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.

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 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, 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? If so, considering that the Time Devourer is capable of ending all existence, why hasn't it already been done by some other planet's Lavos? Back to our Lavos—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?

Kato revealed in that interview that he wrote Radical Dreamers—the precursor to Chrono Cross, in which Kid is similarly de-aged and sent to the future by an unexplained mechanism—as a completely original work, only christening it a sequel to Chrono Trigger after it had been done. This was apparently good enough to copy into the backstory of Chrono Cross when planning the game, evidencing that no real thought was given to the implications or exact way all of this got started.

• How does Schala clone herself?! How does this action obey the law of conservation? And how does she send her clone through a Gate to 1004 A.D.? Was she drawing upon Lavos's power, and if so, why did Lavos allow it to happen?! And if she can create a clone within the Time Devourer's bubble grasp in the Darkness Beyond Time, why oh why doesn't she just teleport herself to safety? Did this process take 3 years, and that's why Kid arrived to 1004 A.D., or can Schala somehow open a Gate to any time period it wants, something only the Entity (and maybe Lavos) could do? Was Schala controlling Lavos to make this happen? And if so, why did she allow any of this happen to all, instead of simply defusing from Lavos and sending herself to safety again?

Same as the above—we're quite confident at this point that the details of Kid's "birth" were simply never thought out, nor exactly what happened to Schala and Lavos in the intervening time. We're at the point now where, if Schala wasn't in control, then her act of sending Kid to the future had to somehow circumvent all of Lavos's power, to the point that she should have just saved herself. And if she was in control, she had the power to do much more than sending a random baby through time, but consciously chose not to. One has to assume she had multiple personality disorder going on to entreat this.

• How are Crono and Marle defeated by Dalton and Porre? The party beat him three times in Chrono Trigger (and this is with help from his golems); how does he militarize Porre and overcome the ebullient Kingdom of Guardia? What exactly does the Fall of Guardia FMV show? Is that the Masamune which is dropped? Who was wielding it? Crono was a katana wielder; only Frog historically uses the Masamune—was he present, somehow? Or did Dalton steal the old Masamune from wherever Frog left it after his passing in the Middle Ages? Why didn't Lucca help Crono and Marle fight Dalton, or did she, and somehow escape the battle with her life? Is Dalton even still alive in 1020 A.D.? Why wouldn't Lucca devote her research to undoing this part of history, considering Dalton was an outside influence to the timeline?

Theories abound for this one, and the Compendium has bent over backwards to try and rationalize it, but it remains an extremely unsatisfying event with virtually no explanation. The FMV raises a thousand more questions than it answers. Crono and Marle are two out of a party of three that defeated Lavos, a galactic threat and canonically strongest enemy in Chrono Trigger, outside of Spekkio. How could they be defeated by Dalton, especially if Lucca were to join the fray? "Dalton gave Porre technology"—but Guardia has the greatest scientist on earth working for their cause, Lucca Ashtear! There is just nothing to good to go off, here.

• What was the panther demon that attacked Serge in 1006 A.D., considering there was no Lynx back then, and we see no panther enemies in the rest of the game? How did Schala hear Serge's random cries through the Darkness Beyond Time, and why did she even care about this random child crying? Was it because she knew Serge would be the one to eventually heal her via the Chrono Cross? If so, does Schala have absolute omniscience, or was all of Chrono Cross predestined? Schala ostensibly took this action to further Project Kid, so either she was trying to undo the Time Devourer but was under Lavos's control, or she was in control of Lavos but just actively resisting simply de-fusing herself and solving the problem; or, she had multiple personalities at war within herself? Was hearing Serge's cry just a stupid whim? Was it because she knew Serge would eventually go back to Lucca's orphanage and save Kid? If so, how did Kid survive the first time around without Serge there? And wouldn't Schala need predestined omniscience to know this again?

So very much of Chrono Cross and Project Kid completely depends on Schala hearing Serge's cries in 1006 A.D. and blowing Wazuki and Miguel off-course to Chronopolis. Without this single act, Serge dies, and there is no Chrono Cross.

• How did Kid rescuing Serge on Opassa Beach from Lynx in 1010 A.D. cause the dimensions to split? If it was the simple act of changing history, why doesn't every act of changing history cause a dimensional split? But wait, which version of Kid saved Serge, here? Was it the post-Chrono Cross, merged Schala/Kid? If so, how could this have happened causally before Serge actually used the Chrono Cross to liberate her from the Time Devourer? But seriously, what causes dimensions to split?! Was it some kind of arcane power projected by Schala from the Darkness Beyond Time, again? And as always, if she had that kind of power—the power to break a timeline in half—why not just free herself?!

Flat-out never explained, and literally the entire premise of the game rests on the dimensions being split. The whole mechanic or gimmick of Chrono Cross, boiled down—it's crossing between worlds, with no backstory ever provided for how those worlds came to be.

• Why does Home World's future see the eruption of Lavos and destruction of 1999 A.D. restored? What exactly is it about Home World that dooms it to have the Chrono Trigger team lose their battle with Lavos, or perhaps never successfully challenge him? And how does this work, anyway—Lavos was defeated prior to the dimensions splitting, but not just physically defeated—he was cast to the Darkness Beyond Time, apparently! Does that not exempt him from being "copied", such that each dimension gets its own Lavos? After all, the singular Time Devourer is still sitting in the Darkness Beyond Time; what on earth is causing Home World's future to be destroyed by the Lavos eruption again, as shown in Lithosphere Investigation Report #27?!

The Compendium came up with a badass theory to try and explain this—Branch Armageddon theory, housed in Salt for the Dead Sea. But the simple fact remains that it's never explained, and to add salt to the wound, visions of Crono, Marle, and Lucca appear in-game and accuse Serge of being responsible for Home World's future destruction. This accusation is likewise never explained.

From: Plot Inconsistencies