HOLY FUCKING SHIT! CHRONO TRIGGER DS!!!

I admit this totally makes me want to get a DS (I live in a cave to I dont have one) and sure I would love to play Chrono Trigger (might as well since Ive already played Chrono Cross like 5 million times (BEST GAME EVER X)), however whats so great about CT thats CC doesnt have? Just putting that out there.

Chrono Trigger was arguably one of the best RPGs for the entire Super Nintendo Era, which is honestly saying something. The story tells of a young man named Crono who, through a few misadventures involving a princess being sent back through time and a bad ruling on a court case, becomes embroiled in a epic quest spanning multiple locales and periods of time, from fighting the Reptites of 65,000,000 B.C. to trying to help the few remaining humans of 2,300 B.C. (the far future in this game, where you begin in 1,000 A.D.) just survive in a world torn apart by the monstrous being lavos, to helping in a war between the humans and the Mystics in 600 A.D… I could go on, but point is, it’s a really good story, that manages to make time travel simple to understand and intuitive by basically taking most of the paradoxes, putting them in a box, and locking that box in the basement. The gameplay is smooth and fun with an active time battle system with combo and triple techs available with your party, the music is spot on and perfect for every locale, graphics were wonderfully done, Characters are quintessential and fun…

Well, actually, let me put it like this. What did CT have, that CC didn’t? A storyline that’s easy to understand, a small but likeable and fleshed out characters who all get their time to shine somehow, And it WASN’T a terrible concept of a sequel that did a half-assed job of trying to tie into another continuity that feels compeltely different from the original.

  • A battle theme that doesn’t make me want to stab myself in the face
  • Characters who say things and have pasts
  • Combo Techs
  • More spells, with more to differentiate them than 6 elements
  • More interesting enemies, with more to differentiate them than 6 obvious weaknesses
  • An experience system that’s relevant to the game
  • Better music. CC had about 7 or 8 really good tracks. The rest were infuriatingly bad.
  • Villains who were actually a little… menacing?
  • A pace that doesn’t put you to sleep
  • 5 Billion endings
  • A general feeling of intensity, urgency… importance. I spent most of my time with CC wishing I could just… skip what I was doing. I spent every second wondering when the stupid fetch quests were going to end and the “real” game was going to begin. Serge never walked fast enough. Conversations never ended quickly enough. Battles dragged on endlessly, each one a little more repetitive than the last. I just wanted to feel some MOMENTUM and PURPOSE. It never came.

This list is anything but thorough.

I really hope you were exaggerating when you said CC is the best game ever. I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve played that are worse.

CC was a good game, but nowhere near as solid as CT.

I love both the soundtracks though. They’re solidly tied for first place in my collection.

I looked over the OST again just now and… I totally lied. There are way more than 7 or 8 good tracks.

…What I was trying to get at was that the songs that AREN’T good… are fucking awful. Gale? The Brink of Death? Did they seriously have to put those in the game? Magical Dreamers? Optimism? Summer’s Cry? The Etudes? Was there are a reason to mar the soundtrack with this shit? Another Termina? Zelbess? KILL ME.

Also, Radical Dreamers (the end credits song, I think, with vocals) is the first song I learned to play on guitar. It’s really good.

What I thought was lame about CC was how they had characters who were really similar to party characters from CT, but different people. It was like they had originally planned to have all the old CT PCs come back, but were too pressed for time to actually write dialogue continuing their character arcs from CT. I don’t like games that seem like they were finished the night before release.

Dere was a few problems wid CT dat I noticed. Some places could get ridiculously hard if you didn’t power level a small bit before da battle. IE:Magus Battle

Personally, I’ve never played Chrono Cross, so I wouldn’t know what to say between da two games. To say da truth, dere were only a few RPGs on par wid Chrono Trigger in da SNES Era. Final Fantasy IV was one and so was da Seiken Densetsu series and Secret of Evermore. (WHY DID DEY HAVE TO RUIN SEIKEN DENSETSU II AND III WID DOSE CRAPPY SPIN-OFFS!!!)

Actually, from what I understand that’s what happened. I heard that characters like Magus WERE supposed to be playable, but some snafu over copyrights or change of plans prevented it. Certainly, they could not use the original character designs (a conflict with Toriyama?) and when the original characters finally show up (or their temporal counterparts, it’s confusing) they looked NOTHING like the CT characters.

You know, if there was one thing I liked about CC it was the part where you run into the undead Beauty Pageant Contestants. That threw me for a loop. :hahaha;

…What I was trying to get at was that the songs that AREN’T good… are fucking awful. Gale? The Brink of Death? Did they seriously have to put those in the game? Magical Dreamers? Optimism? Summer’s Cry? The Etudes? Was there are a reason to mar the soundtrack with this shit? Another Termina? Zelbess? KILL ME.

I actually really liked Magical Dreamers, and Another Termina (not Home Termina so much, though). In any case, I think you’re being unfair to it. I can only name maybe two or three soundtracks (CT, FF6 and Xenogears perhaps) in which almost every single track was easy listening. Tracks like Zelbess are meant to convey a particular emotion or background - in this case, that of a festival ship with a little too much greed and glitter - and it does it well, whether it’s meant to be listened to separately or not.

Some of my favorite OC Remix tracks are of CC songs. They really lend themselves to beautiful tunes.

Wil: The only character who was taken out was Magil/Guile, who was indeed supposed to be Magus, as he was in Radical Dreamers (the midquel of sorts). The reason wasn’t anything to do with copyright, but simply that they’d stuffed so many characters into the game there wasn’t room on the disc to flesh out his character enough. So they left him as a sort of reference.

CC is one of the worst games I have ever played. It had a few good tracks on the OST, but the OST itself was really badly used in the game. The story and battle system and characters were fucking awful. The fact they added all these pointless characters and didn’t include someone relevant like Magus (relationship to Shala, HELLO??) is stupid.

Yeeeeaaaaaaah, Mitsuko, you kinda opened a can of worms there. The people who consider Cross to be a better RPG than Trigger are a minority. If you’ve never played it, then you totally should when the DS port comes out. Just don’t go expecting a prequel to Cross the same way most of us expected a sequel to Trigger, you’ll probably be disappointed in the same way.

Anyway, another reason Cross is panned by fans of Trigger, besides for the above reasons, is how the writers of Cross seemed to treat the characters and story of Trigger. Which was poorly. Trigger had one of the most bittersweet endings I can think of, and it wrapped up (most of) the characters stories nicely. But then along came the writers of Cross, who spat on the ending of Trigger, crapped on it, burned it, then crapped on it again. Aside from two of the characters from Trigger being killed in the course of Cross Lucca, who was killed by Lynx before Cross started, and Robo’s AI who was erased by Lynx in Chronopolis, the Kingdom of Guardia falling, and the Masamune being turned into an evil possessed blade, the overall message of the story was that the heroes from Trigger messed up, and they would’ve been better off NOT doing what they did. Yeah, way to take the resolutions of such a beloved game, smash it to bits, and try to pass it off as a sequel.

For fans of Trigger, a lot of things about Cross just left a bad taste in their mouth. Some looked beyond it and still accepted it as a game in of itself. Indeed, Cross might’ve done a lot better if it cut all ties with Trigger, didn’t have anything to do with it, and was its own game, its own world, and its own story. It still would’ve had its faults, but at least it wouldn’t have had to be compared to its predecessor. Since you’ve never played Trigger, Mitsuko, you didn’t have the expectations going into it that most of us did.

One other thing I largely disliked about Cross was the lack of alternate dimensions. There were two, that’s it. Trigger had five main timelines to explore, and two others which were situational. I think Cross might’ve been a lot better if it cut about, say, 90% of the characters and invested more of that effort in making more alternate dimensions. Some really odd and bizarre ones would’ve been cool. As it stands, there wasn’t even that much of a difference between the two dimensions in Cross. They had so much potential to make the alternate dimension thing be as memorable as the eras in in Trigger, yet they pretty much failed utterly on that point.

That was Robo’s AI? Either I totally forgot about that or I missed it completely. Which is something that happened often in Chrono Cross. A lot of the story elements got clusterfucked with the huge character list, which also seemed to undermine most (if not all) of the character development.

It’s all been said already, but Trigger eclipses Cross in almost every element. Especially the battle parts, that whole “element field” thing was super lame. Not to mention that they only marginally included the tech system in the sense that most did not have any tech moves to combine with Serge or other characters. Had they done that the character development would have improved and it would have added a great deal of depth to the battle system. The story line started out great, I thought, and wound up sucking. The part where you play as Lynx was soooo drawn out.

And lets not get into those strange connections to that never-released-in-usa text based game Radical Dreamers that nobody seemed to play anyway (except Cidolfas, if I remember right).

It’s been ages since I played it, but I’m pretty sure it called itself Prometheus, but if you’ve played the Geno Dome in Chrono Trigger then you know the significance of THAT. It also mentioned Lucca specifically, if I recall right, so it can’t be anything else.

Yep, right on both counts.
And yes, most people haven’t played RD. It was only released on the Satelliview, for one, and for another, it consisted of seven scenarios of which only one or two were remotely serious.

I just wanna say that, to be fair, while there was a good amount of character development in Chrono Trigger, most characters remained pretty static. I think this was the only thing that could have made Chrono Trigger a little better, personally.

(EDIT: I wrote Chrono Cross instead of Chrono Trigger the first time. Haha, oops)

There were combo techs in CC.

I think CC was a much much better game than CT

There were only a handful of combo techs in CC, though. Whereas just about every character had combos with the others in CT (Magus was the exception, but a few special items gave him triple techs). You can’t compare the two in the slightest, it’s just something CT did better. The characters in CT worked together in ways that changed how you fought depending on who you had in the party. That didn’t matter in CC though since too many characters were similar in battle since you were inundated with them. Characters were interchangeable in CC, so many didn’t matter. You had some small changes throughout, such as elemental alignment, which would make a difference but not on the level of CT.

If you like CC more than CT, great. I can’t understand how you’ve come to that conclusion, but there’s never any accounting for taste.

I think what most people mean by character development isn’t so much the development of characters, but just… the existance of characters who have something about themselves to relate to. Depth, maybe?

But yeah CT characters were pretty unchanging.

The worst part to CC’s story I thought was the deus ex machina explanation of the entire game at the end.. You play through the game, it makes no fucking sense, on its own it is an awful series of unexplained and purposeless fetch quests, don’t even get me going on the Lynx transition, and then the designers realized all this and copped out by having someone make up a really awful and stupid fucking story about Shala noticing you cry across dimensions as she fuses with Lavos and creates a split personality.

WHAT THE FUCK?

I never even finished CC, not even close, but you just made me want to pick it back up even less.