I think if you got to the final boss you’ve earned the right to just watch the ending on youtube instead of going through a 40 jrpg again
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I completely agree, but in the last 20 years I’ve forgotten everything that happens in the game, so that ending wouldn’t hit so hard now.
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No, got pics?
You had the guide written by Jeremy Parish then written before it came out in English.
Weird how much of the gamefaqs info on this game in particular is based off frustrated incompetent Japanese even though it has been in English for 20 years now.
one of my friends imported weird dreamcast semi-game creation thing dream studio, then printed out this faq and put it all in a ring binder. i don’t think he ever actually used it to make anything though.
one of these days i’ll play chrono cross, it looks nice, and it’s one of the big square ps1 rpgs that never came out here.
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This is literally decades later and about a game I only played for maybe a half hour once but was Chrono Cross the PS1 jrpg with the… outside the box bit near the end that drove people nuts? (That’s about as vague as I can make it).
These cavemen with their 10 second attack can fucking shove it.
Good Night to the Pirate Captain with estranged child, you got eaten by a Dragon because your steal Skill never worked.
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Maybe? You only get a bad ending for beating the final boss, and the good ending requires using a specific set of elements hinted at near the end of the game,. I remember this being difficult with the final boss getting in the way.
This was fairly low on the usual list of gamer complaints about Chrono Cross though
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How can this skill that just Reveals Enemy HP fail every time (3 times I tried) and thus learned to never ever use it.
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Yeah, I think that was it. FWIW I think half the people I’ve known who played the game to the end complained about that.
Either that or I’m crossing things up with Valkyrie Profile >_>
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I’ve consumed 30 hours of Chrono Cross in the past 7 days. The reckoning is coming.
They really thought this was a one disc game then when “whoops” make it two we got a week and this game has to be 50 hours or the buy-sell turn around is gonna kill us.
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RIP to the pretty boy captain with a Real Gun and his enemy General leader both gunned down by a Mall Security Robot working at SpaceX.
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I have finished Chrono Cross. Did I play it too much in a week? Yes. The reckoning has come.
The battle system sucks. I hated it by the end. Like the rest of the game and so many PS1 RPGs it has all the time microaggressions to just make the game longer. I should have just cheated to unlock fast forward but I remember when I tried the modern port of FF8 and the death grip I had on the fast forward button just made me so sad I quit.
The battle system sucks. It wastes your time so much with the elaborate beautiful incredible animations. Using defense is instant. To remind you it could be fast. What made it a slog though is how it will interupt your decision making process at any time for the enemy attack which again takes too long and then dumps you back to try and remember or replan your strategy. The enemies taking action does not refill your stamina only your party taking actions which again can be interrupted.
I admit I save stated the good ending which turns out doesn’t do much as it is just barely longer than the cut to credits bad ending. The theme of the good ending I feel got lost among the six other things the game is actually about.
Essay Outline the six things Chrono Cross is actually about.
- Perfect Summer Island Vibes
- What if a game just had a million characters you could recruit?
- What is a sequel to Chrono Trigger?
- Parallel Worlds
I admit when it said I am the Chrono Trigger I screamed.
As someone who also recently played Xenogears this is coherent. They clearly had a plan for the story and the game and the world. I don’t think those three mesh well. The last dungeon of the game they just turn to the player and explain the plot to you. It is sad and cop-out.
Is it a love story? Not at all though it seems to make attempts that that is the point? It has the structure but Serge and Kid have no relation for the whole game. Throwing that in at the last second just left me scratching my head.
The game is stunningly beautiful and playing it on PS1 and wanting to see the next environment and enemy design (I don’t think they ever do a pallette swap) is the true driving force for playing it to the end. The game never dissappionts visually. The relationship to Chrono Trigger is legit cool.
Is it worth playing? I really don’t know. It is so obtuse and you absolutely need a guide because aimlessly wandering sucks so bad because again the dozen little time wasting microaggressions and the battle system’s horrendous pacing.
I’ll be thinking about it for a while
More Clear Spoiler Talk
The actual plot being about what gave the crew of Chrono Trigger the right to play god is cool. That there is this cumbersome 4th dimensional chess between Scala and FATE and Kid and Lucca and Lavos and The Dragons is cool. Unlike Xenogears it does in fact make sense. That it still boils down to you RPGing a god to death for nebulous reasons sucks. Then it is actually about the bond between Serge and Kid that is…eternal? Romantic? Platonic? Extant? Wasn’t this about rescuing your girlfriend who comes back at the end? And she says Summer Vacation is just beginning before “Time of Your Life” starts playing over black and white footage of the game?
I like that we are dealing with fall out of Chrono Trigger and what ifs and about 15 issues of Mu, which hold on.
Issue of Mu baby. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was a parasite and we’re the infection!!!
Cool story but what does this have to do with Serge and company? Somewhere between fate and concidence? Why is Serge collecting all these people to his cause. What is his cause? To take down Lynx…until a point. There’s also that invading army from somewhere and an insurgent and maybe people are living in fear? Then serge emerges full formed from an egg?
The concept of FATE is literally a cybernetic ghost of Christmas past…from the future. And maybe Lynx represents that?
Again this is all stuff the game turns to you and says but a plot description is not a replacement for a plot. Like I thought it was legit cool when Xenogears characters narrate stuff on disc 2. The characters of Chrono Trigger as children telling me, the player, what is actually happening completely undigetically is a failure.
It also keeps going on about Love and Hate are the same thing. What is the meaning of life? I am unclear what that has to do with the actual theme of the game. Seems incidental. Which like 80% of the game is incidental to The Characters of Chrono Trigger Face Consequences For Their Actions.
Is it better than of the PSX Final Fantasies? NO. God it is so pretty though. tenouttaten title screen.
Sorry this is scatter shot but even 12 hours later I can feel all the ideas and thoughts I had draining from my brain because to repeat myself again There Are Themes but also a lot of stuff that is coherent to itself but not congruous with The Themes. Which unlike Xenogears (a giant pile of nonsense) or FF7 (extant but not extrapolated.)
But this was like one of the last big 20th Century Games I’d never played. Go me on wasting time!
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In short I wish this game hadn’t been controlled by the need to be 50 hours long and demand a strategy guide.
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I was literally at the penultimate boss before I remembered I didn’t get the Chrono Cross. Which I think one NPC makes a vague reference to in a cutscene and never again.
4th post the “solution” to the good ending being an elevator lighting up before that penultimate boss just…wow. Something you see once and wouldn’t have even clocked as important.
5th Post: Congratulations to Cybernetic Robot Assassin and Kungfu Waitress for carrying me through the credits.
Also doing the secret boss for the best weapon for Serge is an absolute requirement. The solution for that also took 10,000 monkeys at playstation controllers.
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tbh though:
I would argue THAT is what makes CC significant even today:
When was the last time you felt So Many Things to say about a game?
It was the same thing for me when i played it in 2012, it left a lingering feeling and not because i wanted to scream 
, but because it was such a mixed bag of ‘brilliant!’ and ‘whyyyyy’ and ‘what’s THAT supposed to mean?’
and tbh, barely one of the other PS1 RPGs managed to have the same impact for me, even my much and dearly belived FF9.
Is that a sign that CC is good?
Idk, but it lingers on in your mind, and that’s something not many games manage to do, so yeah, that’s worth something 
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Sure you can mash X through garbo battles at 4x, but can you READ at 4x? The real JRPG nuts can!
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