal. Normally I would say that this is making the game far too easy, but because the game doesn't have a conventional leveling system it forces you to learn the combat and utilize your tools. It doesn't want you to lose 2 hours of progress unless you're a dumb ass and forgot the option to run existed because you're burned from horribly designed 90s rpgs that work against you, it wants you to learn and have fun. That is true accessibility beyond yellow paint and map markers

I can understand why it's combat might not be for everyone, because it really is jarring at first and makes little to no sense but once you understand the system it fucking rocks. I ended up liking it just as much as triggers once more magic spots opened up on my characters. What I don't understand is why the fuck people hate this story. You guys actually fucking suck for telling me it was bad stop with the horrible follow up to chrono trigger brainwashing and take the updated media literacy test. The test is enjoying this game and the price of failing is your backloggd account which will get removed if you type the words "bad follow up to chrono trigger" in your review. I think if this game had the same art style as trigger there would have been no controversy or bad follow up bullshit to be heard and everyone would have loved this game just as much if not more

I'm separating this last part from my review because i think it's the most important part of the review but just so everyone knows Masato Kato, the story writer for trigger was handed the reins to the chrono series by it's original creators because he understood the intricacies of trigger, the fucking the composer Yasunori Mitsuda even considered him to be a director of trigger even though he wasn't. He didn't ruin the story he expanded on his own work. Not sure what the argument is there. That's not to say a follow up by original creators has to be all good and no error, but it truly is a great follow up for all of those reasons and more.

Un juego extremadamente vapuleado sin ningún tipo de sentido por el hecho de ser la secuela de uno de los mejores juegos de la historia. ¿Chrono Trigger es mejor? Sí. ¿Chrono Cross es malo por ello? Por supuesto que no.
Chrono Cross es un juego fantástico y extremadamente ambicioso para los estándares de la época. Su apartado visual, su banda sonora, su diseño artístico, su combate, todos los apartados de este juego son brillantes y están a la altura de cualquier JRPG de la época. El único fallo real que tiene este juego es pertenecer a la saga Chrono y haber recibido el hate de un fandom que no supo ni entender ni apreciar el juegarral que tenían delante.

initially was going to convey this in a meaner, snarkier way for the bit but with how this game tied into trigger closer to the end i decided not to. the game is not subtle about how it feels having to follow up a dream team project like trigger and a certain set of characters basically have to refrain themselves from explicitly saying serge ruined chrono trigger, and because of that i would honestly feel kind of bad bringing that kind of attitude with this review. regardless, while i played chrono cross, the main thought that went through my head was "how is it that people thought cross didn't live up to trigger rather than the other way around?" but as i finished the game and write this review i feel as though cross didn't need to live up to trigger and that hinging its value on whether or not it does is a very childish way of looking at things.

to me, chrono trigger is a game that is held back by how near perfect it is. there's so little wrong with it that at least to me nothing really stands out anymore. there's nothing to grab onto, no imperfections to make it feel "complete" to me and as such i feel as though its reverence, while not necessarily misplaced, is harder for me to grasp because to me a "perfect" game without imperfections, as contradictory as it sounds, will never be perfect to me. meanwhile, chrono cross i found to be an amazing, thought provoking, mesmerizing game that pushed the playstation to its limits aesthetically, a game with so much to say about what it means to live and exist, what it means to dream. chrono cross is messy and imperfect in such beautiful ways, it knows its following up chrono trigger and while it still intends to be a continuation of a work like trigger it doesn't care what kind of shadow its living in and intends to be its own experience, flaws and all.
whether or not it lives up to chrono trigger is irrelevant, the arguments surrounding such are just attempts at insecure and childish posturing because these games, while connected are so different that its hardly worth comparing in that sense. i understand that nothing exists in a vacuum, let alone a sequel, but maybe it would do some people a lot of good to both understand the context of something like chrono cross while also letting it be its own experience.

Chrono Cross is on paper a sequel to Chrono Trigger. With an entirely different cast of protagonists, set in a seemingly different world at first, and with a story only ambiguously connected to the original, one can understand the contempt some fans of Trigger have expressed throughout the years.

Divorcing Chrono Cross from Trigger and judging the game on its own merits is the best way to experience the title. Luckily it provides some truly unique, yet at times, overly ambitious features to the turn based format, with a story conceptually just as ambitious.

Like many Squaresoft entries at this period of time, the pre-rendered backgrounds are downright gorgeous. Nobuteru Yuuki's lush and vivid color pallette are striking in virtually every camera fixed screen. The game from a visual standpoint is uniquely recognizable and is a huge strength, standing out from many of its drab and dreary looking contemporaries, boasting just as lively a score as well. Another feature unique to Chrono Cross is its party recruitment system. While it's certainly neat to have roughly 40 playable characters to choose from within your party, (some available/un-available depending on your choices), this forces a vast amount of party members to be skin deep in their development, albeit there's a hearty chunk of backstory and progression for more prominent characters nestled within the sidequests.

The story to Chrono Cross is a convoluted, yet ultimately, existential triumph. Sadly its poorly delivered for the most part. A large amount of its overarching themes and plot is dumped on you near endgame and the dialougue for the most part is poor. I'm assuming this is specifically due to crude localization, a problem many JRPGs suffered from in this era.

Overall Chrono Cross doesn't share the same emotional impact its predecessor conjures. Having said that, dismissing its beautiful locales, wholly diverse set of characters, one of a kind battle mechanics, and grandiose storytelling would be a shame for any Turn- Based fantatic.

Painful. While I will never subscribe to the notion that a sequel to something needs to be wholly like the original, the direction this game went in terms of narrative of gameplay is such an obvious and clear downgrade over the original that I find truly baffling. Instead of a tight cast of characters who get a lot of development and intrigue, you get maybe three characters with SOME development and about 30 who clog up the party doing nothing besides using bad accents. Instead of fluid engaging ATB-based gameplay it's now very slow turn based with the constant need to shuffle vague 'elements' depending on the situation. Instead of a plot that is thrilling to discover and learn more about, you get infodumped about 15 twists right before the game ends.

The game has excellent audio and visuals (Zoah eyes emoji) in service to a plot that is completely beneath it. Chrono Trigger never needed a 'bigger and better' sequel like this, it needed something much more concise, which ironically Radical Dreamers fills the role of much better. One of the all time most disappointing sequels.

yo, just finished chrono cross and damn, what a mess. graphics were solid for its time, but the story? hella confusing. like, who wrote this? i had to google half the plot and still couldn't make sense of it. it's like they threw a bunch of random ideas together and hoped for the best. major wtf moments everywhere. #Fail

combat system? kinda trash tbh. the element grid thing is more annoying than fun, and there are way too many characters. seriously, who can keep track of 40+ people? half of them are useless anyway. character designs are decent, but that doesn’t save the game from being a confusing clusterf***. #WhyTho

and don't get me started on the ending. left me more confused than a chameleon in a bag of skittles. music was the only saving grace, but even that can't save this trainwreck. overall, chrono cross is a chaotic mess that’s more frustrating than fun. not worth the time. #EpicFail #ChronoCross

Apesar de não desenvolver quase ninguém de forma natural ou realmente desenvolver mesmo, acho mais interessante que seu antecessor e possui um combate tão bom quanto.

A composição sonora é absurda, yasunori mitsuda cozinhou pkrl nesse camarada.

Nada a comentar tanto, faz anos que joguei e n pretendo retornar, mas é foi uma experiência agradável sim.

Another entry from my List of the Thirty-Five Best Games I Played in 2023, now available à la carte:

On Chrono Cross (Or — "How I Developed a Palate for Poison")

My grandmother doesn’t live in Vermont anymore. A couple years ago, she and I went back there together and rented a place to relive those days. Naturally, the rental had some similarities to her old place. We drove around, taking in familiar sights, waiting for the rest of the family to join us. I fired up Chrono Cross for the first time one evening, and promptly came down with a case of water poisoning.

If I believed in omens, I’d take that as a bad one. I touched a game about a character who finds himself in an eerie facsimile of home, itself the strange and twisted sequel of a beloved favorite, and it left me hurling into a toilet. The water supply we’d been drawing from was unfit for human consumption. I spent the recovery period with Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest V on DS, beneath the more familiar ceiling of a family friend’s house. I’d later start writing a non-review about how I didn’t have to play Chrono Cross, eschewing the pretense of being some aspiring member of the Backloggd “videogame intelligentsia.” I don’t need “cred,” right??

Well.

I played Chrono Trigger again in 2023 at least twice, depending on how you define a “playthrough”. The first was because I’d just finished Final Fantasy X and wanted to make some unfair comparisons. The second was because I was three-fourths of the way through Chrono Cross and…wanted to make some unfair comparisons. Even in the thick of it, I was avoiding the inevitable.

So…About the Game

Cross makes every effort possible to be anything but a clean, obedient sequel to its father. And you know what? Good. Trigger’s development was predicated on originality, and should likewise be followed up with another adventurous convention-breaker. The “Chrono Trigger 2” advocated by the likes of Johnny Millennium doesn’t appeal to me; lightning doesn’t strike twice. Still, Cross is Trigger’s opposite even in ways it really shouldn’t be.

With the exception of its original PSX audiovisual presentation, some of the most colorful and lush I’ve ever experienced, just about every one of its ideas is noncommittal and indecisive. Monsters appear on the overworld again, but you won’t find anything as deliberately paced as Trigger’s level design to elevate this from the status of "mild convenience." The conceit of its combat system is worth exploring – characters deal physical damage to build spell charges — but the deluge of party members and fully customizable spell slots amounts to a game that would’ve been impossible to balance. Level-ups are only granted during boss fights, and the gains acquired in normal battles aren’t worth the effort, so the whole thing snaps in half not 50% of the way through. It isn’t measured to account for the fact that you can take down just about everything with an onslaught of physical attacks by the midgame.

Then again, if the combat had been as challenging as the story is bizarre, I don’t know that I would’ve stuck around all the way to the end. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as gung-ho about swapping party members around and collecting them like Pokémon. Amid its spectacle and ambition, the wonder of sailing the seas and crossing dimensions, I left most events unsure of what to think, positive or negative. It wasn’t ambivalence, exactly.

SPOILERS AHEAD

It’s like this: Fairly early on, you’re given an infamous decision. One of the major protagonists, Kid, is dying of a magically-inflicted illness, and the only antidote is Hydra Humour. If you agree to go after it, you’ll find that it can only be extracted from the Guardian of the Marshes, and its death would mean the deterioration of the ecosystem which relies upon it. The dwarves and all other life in this biome would be put at risk. I weighed my options. I decided to reload a save and refuse the quest. Kid wouldn’t want her life to come at the cost of hundreds, if not thousands of others. So I start down the opposite path…

…Only to find that, in this route, a squad of human soldiers kills the hydra anyway, leaving the dwarves to flee their uninhabitable home to lead a genocidal attack on the fairies’ island to claim it for themselves. Jesus. The dwarves’ manic strangeness did little to downplay how chilling the result of my little coin flip was.

After an effort to defend the few remaining fairies and keep the dwarves at bay — leaving the survivors to process the turmoil of their new reality — after all that…it turns out that Kid is fine. She got over the illness by herself, offscreen.

For as many words as it goes on to spew, no moment of my Chrono Cross playthrough spoke louder than this one. Chrono Trigger’s party was faced with a choice — allow Lavos to erupt from the planet and drive everything to the brink of extinction, or risk everything to prevent the apocalypse. It’s a thousand years away, these three characters can live out the rest of their days comfortably and never have to concern themselves with it. They’re shown an End of Time, proof that the universe won’t last regardless of what they do, and still decide to fight on behalf of the world. It’s worth trying, if only to preserve a few more precious seconds of life for their descendants and their home.

Chrono Cross (eventually) reveals that their meddling allowed Lavos to become an even more devastating monster. We can defeat it, but who can say that won’t result in an even more cataclysmic fate? Because he lives and breathes, Serge’s timeline is worse off. It’s hard to tell whether that’s lore nonsense, self-flagellation on the game’s part, or genuine philosophizing. It wouldn’t be alone in that. As a chronic “downer,” I can’t help wondering if there’s no way to survive in the modern world without directly or indirectly participating in human suffering.

Maybe Writer/Director Masato Kato couldn’t either. He seems bent on reminding the player that they are but a speck in a cosmic puzzle, and there’s no defiant “so what?” answer to that problem. Even the thing we’ve been led to accomplish isn’t revealed until seconds before the finale of this forty hour game (and that's NOT a joke). You can’t see the credits without recognizing that it’s an unfortunate victim of mismanagement and a little too much Evangelion, but that doesn’t mean it fails to resonate. I don't think there’s another game that so thoroughly captures the existential confusion of being alive.

É uma bagunça completa. E em todos os sentidos, gameplay, a arte, os personagens, a história, é tudo bagunçado e convoluto nada como o primeiro jogo, do qual empresta apenas nomes.

Mas... por algum motivo, é cativante, nostálgico... tem um sentimento do qual eu não consigo explicar até hoje,e não sou só eu, já vi milhares de testemunhos como o meu.

É como encarar uma foto antiga de um ente querido que se foi, mas não reconhecer seu rosto, tem uma melancolia recorrente que persegue toda a jornada, mesmo nos momentos alegres e tranquilos. Uma estranheza pos-mortem. Um funeral em meio a festa, nada faz sentido logicamente, mas você sente que faz sentido (mesmo não fazendo). Bem, meu cérebro não gostou mas meu coração gostou eu acho? Não recomendo (recomendo sim).

I came to Chrono Cross ready to be in love, having seen its art direction and heard its wonderful music for years. Unfortunately, what I found was that every facet of Chrono Cross's story and gameplay feels like it was failed by an editor. The writers needed someone to trim the fat and point out that maybe multiple big reveals at the end of the game would be more impactful if any time was spent with the player to offer them emotional weight. The game designers needed someone to look at the concept of changing out elemental spells to fight specific bosses and suggest "will this not be extremely tedious when there are 30 spell slots and 60 characters you may be switching in and out of your party?" Instead, we were left with a mess of a game memorable only because of its art and character design & it's incredible soundtrack. In other words, I enjoyed Chrono Cross most before I'd played it.