View source for Chrono Cross - A Mea Culpa for a Sea of Plot Holes

===The Compendium's Role===

We instead focused our energy on drawing any link we could between games and events, no matter how tenuous, and building a unified set of principles that permitted all the events of both games to coexist in a beautiful framework—which also served as fertile ground for any fan works that would follow. This apologetic effort culminated with [https://www.chronocompendium.com/Stories/36 this feature], designed as a rebuttal to disenfranchised Chrono Trigger fans and celebration of Cross's strengths. The spirit carried over into development of Crimson Echoes, seen as the perfect opportunity to fill in the blanks with an interquel and exercise the Compendium's mighty grasp of temporal theory. The world certainly seemed to be heading in the same direction. Over the last twenty years, it seems as if displeased Trigger fans have grown smaller and smaller in number, while Chrono Cross and Radical Dreamers continue to be showered with fresh adulation. Mitsuda's arguably more remembered for his work on Cross than Trigger at this point; likewise, the game's HD remaster has brought it to a new generation of fans. While Trigger is still praised as rock solid 16-bit perfection (and perhaps the greatest RPG ever released in its generation), the heirs of the franchise—Kato and Mitsuda—prefer to speak much more at length about Cross, and view it as the torchbearer for what the Chrono series should mean for the fans.
[[Image:Plotholes.jpg|right]]
To mark the HD remaster of Chrono Cross, Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda began answering fan questions on Square Enix's Twitter account. Unsurprisingly, a large share of the questions were about specific plot points in Chrono Cross that the game never explained. Unfortunately, most of the answers were speculative and almost flippant at times; at worst, they're outright contradictory or silly. We're centralizing all the plot issues brought to light in the Q&A on this page as sort of a capstone to the entire Compendium's encyclopedia. It took [[May 2022 - Chrono Cross Radical Dreamers Edition Questions and Answers|this interview]] to finally convince us here, but it can no longer be ignored: ''The disappointed Chrono Trigger fans were right.'' Chrono Cross was the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy of the franchise:

* The original characters were all given off-screen deaths or forgotten...
* The future was made depressing and bleak, downsizing the achievements of the Chrono Trigger team, and...
* ...all of it was poorly explained and thought out, ''a la'' "Somehow, Palpatine returned."

Great writing can very easily support those first two bullet points—after all, it's often exciting when a work's theme is completely inverted. Chrono Trigger was about rushing headlong into changing history for the better. How tantalizing, then, is it to imagine what the repercussions could be of doing that? Or, say, let's explore the concept of crossing into parallel worlds, instead of changing the timeline—again, a juicy proposition to break new ground in the franchise. But absolutely none of it is ever properly explained. We are simply given no details on why the state of affairs of Chrono Cross's world exist in this configuration. Every single machination that produces 1020 A.D. is completely obfuscated and, as we've come to find out through a Q&A done over 2022 and 2023, was never properly planned to begin with.