Chrono Cross
Played through this with a friend, after finishing Xenogears. It was a little while ago now - I was wanting to play PS1 era RPGs I had missed. This didn't exactly come highly recommended from chat, but it was still a game I kind of wanted to play, so what the heck. This is another wall of text with me just typing whatever comes to mind, so fair warning.
Well... There's good, and there's bad. Plot stuff will be in small text.
THE GOOD
- The graphics are solid for the time.
- Some of the songs are excellent.
- The battle "system" is very interesting.
- The early game dialogue was surprisingly touching, and got my hopes quite high - just the NPCs in the starting village impressed me.
So, this is a good start. But now I'll refute most of those points.
Some of the songs are absolutely excellent. But you know what one isn't? The regular battle song. Heck, all of the boss songs that aren't just the field song continuously playing (which is what I kept hoping for, because those were the best songs) aren't great. And you hear these all the time! It's a shame, because Chrono Cross has some stellar tracks, but you spend most of the game listening to the songs that aren't the best.
The Battle system is really interesting. I was REALLY into it early on. I noticed you could pass turns, spending a bit of stamina on each character. I was thinking of ideas like, say, having one character go into negative stamina and passing turns between the other characters to make sure it doesn't go to waste.
And the customization is cool, too! Spells you can only use once? That's really interesting!
Unfortunately - And I suppose part of this comes with a JRPG being aimed at anyone completing it that doesn't really allow grinding - anything can work. And the reason anything can work is because AOE healing is plentiful, and you get way, WAY too many spell slots for your own good. When AOE healing is so common and strong, the only way the bosses can kill you is with OHKO damage, since healing is rare. And that's dissapointing?? "Stay at full health at all times" isn't really interesting?
Seriously. Why is AOE healing so strong and plentiful? Why does that make certain colours like Blue and White and Green stand head and shoulders above the others?
I dunno, I guess I overthought it, but I was really getting excited in the first few hours of the game. The field effects seemed interesting (they aren't, always make the field the opposite colour of your opponent), the spell limits seemed interesting - maybe you'll run out of healing? (you never will since you can equip 20), and the techs made the characters - which I haven't even mentioned yet - interesting, too. (They don't. Techs are useful early game, in particular AOE techs. But after the halfway point of the game, they became ridiculously weak in comparison despite having exciting animations. Maybe I missed something.)
And the characters, gameplay wise. There's like 40 characters, and I get the idea - have so many that it's exciting, the biggest roster ever, or whatnot. And that's cool. But if you're going to have so many characters in the game that aren't plot related... At least make them interesting gameplay wise? Like, every time we got a new character it was like "they seem bad", we had to force ourselves to change characters. For example, pretty early in the game you get Luccia, thought she might be an interesting character to use (she was absolutely useless), why give you a character that's just worse in every way, with no redeeming traits or "ooh, I want to try out this move" or no interesting statlines or no interesting dialogue. Why do they exist!? I guess you might like the character designs.
As for other things... The random battles. Okay, so Chrono Cross has on field random encounters - that's great! Random Battles in videogames tend to only be good if they are balanced really tightly. Chrono Cross also has no EXP after battles, though there seems to be a system in place where the first few battles after you fight a boss gives you minor stat boosts. That's also interesting, and not a bad system at all! No one really likes having to grind for a long time. Chrono Cross also has a third system that automatically heals you after battle depending on your remaining "MP" (I wonder if this is the sort of thing that people were abusing in playtesting so they made it automatic.) This is also a cool feature. That could really let you make interesting, difficult trash encounters (they don't)
So, none of these ideas are bad. But the combination of all of these ideas means that there's no reason to fight any random enemies, ever. All they do is waste time. You will dodge every enemy - and why not? They don't give EXP. They certainly can't kill you. They can drop some useless elements you can sell for 5 gold if you're really interested in that, or you can buy them at a shop for a pittance. If an enemy does happen to catch you, it does not matter. You will lose some real life time, killing this enemy that has no hope of doing serious damage to your party. And you will be healed at the end of it. So what this results in, is you kill every enemy that is in front of a treasure chest that you can't avoid (by the way almost every treasure chest is completely useless consumables, way to go), and dodge the rest because they will just waste your time (and boy will the game make you waste your time with the cavemen that you have to kill about 40 of to make the... Yellow? Dragon appear, which have a way, WAY too long animation and come in groups of, like, five.)
And those animations are impressive, and I realize this is a problem with a lot of games of this era, but if I have to watch this random shadow cat enemy fade into the ground and slowly do its attack animation that is sort of cool the first time and not cool at all the 20th time, then... I have no idea what I'll do, but I won't like it. (To be fair, the animations are nice. They're just too long.) I'll also excuse, though it annoyed me a bit, some of the guide selling parts of the game.
Anyway, party members that got serious usetime were Skelly, Razzly, Fargo, Marcy, and... The mermaid girl... Whose name I've forgotten. Looking at stats at endgame, though, I felt we should have been using Draggy. Really could have used his high accuracy, and his other stats seemed good.
Okay, so I've gotten this far and I haven't even mentioned the plot yet.
....Man, where do I start...? This is just going to be a ridiculous rant (I guess like the rest of this post).
OK, we'll start with the only characters that exist in this game, Kid and Lynx.
Kid is an okay character. I didn't use her because it felt like the game wanted me to use her, and she probably had a lot of dialogue (and she probably should have been forced, if that was the case, or at least showed up in cutscenes regardless of whether you had her in the party. Goodness knows the party needed a voice.). She is a likable enough character, though. No real strong opinions about her.
Except, for some reason, the silent protagonist loves her? Since when? My recollection is I told her off a couple times, begrudgingly accepted her help, and benched her? Huh?
But the most offensive part, is the credits. Where, at least as far as I could understand it, the game was trying to tell me something along the lines of, "Look, Kid is in the real world now, and she's looking for you, the player! Find Kid (Or your own Kid! Don't you love her?)". I mean, how else could I take that? Kid is walking around Japan looking at the camera in real life places - that's absolutely what they were going for and did not deserve because - why would I feel so strongly about Kid!? Because she's the only character in the game? Like I said, she's okay!
So, Lynx. Lynx starts off cool enough as a villain. And then you swap bodies with him in what is actually a really cool scene. Actually, as an aside, there are a few cool scenes in the game. That one, the burning house (If I didn't get lose looking for the Lucca Ice Gun and wander around for 20 minutes, I also "love" how they programmed in a "Dragon Power Doesn't Work Here" message if you try to use the water dragon blessing item to put out the fire like you did earlier in the game, basically telling me no do our pixel hunt please and ruining all tension the scene had.) And the part with Miguel is pretty cool too and the music works well there. Then the game goes on a 10 hour padding fetch quest, but that aside...
But yeah, you swap bodies with him! Wow, what interesting things will they do with you now that you're Lynx? (The answer is nothing. Every character goes OH DO NOT WORRY THIS IS NOT LYNX and there is basically no change at all. Woohoo.) You could have done really interesting stuff with that situation but they did not.
And Lynx himself, in your body... Also does nothing? By the way, I know Villains will always let you get away with it, but "I'll deal with you later" after he takes your body is the laziest thing I've ever seen. Why? He clearly still intends to kill you, at least going by that dialogue??? At least have someone save you, or him ham it up with an "Now watch as everyone in the world hates Serge" or whatever!
So anyway it turns out that Lynx was a robot that wanted to control the future but actually he was also your father but his schemes were foiled by Robo from Chrono Trigger and Harle from an alternate Dinosaur future.
(At least that's what I got out of it!)
Like.. I just don't understand. I complained about Xenogears plot moving too fast earlier, but at least it honestly had the core of a good plot. This has... A plot...? Where random things that aren't connected to each other happen? Oh, but it's all explained don't worry, everything has an explanation, just look at our text dump at the end of the game explaining every plot point (I did understand most of them, but that didn't make them good.)
Anyway, I'm sure I missed some stuff, but this is probably too long already. I don't regret playing it or anything, because I still enjoyed parts of the game despite these complaints, and heck, it made enough of an impression on me for me to want to write this much which is something I guess. Just dissapointed. Especially in the battle system, which I was super excited for.
