Ha, when I saw the headline I immediately checked Yahoo! Finance for stories of the Napa Auto Parts franchise going under.
We all owe ZeaLitY a major round of applause for his recent rush of work on updating the site; I think he's balancing, what, three-to-five grad school courses at any one time nowadays? It's been pretty amazing around here.
That pic of Schala and Janus at the Ocean Palace is a real treat. There's something similar
in this Talk Battle translation that CuteLucca furnished and GlitterBerri translated IIRC. Check the bottom left corner of the page, right above the page number.
Marle's actually
laughing there, at one of the most serious points in the game. Maybe she's saying, "Whoo-boy, Crono, that was
close! I'm sure glad you weren't killed by Lavos or anything! Tee-hee!"
This is all extremely fascinating. Possibilities include the following I guess:
1. (Most likely?) Crono did not die in the original plot draft, which made it all the way to the alpha phase of production. This means that the Dream Team came up with the "shoking occurrence" whilst in mid-production, changing the course of the story in a major way. I have to wonder whether that was Kato's idea, but we might be able to link this to Final Fantasy VII's development; what scenario design team members besides Kato were both in FFVII and Chrono Trigger? Whoever thought of Cloud being indisposed may have come up with Crono dying, but that's purely wishful conjecture. It's amazing how Chrono Trigger was, in some respects, a daring testing ground for things never before done in videogame stories. That might be why Chrono is so classic. It was downright
daring.
However, this is problematic because Crono and Schala surviving in the main plot would suggest Zeal never fell, seeing as the Ocean Palace is still intact rather than being partially trashed by Lavos. Still, the Black Omen was nicely decorated in the final draft, so maybe Lavos shot its lasers through wormholes that would allow it to level Zeal without damaging the immediate environment. Or maybe this newly discovered picture shows a scene where Crono & co., plus Janus and Schala, are escaping post-Lavos encounter as water rushes in.
Also interesting is the fact that Janus is even there -- he should have been Time Bastarded by that point, or around that point. It was Kato's idea to link Janus and Magus, correct? Maybe this is even before that came into being; thus obviating the need to have Janus disappear into a black gate.
2. (Maybe less likely): Perhaps this is from a planned ending where Crono & co. defeat Lavos at the Ocean Palace. It always irked me that there were two ways to get the Developer's ending; it would have been a real treat to see what would have happened had Crono & co. prevented the fall of Zeal.
