Where Chrono Trigger focused on time travel and the resulting paradoxes and such, Chrono Cross is about multiple dimensions. Unfortunately, there's only two of them to bounce around in, unlike the five or so time periods of Chrono Trigger. *sigh* Oh well. These two worlds are called "Home World" and "Another World." Take a wild guess which is which. Now then, I haven't really gotten all that far into the game, but, despite what I heard in magazines, I don't really think what you do in one world affects the other. Actually, it's more a case that there are some things you need in one world that you can only get in the other, so you have to travel around to get the necessary junk. For example, at one point, you need something to do with a Hydra. Hydras are extinct on Another World, so what is a poor person to do but go to Home World to find the not-so-wee beastie. Then you go deliver back to Another World. Of course, killing the hydra in Home World starts all the dwarves in a tizzy there, and when you go back after a while you find that they went and ransacked the fairy village... but that's another story. Oh yeah, and be on the lookout for old buds from Chrono Trigger. Square honestly should do this more often. They rarely do little crossovers like this, but it's great when they do. The only cross-overs I currently know in the Square universe are in Final Fantasy Tactics, a mysterious "Flower Girl" sells you a flower necessary for bringing over an certain spiky-yellow haired Final Fantasy 7 friend from another dimension... complete with new "Cherry Blossom" limit break. And I just came across one in Final Fantasy 9: Zidane looks at a sword and comments, "I once knew a spiky-haired guy who used these..." Hm... I have not yet come to any CT crossovers in Chrono Cross yet. But I sorta kinda peeked in the game guide. Let's just say I can't wait to make it to that part of the story- it sounds very moving.
        Now, for the actual story line. There's this dude named Serge. Hot dude, might I add. Anyways, he likes this girl name Lina. Everybody 'round town says making her a dragon (more like mini-dragon, lizardish) scale necklace will make her like him. So you have to go get some scales. After he gives them to her, she tells him to meet her at the beach. You go, and he falls unconscious for no apparent reason. When he wakes up, Lina is gone. He goes back to town only to find out that his house is occupied by someone else, and nobody remembers him. Not even Lina! How harsh. All around town, they tell him a sad tale of how a poor boy died in their village 10 years ago, so what else is there to do but visit his grave? "Here Lies Sergey." Aww, crap. Now I think Sergey has had two close calls in life: 1) He was attacked by a panther. So now he's afraid of cats. Since at one point a lady told him the dead boy was afraid of cats, I'm assuming that means he escaped the panther in both worlds. But maybe my idea of the storyline is a bit convoluted- It's been a while since I've played this game. 2) He nearly drowned. Either one he escaped at home, but apparently... he wasn't so lucky on this world. Anyways, at the grave, he's attacked by Solt and Peppor, these incompetent lackeys of Lynx, this guy who wants Serge for something (probly cuz he's from another dimension, duh, but why?), and this girl named ::drumroll:: Kid comes in to help. The rest of the game is trying to figure out how all this happened, and find out exactly why Serge is wanted. ::stares at Sergey:: Now if their boss was female, I could understand it, but the cat-man Lynx? Something's fishy there.
        Now, throughout the game, there's plenty of little side-stories. And LOTS of playable characters. Unfortunately, you can't get every character in one game. Sometimes there's a fork in the plot, and if you go one way, you get some characters, if you go the other way, you get other characters. But, like Chrono Trigger, there's a Plus feature. What this means, is that when you finish the game, you can start a new game in Plus Mode. This allows you to retain your items, armor, weapons, spells, and whatnot from your original game, but most importantly, you get to keep your characters and their stats. So then you can replay the game and get whatever characters you missed. Sometimes you have to play it 3 or 4 times to get 'em all.

        Thank you for listening to me ramble up there. That wasn't all storyline, but it was close enough. It's all good. Now, graphics. Come on. This is Square we're talking about. They're gorgeous! Beautiful (if not rare) cinema scenes, although it seems to me that they use the polygonal people for storyline progress a bit more than they usually do, but I suppose that's okay. The polygonal people aren't the best, but they do the job fairly well. And the spells. Wow. "Pretty lights... swirling... so dizzy... but preetttty..." sums it up darn well.
        Music. How many times must I repeat myself? This is Square we're talking about here! The composer of Chrono Cross' music is the same guy who did Chrono Trigger, which is fine with me, because I've always thought CT had the best game music of all time. Many of the songs are reminiscient of the Chrono Trigger theme, but like I said, that's perfectly okay. There are also many new songs, with beautiful little voices that sound like actual singers, but I doubt they are. Computers can do amazing things nowadays. The songs almost always have an air of sadness, but that's part of what makes them so great. They all have this serene beauty to their melody. One of my personal favorites is the song used in the CC commercial spots, and is at the beginning of the game: Scars of Time. It starts with the almost depressing serenity of most of the songs in the game, but later gets a boost in tempo with a nice flute added in. One other thing that must be mentioned are some of the names of the songs: Chronomopolis, Chronomantique, etc. Most of such named songs have a resemblance to the old Chrono Trigger music, but mostly, I just think they're funny names. ::clears throat:: Anyways... The songs showcased here are "Scars of Time" (of course), Serge's village's theme, the battle theme, the battle victory theme, the Radical Dreamers (a group of "thieves") theme, and to illustrate the Home World/Another World difference: the Another World's overworld theme (at a tie with "Scars of Time" for my favorite song in the game), Home World's overworld theme (one of the few I'm putting up that resembles an old Chrono Trigger favorite- any CT fan knows, and loves, Schala's theme! The adoration of that song is most likely what made them decide on using a variation of that for the song you hear most often [excepting battle & victory music] throughout the game!), and the voyage theme for both worlds as well. "Voyage" is when you're sailing, I do believe. ...Oh my. That's a lot of music I put up there. But I do love music. Especially Chrono Cross's music. Although I loved Legend of Mana's music just as much. ::sigh:: I only wish they'd have more LoM midis... Better yet, I wish I had the LoM soudtrack. Or the Chrono Cross soundtrack, for that matter. They're both magnificent collections of music. Oh well. On to another big topic: battles.
        The battles are like any Final Fantasy, with the menus and such, but with a twist. I like the twist. It's a good twist. See, when a character attacks, they have a certain amount of stamina. Stamina gets used when you cast spells. Stamina comes back when you attack regularly. So you can't just go on a spell blitz, cuz you'll run out of stamina. So you attack. When you attack, you have this little meter that goes down with each attack you make (yes, this means multiple attacks.) There's three levels of attacks: Weak, Medium, and Strong. Strong attacks are great, but they have pretty low chance of hitting, and they take up more of your little attack meter thingy than weaker attacks. There's nothing you can do about how much of the meter it empties (btw, the stamina meter is not the same as this "attack meter" I keep talking about), but as for the chance of a hit, you can up that by doing weaker attacks. Although for some reason, when it says you're supposed to be hitting 90% of the time, it seems more like 10%. ::shrug:: Oh well. One of the few bad parts of the game. They don't like having successful attacks. Anyways, back on topic: Say you take an attack, but you don't deplete all of your little attack meter. Well then, you get to attack again! What's kind of annoying is when the baddies interrupt your little spiel of attacks, but you can always pick up where you left off when they're done. Another thing I've noticed: The baddies attack you about twice as much as you seem to attack them. Even with three characters. Ah well. Oh, and about spells: They're assigned elements. Each character is assigned elements. Why do you think they'd so a silly thing like that...? Point taken, I hope: Use opposite elements on the baddies. Fire enemy, water spell. Get it? And if you have a fire character cast a fire spell, it's gonna be stronger than a water char casting a fire spell. Ah, and this all leads us to the little three-sectioned-map-thinger in the upper left corner of the screen. It's supposed to represent the battle field. When you cast a spell, the inner section of the mini-map turns that spell's color, pushing the outer color off the map. If you fill all three sections with the same color, not only with that color spell be stronger than usual (and the opposite color be weaker), but if you're lucky enough to have a summon spell that color, you can summon it. I have yet to get a summon spell, though, so I don't know much about 'em.
        I've really got to shorten these things down... Jeez. Lookit all that. ...You do realize I probly won't shorten it down unless somebody complains though, right? Of course, if everybody says they're ok with 'em bein' long, then I'll stop worrying about it... We really need more visitors to this site. Sailors Seiji and Touma really want some input on their stories, too. And nobody can complain that it's not in any search engines- I filled out the little form. If the search engine people didn't put it in, then that's their problem. Hmph. Ok, ranting done. I'll go.

Sponsored LinksYour Ad Here

---