Hey Compendium folks. I just happened upon someone's last chapter of their Chrono Trigger LP in my suggested YouTube videos, and for whatever reason decided to watch it. After the Lavos Core fight, I saw something I don't think I'd ever seen before. The screen flashes through all the eras, fades to white, and then (this is the new part for me:) silhouettes of the party appear facing off against the silhouette of the Left Lavos Bit. Check it out here:
https://youtu.be/fvESTN94Cc0?t=24m.
I've beaten this game countless times, and do not remember ever seeing those silhouettes. The LPer on this video skips the Black Omen, so at first I thought maybe that's what triggered them, like they were there to indicate that there's more you need to do to unlock New Game + or something. Then, I watched other LP videos where the player had completed the Black Omen and they showed up anyway (
https://youtu.be/HzCmh44xSe8?t=29m31s). One LPer (who seemed very knowledgeable about the game) was a bit surprised by the silhouettes showing up:
https://youtu.be/O_4k500z4Xs. And on other LPs, the silhouettes do not show up at all:
https://youtu.be/YJcbscptQ0A?t=37m19s. I also popped in my own SNES cart to make sure I'm not losing my mind, and sure enough, I did not get the silhouettes either.
Now some Googling and more LP-watching seems to indicate that these silhouettes never show up on the DS version of the game, leading me to believe that their appearance was unintentional. But why do they appear inconsistently in the SNES version? Is there something you have to do in the game to trigger them? Do just some SNES cartridges have the silhouettes and some not? Is it just some strange byproduct of playing the game on a certain emulator (or maybe the most commonly used ROM was taken from a "glitched" copy of the game)?
Though the silhouettes show up in a lot of LP videos, I can't imagine a ton of people have seen them, because there are a lot of implications that can be drawn from them that I've never seen discussed in my years of lurking and posting on Chrono fan forums (that Lavos survived the final battle, that maybe that Lavos Bit is what first merged with Schala, that the Bit actually "saved' Crono & co. from the time explosion thing that seems to happen at the end of the battle, etc.).
Needless to say, this has really sparked my curiosity. Just when I thought I knew everything I could know about this game, something new showed up on my radar! Does anyone know anything about these mysterious silhouettes?