Chrono Cross is a narrative about time travel, but it frequently feels more like a ghost story—albeit one with vibrant, oceanic colors that provide a tropical reef’s ambiance to every pre-rendered setting. The main character, Serge, is a teenager who falls through a portal to a parallel universe while collecting shells on the seashore. This world’s history is different; Serge died a kid here, with his memorial carved high above the waves in coral. In his quest for information, Serge encounters Kid, a gregarious girl with Australian accents, and teams up with her to track down a menacing, cat-headed guy who is also looking for something known as the Frozen Flame.
You will be travelling back and forth between worlds on this adventure, which serves as the foundation for a story in which every person, object, and location is haunted by its opposite. Far over the water, in one world, lies a massive technological complex; in another, it’s a ruin. A straw idol (which you can ultimately enlist as a party member) is worshipped by the feverish reclusive local guy in one world, where he has become an expert fisherman. In one reality, a dragon cannot enter the lagoons around a fairy town because they have been drained; in another, goblins who have been expelled from their homes have taken possession.
Chrono Cross offers a universe without a past, in contrast to its critically acclaimed SNES predecessor Chrono Trigger, which operates period by period. This leads to a constant sense of anxiety as possibilities collide and threaten to cancel each other out, a dilemma embodied by the game’s ever-present, gorgeous, but terrifying ocean. This is particularly true of Serge, who teeters between the brink of existence and anachronism, as well as life and death. This irresolution leads to one of the biggest story turns of the PS1 period. However, Serge also functions as a sort of cosmic cleaner, hopping between dimensions to get around barriers and ease the tensions between his parallel personas, each of which is the ghost in the other’s mirror.
If any of this seems too cerebral or just plain gloomy, remember that Cross is really a lighthearted rescue mission that veers between humor and poignancy. Here are only 45 of the playable characters you may find, some of whom you can only find during your second playthrough: A skeleton clown you’ll have to slowly put together bone by bone; brooding boy painters and jesters who speak Monty Python French; strutting J-pop stars and hags that copy previously slain monsters. These odd partners, who may be added to your three-person party at savepoints or on the overworld map, stand out for their stats as well as the modifiable grids that you can insert spells, or “Elements,” and special Tech skills. Though the number of cast members means that only a select few get the kind of in-depth attention you’d associate with party members in the PS1 Final Fantasies, all have personal tragedies to unearth that extend across worlds.
The primary plot is exciting, finding a happy medium between the long monologues of later 3D RPGs and the succinct text boxes of the SNES period. It transports you to some eerie locations. There are shimmering flooded woodlands, chaotic universes where routes intertwine in an Escher-like fashion, and tower dungeons with riddles that require altering the order of the group. Pre-boss dungeon runs are a little easier than in Final Fantasy since, similar to Trigger, opponents are shown on area maps and may be avoided. Cross grinds rather lightly as well. You obtain helpful but not necessary boosts from regular battles instead of experience points and levels. You gain something like to a standard level-up from major plot battles, where stat gains are selected for you based on background data. These are applied to all recruitable characters in the game, not just the active party, so feel free to prioritize or disregard friends as you see fit.
Although you occasionally have to fight creatures because they’re blocking an entrance, the remaster emphasizes this counterintuitive but flexible approach to progression. Power-ups notwithstanding, you’ll want to engage in some extended monster-mashing occasionally in order to obtain new spells and equipment-crafting materials. When gathering crafting materials during a combat, you may also automate physical assaults and reclaim control with a single stick click.
In Chrono Cross, combat is arguably the most peculiar aspect of the game, despite its seeming similarities to Final Fantasy’s separately loaded, party-based battle system. I still have a hard time understanding this part, therefore it’s worth going into great detail about. An unseen time controls the proceedings instead of Active Time Battle’s cooldown bars or predicted turns. The clock is advanced by physical assaults, which are classified as light, medium, or powerful depending on how accurate they are, as well as spells or “Elements.” Enemies strike after a certain number of ticks.
You can only have a maximum of seven stamina points per character, which is also depleted by spells and attacks. As long as a character has stamina, you may use them to do things like as combining different attacks and components or even moving between teammates. However, elements usually leave you with a deficit that needs to be made up before they can act again because they always cost seven stamina points. It is preferable to avoid spamming Elements to completely deplete everyone’s stamina at once since if that happens, the game will advance and introduce opponent turns more often.
So how can you maintain a profit at your party? As if to give their comrades a little breathing room, characters’ stamina is restored when they fight or use Elements. Therefore, you may get a character that is low on stamina to act by having another character launch a barrage of assaults. Thus, fighting turns into a juggling act where you must use up all of a character’s stamina before switching to another to replenish it. However, stamina points are not transferred equally, so you cannot just swap stamina between characters endlessly.
With me up to this point? There is more. You can also use physical attacks to access each character’s spells and Elements, which raise the level of the active character’s Element by varying degrees and unlock higher tiers on their element grid. Thus, on top of managing your stamina, you’re also considering if you can level up a character and unleash an element before the opposition reacts. As you can hopefully see, the crucial element in this strategy is uncertainty about the running order: should you focus on lower-level healing elements in case the enemy is preparing a show-stopping move of their own, or do you have time to raise the element level of a character equipped with a juicy top-tier spell?
Cross is the successor to an acclaimed role-playing game that is actually more of a companion piece, evocative of the PS1 Final Fantasies but a completely different beast on the battlefield. At times, Cross feels like a guest from a parallel universe itself. It’s a captivating epic that blends humor, melancholy, and a hint of cosmic dread without ever devolving into comedy.
We’re not quite done yet. The issue of element affinities—fire/water, light/dark, and air/earth—also has to be addressed. Due to their intrinsic affinity, characters are more adept at employing and more resilient against Elements that share that affinity. However, using elements also gradually modifies the battlefield’s affinity, which is shown as three concentric circles in the upper left corner. This improves elements with the same affinity. Therefore, in addition to managing your stamina and element leveling, you’re also battling your opponents over the chemistry of the landscape in an attempt to influence the surrounding synergy in your favor so that potentially match-ending spells deal the most damage.
Chrono Cross isn’t always great at explaining itself, so there’s a lot to take in. Early on, there are a number of humorous tutorial bouts, but certain things are still unclear, such as the true purpose of status effects. More significantly, the game doesn’t really put much pressure on you to comprehend and become an expert at the elements, affinities, and stamina until rather late on—I finished it in about 15-20 hours.
Even at its finest, it’s an acquired taste. As much as I appreciate estimating the speed of enemy attacks, I also miss games like Final Fantasy X and the new Othercide that trade off suspense for a visible chronology. Again, because of the extremely mild difficulty curve, it can be difficult to determine whether your calculations in Chrono Cross are paying off; frequently, element levels and stamina feel like needless extravagances. When things do come together in the form of later monsters, Chrono Cross’s hazy fighting system may be excellent since it allows players to fine-tune their affinities and gauge openings, which can be the difference between a tight win and a party-wipe. Stepping back from the details, battle is also a fun way to revisit the game’s concepts. The fighting system handles time as something that is fought out between opposing sides, with units of agency being handed back and forth, much how the plot explores multiple timelines that are subtly linked.
While pixelated backdrops are largely left to wither in the glare of today’s HD displays, Square Enix has restored some of its more ostentatious visuals in this one. To be fair, there’s a choice of Classic or Enhanced modes at start-up, with Enhanced rounding off those background pixels. During combat, the frame-rate is just as erratic as it was back in 1996. Aside from the ease of bypassing encounters, the Radical Dreamers visual novel—an additional quasi-sequel to Chrono Trigger with Serge and Kid—is a highlight of the remaster. It was first released on the Satellaview. It’s a complex yet witty story that starts with a mansion theft and is entertaining both by itself and in contrast to or in addition to the events and structures of the role-playing games. For example, there is a fighting system-like element, but the decisions to attack or defend are narrative branching. One simple aspect of the writing that I enjoyed was that, despite the fact that it may seem difficult to navigate a maze of traps and closed doors using text alone, I never got lost since the descriptions adjust to take into account the fact that you have already been in a particular location.
Cross is the successor to an acclaimed role-playing game that is actually more of a companion piece, evocative of the PS1 Final Fantasies but a completely different beast on the battlefield. At times, Cross feels like a guest from a parallel universe itself. It’s a captivating epic that blends humor, tragedy, and a hint of cosmic dread without ever devolving into comedy. Although the combat system can occasionally be frustrating, accepting it is all part of the quest. Although the remaster isn’t particularly good, it’s nonetheless exciting that the game is being revived in any way. I’m interested to see what gamers who discovered role-playing games after the Chrono series failed thought of it.