Chrono Cross has almost impossible shoes to fill. How do you perform as a sequel to one of the greatest games to ever be released? How do you follow up a JRPG darling that took a combined superteam behind Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragonball? Well, Square decided to move the "series" in a completely different direction from the first game.
Many people, as the average rating of this game currently indicates, took an issue with this current remaster/port of the 1999 PSX classic. I did not play the original so this was my first experience with Chrono Cross, and I honestly after spending thirty some hours with this using the "new" graphics I... didn't really see a big problem? I found that textures by and large, from the characters to the text to the environments looked pretty good. I honestly really liked the watercolor-esque backgrounds, and thought the graphic upscaling/sharpening made running through an archaically designed world pretty enjoyable. Frame rate could have definitely been better when it came to fights, but the speed up feature and general ease of combat meant that I wasn't very preterbed. I think the performance and graphical overhaul was largely exacerbated as a problem by the community and made out to be a much larger problem than it should have been. It's a JRPG from 1999, it looks good enough and for the price of $20 I really wasn't expecting anything more.
For the game itself, I greatly enjoyed my playthrough as Serge and company. Combat was mostly rewarding, and the use of the innates/element system made for a unique approach to combat. The jump from Trigger to Cross in these combat systems reminded me of going from FF7's Materia to FF8's Junction system. Cross greatly shook up what was a very simple JRPG formula in it's predecessor. With Cross, each character has a stamina bar that allows them to attack a certain amount of times. These attacks grant them combat levels which the summation allows them to use magical abilities. This means that fighting for a majority of the game revolves around a dance between basic attacks and elemental powers. This took a few hours to get used to, but once I got a hang of it and messed around with my ability lineup, I found a rhythm that took me all the way through the game. Having fourty+ characters was both a blessing and a curse to this game in regards to combat. It was nice because I never felt pigeon-holed into one elemental style or grouping for my party, but I felt mostly uninterested in adding new characters to my party as the game went on because that meant re-speccing abilities and items everytime. Each character of course has their own involved story and background, but when it came down to adding them to my active team, I felt mostly unconvinced to move outside of a group of five or so. With Trigger, and again this is almost unfair as a comparison because I'd call it a "perfect" game, each character served their own unique purrpose and because of tech system there was a unique benefit to almost any combo of characters. Combat and fighting in general though was extremely easy, I genuinely don't think I've had an easier time in any JRPG that I've played, even including FF8 in which I played with the limit break always on option enabled. I got one game over in the entierty of Chrono Cross, and that was to a mostly RNG mini-boss late into the game. Other than that every fight was done with relative ease which... honestly I'm alright with? This was a game that I wasn't playing for the difficulty or depth of combat, much like Chrono Trigger, it was for the atmosphere and story.
Now for the story of Chrono Cross, up until about three-fourths of the game I honestly had this pegged as a 4.5 or 5 star game, as the mystery of the story had me glued to the screen. I was constantly theorizing about the relation this game has to its prequel. How could they relate? How does Trigger lead into this? Does this character seem familiar? I ran through these questions as I spent every waking hour triyng to complete the story, however as it went on and the lore dumps occurred, I became a little less interested. The story became rather... convoluted and strayed away from Trigger's thought provoking simplicity. I appreciate the dev team for trying to get weird with the story and taking risks in the telling of time travel and the two worlds, however it didn't pay off asmuch as I would have liked it to. I just think Chrono Cross got a little bit too much in the late game lore explanations.
One fault Cross has in relation to Trigger that became more apparent as I went on was the "too many cooks" dilemma. I'll give them credit, they really did the best job to create interesting enough stories and backgrounds for the expansive cast, but I think this came at a detriment to the emotional storybeats of the game. Trigger was a game riding high on emotion of the tightly knit party and their motives. Chrono and Marle were close like lovers, Lucca was Chrono's childhood friend, Robo had a story full of loneliness and tragedy, Frog was a fallen hero and Ayla was... Ayla. These characters had motives and passion that was apparent and prevalent at all parts of the story. With Cross you have a story that features a great deal of the recruitable characters in your party. Many of the members in your team make appearances as main dialogue options or centerpieces of action, meaning that I never really knew who I should have had in my party as certain points. It became tough to be attached to some characters knowing they'd have their fifteen minutes of fame, then go dark for ten hours of gameplay, and come back as a center focus of certain narrative elements. Sad character backstories were relegated to retrieval of their techs, and many you never visited more than once. To boot, the one character in this game who is packed with more time in the front and center than anyone, Kid, I absolutely couldn't stand. She was supposed to be the Marle type for Serge, the one that would always be there for him, his emotional centerpiece. She is billed as the star crossed lover, however had a real "tough girl" attitude that didn't match what the narrative was trying to portray her as in relation to Serge.
The soundtrack is another masterclass by Yasunori Mitsuda, the same hero behind Chrono Trigger's OST, however this time I felt like it was a little bit weaker as many soundtracks were when they made the jump from the 16 bit SNES era to the MIDI PSX tunes. Certain remixes of Trigger songs that made their way into Cross were very well done, like the main theme and victory fanfare, and new songs like Kid's theme and the second to last boss theme were fantastic, however I think the expansive nature of this game and jump in technology hurt it a little bit for me when it came to music.
Overall though, I had a great time playing Chrono Cross and it is nice to finally be able to mark it off my list of Square classics to play. If you like any other games from Square-Enix's legendary run in the 90's including Chrono Trigger, or like JRPG's in general, Chrono Cross is a worthwhile playthrough. I wouldn't let detractors of the game's performance or graphical changes be a deciding factor personally.
Many people, as the average rating of this game currently indicates, took an issue with this current remaster/port of the 1999 PSX classic. I did not play the original so this was my first experience with Chrono Cross, and I honestly after spending thirty some hours with this using the "new" graphics I... didn't really see a big problem? I found that textures by and large, from the characters to the text to the environments looked pretty good. I honestly really liked the watercolor-esque backgrounds, and thought the graphic upscaling/sharpening made running through an archaically designed world pretty enjoyable. Frame rate could have definitely been better when it came to fights, but the speed up feature and general ease of combat meant that I wasn't very preterbed. I think the performance and graphical overhaul was largely exacerbated as a problem by the community and made out to be a much larger problem than it should have been. It's a JRPG from 1999, it looks good enough and for the price of $20 I really wasn't expecting anything more.
For the game itself, I greatly enjoyed my playthrough as Serge and company. Combat was mostly rewarding, and the use of the innates/element system made for a unique approach to combat. The jump from Trigger to Cross in these combat systems reminded me of going from FF7's Materia to FF8's Junction system. Cross greatly shook up what was a very simple JRPG formula in it's predecessor. With Cross, each character has a stamina bar that allows them to attack a certain amount of times. These attacks grant them combat levels which the summation allows them to use magical abilities. This means that fighting for a majority of the game revolves around a dance between basic attacks and elemental powers. This took a few hours to get used to, but once I got a hang of it and messed around with my ability lineup, I found a rhythm that took me all the way through the game. Having fourty+ characters was both a blessing and a curse to this game in regards to combat. It was nice because I never felt pigeon-holed into one elemental style or grouping for my party, but I felt mostly uninterested in adding new characters to my party as the game went on because that meant re-speccing abilities and items everytime. Each character of course has their own involved story and background, but when it came down to adding them to my active team, I felt mostly unconvinced to move outside of a group of five or so. With Trigger, and again this is almost unfair as a comparison because I'd call it a "perfect" game, each character served their own unique purrpose and because of tech system there was a unique benefit to almost any combo of characters. Combat and fighting in general though was extremely easy, I genuinely don't think I've had an easier time in any JRPG that I've played, even including FF8 in which I played with the limit break always on option enabled. I got one game over in the entierty of Chrono Cross, and that was to a mostly RNG mini-boss late into the game. Other than that every fight was done with relative ease which... honestly I'm alright with? This was a game that I wasn't playing for the difficulty or depth of combat, much like Chrono Trigger, it was for the atmosphere and story.
Now for the story of Chrono Cross, up until about three-fourths of the game I honestly had this pegged as a 4.5 or 5 star game, as the mystery of the story had me glued to the screen. I was constantly theorizing about the relation this game has to its prequel. How could they relate? How does Trigger lead into this? Does this character seem familiar? I ran through these questions as I spent every waking hour triyng to complete the story, however as it went on and the lore dumps occurred, I became a little less interested. The story became rather... convoluted and strayed away from Trigger's thought provoking simplicity. I appreciate the dev team for trying to get weird with the story and taking risks in the telling of time travel and the two worlds, however it didn't pay off asmuch as I would have liked it to. I just think Chrono Cross got a little bit too much in the late game lore explanations.
One fault Cross has in relation to Trigger that became more apparent as I went on was the "too many cooks" dilemma. I'll give them credit, they really did the best job to create interesting enough stories and backgrounds for the expansive cast, but I think this came at a detriment to the emotional storybeats of the game. Trigger was a game riding high on emotion of the tightly knit party and their motives. Chrono and Marle were close like lovers, Lucca was Chrono's childhood friend, Robo had a story full of loneliness and tragedy, Frog was a fallen hero and Ayla was... Ayla. These characters had motives and passion that was apparent and prevalent at all parts of the story. With Cross you have a story that features a great deal of the recruitable characters in your party. Many of the members in your team make appearances as main dialogue options or centerpieces of action, meaning that I never really knew who I should have had in my party as certain points. It became tough to be attached to some characters knowing they'd have their fifteen minutes of fame, then go dark for ten hours of gameplay, and come back as a center focus of certain narrative elements. Sad character backstories were relegated to retrieval of their techs, and many you never visited more than once. To boot, the one character in this game who is packed with more time in the front and center than anyone, Kid, I absolutely couldn't stand. She was supposed to be the Marle type for Serge, the one that would always be there for him, his emotional centerpiece. She is billed as the star crossed lover, however had a real "tough girl" attitude that didn't match what the narrative was trying to portray her as in relation to Serge.
The soundtrack is another masterclass by Yasunori Mitsuda, the same hero behind Chrono Trigger's OST, however this time I felt like it was a little bit weaker as many soundtracks were when they made the jump from the 16 bit SNES era to the MIDI PSX tunes. Certain remixes of Trigger songs that made their way into Cross were very well done, like the main theme and victory fanfare, and new songs like Kid's theme and the second to last boss theme were fantastic, however I think the expansive nature of this game and jump in technology hurt it a little bit for me when it came to music.
Overall though, I had a great time playing Chrono Cross and it is nice to finally be able to mark it off my list of Square classics to play. If you like any other games from Square-Enix's legendary run in the 90's including Chrono Trigger, or like JRPG's in general, Chrono Cross is a worthwhile playthrough. I wouldn't let detractors of the game's performance or graphical changes be a deciding factor personally.