With the release of the Radical Dreamers edition of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Chrono Cross, a whole new generation of gamers can experience one of the finest - and strangest - RPGs ever made. It was created when Square was still flush with cash from their PS1-era dominance and willing to take chances on weird experimental RPGs, even if they were meant to be sequels to iconic and indisputable classics like Chrono Trigger. Chrono Cross bursts at the seams with interesting ideas, but many of those are only half-executed, leaving a game full of dangling threads and con🍸cepts that just... don't make a lot of sense.
7 How Is Skell🦄y Still Alive? 🦄
Chrono Cross is packed to bursting with optional party members - you'll meet fairies, goblins, flu💝ffy dogs, wrestlers, and even clowns (ugh). But by far the strangest is Skelly, a literal skeleto﷽n.
You'll finꦯd his head first, early in the game, and in order to get him to join youꦆr party you'll have to embark on a bizarre quest to find his remaining body parts scattered across the world. Which begs the question: how is this literal skeleton still able to talk to you when he's broken into pieces?
6 Where Are All These Accents🍎 Coming From?
With so many party members to find and recruit, Square needed a way to differentiate between all the characters. But just giving them unique designs and individual story🌟lines wasn't enough. No, each character is also given their own unique accent. 🐻Kid, one of the game's key characters, speaks like she's just come back from a barbie in the Aussie outback, while Harle's dialogue is inflected with haughty French intonations.
Which begs the question: where are these accents coming from? El Nido is a small archipelago, distant from the mainland, which seemingly contains just a few towns and one major city. How can one small place produce so much variatio🐓n in accents?
5 ๊ Who Ar💜e The Ghost Children?
Chrono Cross' status as a sequel to the all-time classic Chrono Trigger is, counterintu🦹itively, one of the game's biggest barriers for new players. If you've played Chrono Trigger and go into Cross expecting an equally streamlined experience... you're going to have a bad time. Even the ways t🌃hat the game ties back to its predecessor are a little messy.
For instance, late in the game, you'l🍃l encounter a group of ghost children, who appea🎶r to be the ghosts of Trigger's iconic party members - meaning that the characters you know and love have died, sob. But that might not be the case. Depending on your point of view, they might also be the planet's manifestation of its memories of those party members, instead of their literal actual ghosts. Which, um... what?
4 Why Can't I Use Spells Twice In One Ba﷽ttle?
Chrono Cross' battle system is another departure from its predecessor, attempting to infuse the turn-based JRPG formula with interesting new twists. Instead of earning experience points to level up, your stats level automatically after each boss battle,💝 cutting down on grinding. And instead of using mana to cast spells, you build up stamina through physical attacks and then select a one-time use spell from a customizable grid.
But why can you only use a spell once in each battle? Sure, you could stack a grid with copies of one spell to use multiple times, but then you're cutting off other strategic possibilities. And if each spell is one use per battle, how do they recharge afterward? Does your magic just know that the battle is over, as if by... uh, magic?
3 How Did Sprigg End Up Stuck Between Dimensions? 💦 𓆉
Partway through Chrono Cross, after the game's first big twist, you'll find yourself stuck in a liminal space between dimensions. It's honestly pretty chill: the art style changes to a surreal watercolor style, the music is peaceful, and it's a nice br♛eak after havi🌌ng the whole emotional status quo of the game flipped upside down. Here, you'll meet Sprigg, a friendly goblin who's seemingly been trapped in this liminal space for years, if not decades.
But the question remains: how did Sprigg end up here? You get tossed into the void after an event that's so bonkers that it disrupts the normal rules that govern dimensions. What could Sprigg have done - or what could have ⭕happened to her - that matches up with that?
2 Why Does The Remaster Run So B💯adly?
Chrono Cross was originally released at the tail end of the PS1's life cycle, when developers were really pushing the system to its limits with cinematic camera moves and flashy particle effects. The game's lengthy spell animations were definitely impressive for the time, but🌼 there was also a trade-off🍒: in its original release, Chrono Cross' framerate was absolutely dire, as the system struggled to produce the glitzy visual fireworks that Square was aiming for.
One of the promises of the remaster, then, was that modern systems should be able to display those animations with ease. So why, then, does the game still run so poorly, with framerates regularly dropping below 𓆉30 FPS? Framerate isn'🧔t everything in a game like this, but you have to wonder what happened behind the scenes.
1 ꦗHow Is The Soundtrack THAT Good?
So sure, Chrono Cross is weird. It's got a bunch of technical issues, its s📖tory is a bit of a mess, and its interesting battle system is poorly explained and difficult to fully grasp. But despite all of those rough edges, it's also an excellent game with a lot of heart and a truly absorbing atmosphere. There's just an ineffable magic about it - if the game clicks with you, you'll know it imm❀ediately.
A big part of t♊hat magic is Yasunori Mitsuda's soundtrack. Mitsuda worked on Chrono Trigger, and that game's soundtrack is rightfully reꦑgarded as one of the best of all time, but his work for Cross is in another league entirely - just listen to "Scars of Time" and tell me it's not the best thing you've ever heard. You can't! When Mitsuda put his hands on the piano, did flames spontaneously erupt from the keys? How did he do it???