Difference between revisions of "Chrono Cross - A Mea Culpa for a Sea of Plot Holes"

Revision as of 03:45, 8 December 2023

General Information

When we first started the Chrono Compendium in 2003, fan disappointment with Chrono Cross was still very fresh. As someone who only played Chrono Trigger for the first time in 2002, I took an open-minded approach to it, embracing both games from the desire to link them as an established canon, using the Compendium to centralize all the details, lore, and theories that would bridge the gap. There had to be value in this exercise, right? Cross was a beautiful game—the music was sweepingly romantic and poignant; the art style was delicious and popped off the PS1's renderer, and in general, the game's emotional flourishes struck heartfelt and sincere. My recency to the series spared me the betrayal that many Chrono Trigger fans felt when discovering that none of them served as player characters, and most were implied to have met untimely, tragic ends. Likewise, the Compendium's positive approach of seeking answers led the fans here beyond the point of simple frustration with the game's inscrutable plot.

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 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.

In truth, Chrono Cross was the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy of the franchise. The disappointed Chrono Trigger fans were right. It took this interview to finally convince us here, but it can no longer be ignored:

• The original characters were all given off-screen deaths or forgotten, and...
• 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.

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:

• Schala is sucked into the Darkness Beyond Time by the defeated future Lavos in the Ocean Palace—but how and why? Is this a power every version of Lavos has when defeated? Why was the defeated Lavos sent to the Darkness Beyond Time in the first place, having been physically destroyed by the Chrono Trigger team? How does this avoid the Grandather Paradox, considering Schala was sucked into the DBT prior to Lavos actually being defeated?

The

To mark the HD remaster of Chrono Cross, Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda began answering fan questions on Square Enix's Twitter account. Fans came out in droves to ask specific plot points about Chrono Cross that the game never explained. Unfortunately, most of the answers were speculative and almost flippant at times, revealing that the development team barely thought through the plot of the game beyond the emotional moments concocted for dramatic effect. 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.

From: Plot Inconsistencies