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