However, there are two key differences: Stressing its theme of choices and their consequences meant that many characters can be rendered permanently missable, and its alternate realities mechanic created room for some truly innovative ideas. Composer Yasunori Mitsuda was the only one able to make his part of the game worthy of the name, but having one of the best soundtracks out there is nowhere near enough to make up for the story and the gameplay being so inferior.ģ4h 10m PlayedWhile apparently attempting a highbrow version of Chrono Trigger's time travel design, Chrono Cross is more linked to the 'open' approach of SaGa than a proper followup, with a hefty amount of optional unlockable characters and their related side quests. But comparisons are unavoidable when they've chosen to use the Chrono name and write and market it as a direct sequel. After all, most of the developers were inexperienced as the dream team was long gone and the Xenogears main staff left to form Monolith Soft. I can't blame Cross fans for finding it a little unfair to compare it to Trigger all the time. Trigger's bonus endings had unusual requirements and were relevant to what point in the story you finished them at Chross's are all unlocked in the same way and are pointless "comedy" skits or scenes that are supposed to have actually happened in the story but the developers couldn't fit them in due to the previously mentioned incompetence. It was a good idea to have a fast forward button but it's limited to new game plus which is going to be a slog even at double speed. Battles are even more of a chore when the unskippable opening flyover and unskippable three summary screens take up a minute every time, including for battles you run away from. It's also unneccesarily hard to interact with NPCs and items in the world because your character always seems to end up facing in the wrong direction. Along with the Cross-specific issues it also has the typical JRPG guidebait like characters you can only recruit by doing obscure actions and sidequests where you have to take each character to a specific room which could be anywhere in the world (and there are no clues) to get their ultimate attack. Not even the main characters get any development in the entire 50 hours, with the only changes being when characters are shockingly revealed to be related to each other (I can remember at least 3 times this happened). To be fair none of the characters are interesting enough to be worth using so you can just ignore all but the first three. This isn't limited to the story - Trigger's positional battle system is thrown out and replaced by an equippable magic system that makes all the characters play exactly the same and makes you take 20 minutes re-equipping magic and accessories every time you want to swap in a new character. These sort of plot points give the impression the creators actually resented Trigger and didn't want to make its sequel. Chrono's ultimate weapon from the first game is now, without explanation, the ultimate evil weapon that corrupts anyone who touches it. They just created a mess for the new characters to clean up. Although it takes place in the same world 20 years later the theory of time travel is changed to make the previous game's protagonists' actions not save the world at all. 68h 11m PlayedThe first 50% of the story is almost entirely filler but the last couple of hours are full of endless exposition dumps delivered by visions of Chrono Trigger characters who are implied to have all died.
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