Chrono Cross seriously feels like a game that Square just walked in one day when they were about 80% done and said "You should tie this in to Chrono Trigger!"

And then made them release it when they were only 83% done.

lol plagiarism
 

Truth.

You know what? I'll go so far as to say that if you took Chrono Cross, stripped out all the "Oh yeah Guardia um er... it's dead now! yeah that's the ticket!" bullshit and just made it about a bunch of shady dudes gettin' up to shit on a collection of islands, had the end boss just be a bunch of evil-ass manipulative Voltron-dragons that unite to form Generic Ultimate Scary Evil, then went through and stripped out all the other stuff that wouldn't make sense no matter how hard you hammered it out, then filled in the missing 20% of things that explain everything else and stuff that would make the battle engine feel actually finished, you might very well have a solidly mediocre-to-somewhat-good game on your hands.

Or at least something no more offensive than say, Grandia III.

Agreed!

Well I'm pretty sure that everyone can agree that they made this totally great game, saw that Radical Dreamers still wasn't in the US, and mashed it together with duct tape and super glue.

I think what he was going for is that you can't allow in-game stats to affect the way plotline works.

I mean hell, if you New Game + you've got Luminaire and an attack/speed score of Fucking Huge (AKA **), and yet Crono gets knocked out by one blow when he enters Guardia castle.

HOWEVER, it's a good example of how assbackwards Chrono Cross is in it's ties to Chrono Trigger considering in CT you had to have Spekkio unlock your magic for everyone to even get magic, where as Chrono Cross (Twenty years later, but feh, whatever) you just get elements, something that's even less defined than Materia.

Chrono Cross had a great fighting engine, and the music alone was totally worth it. But it really was "Seriously, This Is Your CT Sequel, Now Shut Up: The Game."

Fair point. Though it's worth noting that it at least makes sense on the original playthrough based on likely player-character power levels at the time.

True. But I would have at least preferred a Golem or First Gades encounter style fight, where you don't have to win, but you can.

But his Aeris example is spot on.

You had me, then you lost me.

First Golem fight in Zeal - You don't have to win, but it's perfectly possible. First Gades fight is from Lufia II and it's the same thing.

And if this is about Aeris, yeah, okay, maybe that's not a good example.

What if CC wasn't a sequel, but a prequel?

In Chrono Cross, the final boss was essentially a fusion of Schala and Lavos. However, what you see in the far future of Chrono Trigger was clearly just Lavos by himself - no hint of Schala remaining in him at all.

So what if the second's games events were what originally happened? Serge doesn't simply forget everything that he did; instead, he ceases to exist at all. Rather than Crono and Marle being the ones erased, they were the ones that came from the world that resulted in Schala trying to fight against Lavos. Schala, being unable to directly fight against Lavos herself, leads Chrono Trigger's heroes all throughout history - ensuring that their actions do have an effect in the world they're living instead of creating entirely different dimensions like before.

That was actually sort of like a theory I'd read somewhere a while back, wherein the events in both games were both the cause and repercussions of each other. Something like Crono's group defeats Lavos which causes the remaining Lavos bit to mutate into the Devourer of Time, which causes the entire timeline to get all fucked up to the point that Crono's group never stopped Regular Lavos, so Serge's group defeats Time Devourer Lavos and sets things more or less right so that Crono's group is once again able to defeat Regular Lavos and continue the whole paradoxical cycle. It was all very odd and brain-hurty, though, which is always what happens when you try to reconcile the two games.

However, Leah from Cross was supposedly Ayla's mother, which means that by fixing whatever massive fuckup that caused her to get dumped in Serge's time as a child allowed the entire Ayla/Zeal/Guardia bloodline to even exist, so there is some merit to the idea.