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[ElFly]

Even if you ignore the depressing aspect of most of the CT cast being fucked over, and the obvious comparisons, the game suffers a lot from being a CT sequel.

The links to CT are barely needed for the game, and where they are used, the game has to drop a lot of text on you to make it work.

Also, the final boss was a super disappointment.

 

[Varna]

Pretty much my favorite PSX (and jRPG in general) game along side Legend of Mana. Game is just incredible. I know it gets a lot of hate for not being the best sequel around, but for me it was true to Chrono Trigger were it really counted... the choices, different routes to the ending and secrets. There was so many thing that could play out differently depending on your choices. I'm not ashamed to say I played this through this game at the very least 20 times.

Yeah that was pretty obscure and I wouldn't have gotten that without GameFAQs. To get the color combination right, you had to pay attention to some random background in the last dungeon... (something like that) they don't tell you to pay attention, the last battle is a long time later, and you don't go back to that location

I didn't even know about the Chrono Cross my first few times through. Even though I did not have proper internet at the time, I'm pretty confident I ended up finding nearly everything in that damn game.

 

[yeb]

Really, battles were that you would either go Weak>Fierce>Fierce, or Weak>Strong>Fierce>Element if you needed to heal. The effects of Elements were usually so inadequate for their cost that they were simply impractical to use, especially when you could unleash a full combo with the same amount of stamina and deal more three times more damage than you would've with an Element. And fill your Element Grids with healing Elements and you were unbeatable.

This is pretty much the main reason I dislike the game. I know it's possible to get through a lot of RPGs with attack-attack-heal button mashing, but CC is the only game where it actually seems like a good strategy. You try to do something different, and it's almost like the game is punishing you. You lose a lot of stamina while regaining very little for your other party members, and you leave yourself unable to cast more spells because your elements get drained. Then you have to spend another round doing physical attacks (possibly with a weak attacker) just to get back on your feet. It feels like you're just throwing away your momentum.

Also rather revolutionary was that you could automatically heal after every battle. At the end of a fight, you'd have the option to use what Elements you had charged by the end of the fight in order to replenish the party's HP without having to go into the menu and manually do it. It's a bit surprising that they have this option which cuts out so much micromanagement when the rest of the game's systems were so sadly plagued with it. The World Ends With You and Final Fantasy XIII both took this concept a bit further to just automatically restore your health at the end of each fight, and I think both games were better off for it.

There's only one game where I've ever considered this kind of feature to be a negative, and it's Chrono Cross. Combined with the boss-based leveling system, it made regular battles feel completely pointless. TWEWY had a very fun battle system, and FF13 had some regular enemies that could actually kill you. In Chrono Cross, it just felt like I was running around with god mode on, getting no rewards for the battles whatsoever. The only way it was even worth the load time was if the enemies were dropping a new material for the next tier of weapons.

Suikoden.

The Suikoden series' castles actually provide some character development for all those throwaways. Even the unimportant farmers get minigames and some history from the detectives. They also have dozens of characters that are relevant to the story in some way.

For some reason though, I always make a connection between Suikoden 3 and Chrono Cross. They're both sequels to popular games, and the expectations for both were unrealistically high. The initial response on various boards was similar, something like "Well, I wish the game was more like its predecessor, and I hate all the weird and stupid design choices, but... the game's great! 10/10!" Then a few months later, they became games that everyone loves to hate.

 

[Lard]

Pretty much my favorite PSX (and jRPG in general) game along side Legend of Mana.

Ironically, both these games were criticised and dismissed for not being enough like their previous iterations.

These complaints are wrong.

 

[petethepanda]

Chrono Cross was my first RPG (never played them on snes/genesis or even PC; I was a dumb kid :lol ). I love Trigger, but Cross has a special place in my heart.

I would KILL for a third entry.

 

[teiresias]

I haven't played the game in forever, but I remember liking it and it's pretty convoluted plot. The whole thing with the quantum worlds intrigued me -

Spoiler

dinos living on in one, etc

- in the same way the mythology of shows like Lost and BSG intrigue me, or books like King's Dark Tower series.

My main memories are from Chronopolis and the tower(?) at the end of the game, so I remember the game as being far more melancholy than CT which I sort of liked.

 

[NeoUltima]

One of my favorite games ever.
I also don't get people knocking the game for being not similar enough to Chrono Trigger...It's not called called Chrono Trigger 2.
I can however understand the anger for it kinda retconing Trigger's story, and I admit, it hurts my appreciation for the game just a little bit. But it can't take away all the other awesomeness.

 

[Shadow780]

better game, bad sequel, best OST of the PSX era.

 

[BocoDragon]

I also don't get people knocking the game for being not similar enough to Chrono Trigger...It's not called called Chrono Trigger 2..

Agreed.

Chrono Cross would be a bad Chrono Trigger 2... if it was trying to be that. It isn't the same type of simple RPG as CT.. it's something else.

As a Chrono Trigger gaiden, it's really cool. I certainty don't think it ruined the story... I believe they enhanced the universe.

Someday I wish they would release a real Chrono Trigger 2 (just make it a light-hearted old school FF-style romp... with the same classic time travel mechanic). If they did that I have no doubt people would look back at Cross as its own thing.

 

[BlazeHedgehog]

I still don't like Chrono Cross. Too much focus on having a lot of characters to choose from - not enough of them really had any depth to their personalities.

I didn't like how far it departed from Chrono Trigger aesthetically and stylistically. Having primarily two dimensions instead of five or six time periods seriously hurt one of the cooler aspects of CT (experiencing first hand the way the world and culture evolved over the centuries).

What storyline was present was a convoluted mess that was nearly incomprehensible for the vast majority of the game. CT clearly establishes its premise (time travel) and uses that to establish the villain (Lavos) within the first two or so hours of game. Chrono Cross instead seems to delight in confusing the player and being as cryptic as humanly possible. I must've played at least halfway through and I had zero idea what was going on until I read spoilers for it years later (which were unceremoniously stupid).

Furthermore, Chrono Cross is just a boring game. The entire reason I stopped playing is because nothing compelled me to keep going. The battle system changes so dramatically that I think they lost sight of what an RPG should've actually been about (powering up your character through level-ups and buying new gear) because as I recall, you only got EXP from boss battles (which almost always guaranteed a level-up).

It was a bad game with beautiful music and some pretty environments, but it didn't feel like Chrono Trigger and the ties they tried to hook back in to CT were weak at best. The game would've benefited from dropping the "Chrono" moniker altogether and standing alone, but even then it would've still probably been boring, confusing, and left me wholly unengaged.

 

[BudokaiMR2]

I absolutely loved this game as a kid. I have never replayed it for some reason though.
The big cast could have easily been trimmed and developed better but I still managed to find likeable characters.

I love the fact that a lot of the hate seems to stem from OMG bad things ended up happening to my favorite characters, but I thought that was awesome as a kid. Even then I had thr notion that all these perfectly happy endings are cliched and boring. The revelations from CC actually hit home for me. I might just be a weirdo tho

 

[suzu]

It was all right. Not the sequel to CT I was hoping for though. I loved the soundtrack.

 

[Magnus]

The soundtrack is a masterpiece almost without peer in gaming. What a forgettable mess otherwise. I managed to enjoy the battle system and challenge a lot, but objectively speaking, it really wasn't anything special.

 

[jeremy1456]

Cross is an average game that rarely shines but frequently stinks.

The battle system was too bloated and uninteresting. Meanwhile the story was a trainwreck.

Pretty good soundtrack though.

 

[DJ_Lae]

Loved the game, although I still wish it had absolutely nothing to do with Chrono Trigger as the links served to make both Cross and Trigger worse games.

 

[aerts1js]

One of my favorite RPGS of all time. The music and art were and still are amazing.

 

[DarkPanda]

I played Chrono Cross for the first time over the summer. I thought it was an ok RPG: good, but not great. I felt that the flaws mentioned in the OP tended to overshadow the good in the game. As a sequel to Trigger, it failed miserably. The connections to Trigger felt incredibly tacked on, even at the end, and it always felt like all the CT references were forced and added after the fact. I feel like if the game had been something original instead of a Chrono game the story would have been much better. The callbacks just felt way too tacked on to me.

The battle system was just as you said: easy, with the whole element thing being a well-intended but ultimately flawed mechanic. Most battles I just went weak-middle-strong with each character, unless the initial elemental alignment let me use a spell. Which was the problem: the game discouraged you from using magic unless the field was in your favor, and you could only achieve that by using magic, but usually it was far more efficient to use normal attacks instead. And don't get me started about the hoops you needed to jump through to use summon attacks. If I wasn't so OCD about getting 100% in RPGs, I probably would never have casted a summon spell at all, nor would I have ever used a trap if I didn't have gamefaqs telling me when I needed them. You can tell they had good intentions when developing the magic system, but in the end it just encouraged you to ignore magic 90% of the time.

And I definitely agree with the too many characters viewpoint. I followed a walk-through to get as many as possible on my first play-through, but I never liked the fact that most of them were useless, or that the game encouraged me to not use 2 opposing elements together. When I

Spoiler

had Lynx, I never used a light-aligned person, because they would weaken Lynx's stuff, and when I had Serge, I never used a dark-aligned character for the same reason

. There were times when I would have loved to use, say, a wind-aligned character and an earth-aligned character, but that would have been counter-productive. The whole elemental field thing really did nothing more than discourage you from using certain characters and make summons more useless than not.

 

[ULTROS!]

I liked the game. Beautiful OST and locations (Dead Sea and Chronopolis were my favorites).

Although the story of CC made the Chrono series(?) much more convoluted than it was. Fortunately I liked the convoluted-ness of the game.

 

[djtiesto]

S-E's trend of localizing characters with shitty accents got its start here. I wasn't a big fan of CC, although I could appreciate some of its concepts and the art direction/environments were absolutely phenomenal.

One thing though, the story was pretty cool, even if it was doled out poorly (large chunks of expository text followed by hours upon hours of barely anything going on). I like the whole alternate dimension concept, the multiple timelines splitting, and some more of the complicated theory that gets you thinking, stuff that doesn't make much sense unless you really think about shit. That kinda plot was popular back in the 32bit RPG days (see also: FF7, Xenogears), but you don't find it much anymore unfortunately

 

[MomoPufflet]

Terrible game, terrible design, terrible characters, incredible music.

 

[jett]

I really liked it back when it came out. It's a beautiful game, with amazing music, and is a pretty inventive and original sequel in the way it is tied to the first game.

I'm not sure if I could play it today, the battle system isn't all that great to warrant a revisit.

 

[Prime crotch]

Great production values, and really ambitious, but shit game. Really bad design at some levels like the party system. If it weren't a sequel to Chrono Trigger I doubt we would still be talking about it.

 

[Augemitbutter]

- great soundtrack

- uninteresting battle system

- throwaway characters

- wtfisthis story

- good tech for its time

- dissappointing sequel

 

[zlatko]

I loved every bit of it. I also laughed hard one day at Gamestop when I had to have been around 14 or so when it had come out, because there was 2 20 some year old guys talking about Cross and how it wasn't even related to Trigger. At that point I had to butt in and ask them if they even beat it and in general had to explain to them how it was indeed related to Trigger, etc. They felt stupid...or felt like I was too dorky or nosy. Either way it was a good laugh. :lol

 

[Regulus Tera]

Good game with an awesome soundtrack, but still better than two of the three mainline FFs for the PSX.

As a Chrono Trigger sequel it fucking sucks though.

 

[Korigama]

Beautiful art direction, brilliant soundtrack...and a middle-of-the-road game with a nonsensical story, a bloated cast with minimal development spread out amongst its members, and an underwhelming battle system. It's probably the most disappointing thing I've played from PS1-era Square. I say all of this without having ever played Chrono Trigger.

 

[Owensboro]

- great soundtrack

- uninteresting battle system

- throwaway characters

- wtfisthis story

- good tech for its time

- dissappointing sequel

That's pretty much it. Except I'd add

- only two "dimensions"

For some reason when I played this I was all super excited about hopping around dimensions like you hopped around time in CT. I was real pissed when that didn't happen at all.

Also, 45 characters and only 2 Triple Techs? Really?

 

[Regulus Tera]

I will never ever ever ever understand the "TOO MANY CHARACTERS, BIG FLAW!" spiel. Every other critique is rational and understandable.

Because instead of having well-developed and interesting characters to form a bond with we have a bunch of meaningless faces who do shit in battle and speak in funny accents.

 

[DarknessTear]

Beautiful art direction, brilliant soundtrack...and a middle-of-the-road game with a nonsensical story, a bloated cast with minimal development spread out amongst its members, and an underwhelming battle system. It's probably the most disappointing thing I've played from PS1-era Square. I say all of this without having ever played Chrono Trigger.

What? Why not?!

 

[Korigama]

What? Why not?!

Just haven't gotten around to it (I didn't start playing RPGs until the PS1, and I never got around to trying the port of CT available for that). I've considered the DS version, but many seem to complain about it further legitimizing the events of Chrono Cross.

 

[RedFalcon]

This game has been sitting on my shelf for years. I remember I sunk about 20 hours or so into it back in the day, but never finished because I was bitter that it wasn't exactly like Chrono Trigger. Reminds me that I need to go back and give it a more honest chance. I do remember being blown away by the soundtrack.

 

[vocab]

Still garbage.

 

[GWX]

My avatar says it all.

 

[Pureauthor]

Extremely flawed on almost every level.

Except for the music. The music is superb.

 

[gokieks]

Beautiful (for the time) visuals, an absolutely amazing soundtrack, and pretty fun battle system.

But desperately needed for about half of the playable cast to be cut.

And anybody who thinks it's better than CT in anyway except graphics and (possibly) music is nuts.

 

[Mr. Wonderful]

Funny, I just saw Princess Mononoke the other day, and when the heroine gets bound to the demon-boar's head, I was like "Schala?" Haha.

 

[Parley]

I popped this in a couple of months ago because the music kept echoing in my head. I would be at work and for some reason some of the songs popped into my head.

When it came out I really didn't care for it that much. I thought the battle system was non sensical and the fights were too easy. Most of the characters were just lame and the story was hard to follow.

On the revisit I found the music was still amazing and the battle system was fun and tactical. It really pulled a lot of things together and could be a lot of fun if you just used a little strategy. While the auto equipping of elements wasn't perfect I learned how to tinker with it and really like it. While most characters still blew there were a few I focused on and really liked.

This game is great and totally worth the replay or initial play if you haven't played it.

The song that should get the most love is Chronopolis (spelling).

 

[Patryn]

The large cast in Suikoden make sense, since you're generally building an army or staging a revolution. In fact, it makes more sense to have a large cast as opposed to the usual handful of people.

There's really no reason why Chrono Cross had such a large cast. Why were all these people following Serge?

But it's still a pretty good game, and for a PS1 game it's gorgeous.

 

[Adam Prime]

I still have the Chrono Cross desk clock that came with the "Summer of Adventure" promotion for pre-ordering!

That actual game was cool. Visuals and music was great... and I initially liked the story. The whole "woah my 'spirit' is now in the villain's body!" plot twist was really cool.

But by the time I finished the story, I had NO clue what the hell happened in that game. I wish the story was more coherent and easy to follow without a FAQ.