Endings

[ZeaLitY]

Perhaps he could hang around with Melchior. I'm really apt to create a couple new rooms with the future Blackbird tileset once it's ready, like a conference room or something like that.

If I recall...Gaspar had to retrieve the Chrono Break or something in the original, original plot. But other than forge weapons or give advice, Melchior and Gaspar don't do anything else. Perhaps we could work them in on at least one field assignment? It was always cool in James Bond when Q went out into the field. Similarly, it was cool to have Belthasar right there in Viper Manor (if only we could ask him questions!). Perhaps it could be part of a sidequest. I've still got one more class to go before I have free time, so any ideas are welcome.

[Daniel Krispin]

I guess this has nothing to do with 'ending', but it would be kind of neat to see Gaspar show his power. The guy shouldn't be named the Guru of Time for nothing. All his actions to this point have been reserved and with a long reach - and though his times had great importance, they don't figure nearly so prominently as Melchior's (in the way of the Red Knife) or Belthesar's (his involvment in events needn't even be mentioned, they are so numerous.) The thing is, personally, I think it would be kind of neat to see him arrive on the scene, look to the left and right, and cause a sort of temporal freeze in the enemies - halt everyone where they are. Do you think that would be too over the top, though?

[nightmare975]

I still think that he should be the one to help them out of the DBT at the end.

[ZeaLitY]

Okay, I'll add him there.

~~Preserving something from the other thread~~

I forgot about the Chronopolis thing. We can resolve it in the ending. The Chronopolis chief notes that Belthasar appeared out of "nowhere" with the Time Research Lab. Perhaps we can justify it by Belthasar noting at the end that he's going to renovate Chronopolis for his ultimate plan, and that he'll need the Central Regime's vast resources for a grand experiment he's going to conduct. He's going to reveal his "private lab" after dismantling certain aspects to the Central Regime, which will jump on the opportunity and move things to the sea of El Nido. This will also enable Belthasar to use the Frozen Flame.

[Daniel Krispin]

I still think that he should be the one to help them out of the DBT at the end.

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of a hopeless battle, and he steps in out of nowhere, and freezes everything. Sort of like in the movie X-Men 2 when the professor gets everyone to stop near the beginning of the movie.

[Chrono'99]

#  ? - SCENE: King Zeal is lying down in an undisclosed location. Magus enters and they share dialogue. Magus notes that King Zeal will tell him all the secrets of the dark arts to help him find Schala. King Zeal laughs.
#  ? - SCENE: If you completed all the sidequests, the bonus scene appears.

What should we do about these? I was about to tackle the coding of the Magus/King Zeal cutscene, but I realized we don't have dialogues for it (or are they somewhere?). We can definitely code these bonus cutscenes up, but I think we may agree that if I or Jsondag write the dialogues, instead of Zeality, the result might not be perfect (at least compared to the 1005 AD cutscenes that come just before them).

[Vehek]

It's in the bug submission form. (Bug #1252)

[Agent 12]

I think we may agree that if I or Jsondag write the dialogues, instead of Zeality, the result might not be perfect

haha....yea....

Zeality took pictures of some of the dialogue I wrote just for laughs. albeit I knew it wasn't going into the final product.

You'll be able to close bugs 1252, 1248 and 1249  and maybe 1250 if you want?( Sweet )  You can check belth's little sidequest speech to see the bits that can be used to see if  sidequests were completed, and you can check bits in the end of time to see if the developers ending is done.

It'll be nice when that table is empty.


--JP

P.S. Since you and vehek are both checking what NPC's / Dialogue do you want for your appearance in game?  Vehek I think you may have PM'd me awhile ago about this sorry for not getting back to you...

[Chrono'99]

Alright, this takes care of the Magus cutscene.

Concerning the bonus scene, I don't know if we're thinking of the same thing. Actually I...think I might have made a big mistake by forgetting to post the content of some PMs sooner. There's some huge information and it's not on the wiki or the forum so we're probably not all aware of it (sorry :/ ).

I realized today that CE doesn't use a lot of Key Items. Jsondag2 e-mailed me and we discussed how the party would attack the Frozen Flame in the Ocean Palace to lure King Zeal out, and I proposed Belthasar give the party a "Annihilation Agitator", which will stimulate the Frozen Flame with Annihilation energy. This will react with the Flame's Anti-annihilation energy, causing high levels of energy to attract King Zeal. The party would keep the Agitator afterwards, and Belthasar would tell the party to use it at the top of the Spire of Telos to gain access to the DBT.

But then I remembered that every game in the Chrono series has a Time Egg. So I was thinking...

• Belthasar gives the party a Time Egg to help open a hole to the DBT in the Spire of Telos.

If you didn't do all the sidequests:

• The party uses the Time Egg to access the DBT at Telos.

If you did all the sidequests:

• Crono, who still has the Entity-meld, feels all the dreams of the people he's helped. He feels enough power to use the Entity's latent temporal energies to open the Gate to the DBT.
• The party keep the Time Egg. At the end of the final battle (or perhaps for some other use), the party use the Time Egg on the Time Devourer (or King Zeal, Schala...anyone there).
• This unlocks a special scene in the ending.

Still, I don't know what the Time Egg could be used for, or what the scene could be. Maybe the Time Egg could be used to skip a boss battle by violently removing an enemy...or perhaps it could be used to save a person at the DBT by Gating them to the safe End of Time. We already have the scene that displays always, with Magus telling King Zeal to teach him temporal magic. Does that mean this Magus scene takes place before Magus visits the Dream Devourer?

Anyway, this special scene...I imagine it could be a period after Chrono Trigger, after Crimson Echoes, and after Chrono Cross. I have no plans right now for a next project, but it still might be fun to hint that more adventures take place. It could be a simple meeting between characters, and someone mentions the "Chrono Break"...

Sorry for the late answer...I was a bit busy with midterms. The Annihilation Agitator idea is good. As for the Time Egg, I've been thinking maybe it could be used by Crono and Marle to leave for other dimensions:

• Just before the final battle, perhaps we can have King Zeal taunt the Dream/Time Devourer, with magic energy or something. The Devourer would react by randomly opening destructive wormholes from Telos/DBT to various other dimensions. This is kind of reminiscent of the Dimensional Vortices of CTDS, except here the wormholes are destructive; they rip and absorb what they touch and make a few dimensional spaces collapse. The party express their shock at the destruction in these places, since they were unrelated to their conflict.
• The final battle and first part of the ending play as usual. After the monarchy is abolished in Guardia, a short extra cutscene shows Crono and Marle reflecting somewhere (Leene Square?), saying that most of their ties with Guardia have been severed now that people and history have decided to go on without them. The outcome of the dialogue changes depending on whether you did all the sidequests:

If you didn't do all the sidequests

• They say that now they'll be able to live as normal people and that it's not that bad. They'll remain in Guardia to try to make things better and help rebuild Truce. They mention Lucca, who will also help with the orphans.
• The credits + the Magus and Belthasar cutscenes play, and that's it.

If you did all the sidequests

• Instead of remaining in Guardia, Crono and Marle decide to use the unused Time Egg to explore the dimensions affected by the Devourer, to see the extent of the destruction, to heal the people that were hurt and to help them rebuild their homes. Crono mentions that he said goodbye to his Mom and that she's okay with him leaving. Crono and Marle note that with Lucca helping to rebuild Truce and helping the orphans, Guardia will remain in good hands.
• So, they use the Time Egg at the Telepod exhibit to return to the Spire of Telos and reach the wormholes.
  
• The credits + the Magus and Belthasar cutscenes play.
• Then another cutscene is shown, with Gaspar, Crono and Marle discussing (in the Dreamtime?). Gaspar asks them how well they've been doing with the other dimensions, if they met Schala now that she'd been freed, and if they found the Chrono Break yet. At the end of the chat, Crono and Marle say their goodbye and leave, and Gaspar literally vanish. The dialogue would be more on the lighthearted side than overly mysterious or very important storywise (like maybe have Marle notes that Schala looks nice with blonde hair, etc.). However, one extra plot point we might hint at is Gaspar's new status: at that point in Chrono history, he may have finally merged with the Entity (hence how he knows so much, and how he vanished).

So, that's an idea. It gives more closure to several points, including Crono and Marle. Instead of the passive feeling of having them remain in a time that doesn't need them, we have a more dynamic feeling and we know they're not that sad of leaving (think Sam Beckett in the last episode of Quantum Leap). This also draws a subtle parallel with the actual state of the Chrono series: a large part of the gaming world has moved on, but the series still lives on in some form.

The downside in that ending is that we jump around between many separate story arcs (Guardia, Crono/Marle, credits, Magus, Belthasar, and Gaspar/Crono/Marle). CC is a major common link between all these arcs though, and we could allow the player to walk in some of the cutscenes to let them see the ending at their own pace. What do you think?

Sounds good.

So, yeah, I should have posted this somewhere sooner... I kind of forgot that it hadn't been posted.

These cutscenes look huge on this thread but they're not difficult to code, since they rely on dialogues on still screens mostly. I believe this expanded ending would fully round out everything in terms of closure and impact (as it confirms that Project Kid went well), but if Zeality doesn't have the time to write the dialogues, what should we do?

---

EDIT: Well there's an outdated part about Marle not being Queen anymore so this ending either needs revising or it has already been scrapped? In that case, what is the bonus scene?

---

Concerning my cameo, I'll see after I'll do my beta testing playthrough.

[Agent 12]

I'll let Zeality comment, I do think we should have an extra scene to reward doing the sidequest though.  Everything looks easy except maybe this:

Just before the final battle, perhaps we can have King Zeal taunt the Dream/Time Devourer, with magic energy or something. The Devourer would react by randomly opening destructive wormholes from Telos/DBT to various other dimensions. This is kind of reminiscent of the Dimensional Vortices of CTDS, except here the wormholes are destructive; they rip and absorb what they touch and make a few dimensional spaces collapse. The party express their shock at the destruction in these places, since they were unrelated to their conflict.

Mainly because we are out of pallettes already...

unused Time Egg to explore the dimensions affected by the Devourer, to see the extent of the destruction, to heal the people that were hurt and to help them rebuild their homes

wouldn't they need a time egg each time they go to a new dimension?

Besides those critiques I think it's a pretty valid ending and like you said not to difficult to code.

--JP

[Chrono'99]

For the wormhole stuff, perhaps King Zeal can do that between the two battles against him, so there would be only 3 active characters on screen. We can have some sort of ShakeScreen command plus portals opening and closing (like when the party is thrown out of the DBT, but with a different color since they lead to different dimensions instead of North Cape). The destruction would be shown with very short clips of a few locations that would use recycled maps with different NPCs in them (to show that they're different dimensions). Then back to the DBT, the portals would leave "closed portal" sprites behind them (to show that they're accessible), though we'll drift them out of the screen for the final battle obviously.

These portals would be like the Dimension Vortex portals of CTDS, except you're opening them from the DBT instead of the outside world. They need a Time Egg only to access the DBT from this dimension, since King Zeal's death kind of shut the DBT here while the other portals in the DBT still exist. We can probably color these gates purple with MemCopy. In any case, this ending is meant to account for their absence in CC and basically "end" Crono and Marle's saga as far as we're concerned; they "no longer exist in this timeline" as the children ghosts say, so if it's difficult for them to return it's kind of the point. They're not dead, but they kind of are in a way (but it's not sad!). In future fanprojects like AE:HU or CC:DBT they'd really be returning for instance.

[Agent 12]

I see you've thought about this haha. Do you want to drive it or you want me to take a crack at it?  I'm somewhat out of things to do and I'd still like you chrono99ify chapter 14, do a beta run and you'll probably be tasked with doing the tileset transfer for King Zeal.


--JP

[Chrono'99]

Well I might as well do it since I polished the same locations and events in the latest patch and so it's easy to go through it again adding the necessary stuff.

However, I'll post a list of endings in the wiki in a few minutes. I haven't considered the possible endings post-Chapter 13/15 yet, but there's currently a little less than 10 endings you could implement (don't hesitate to do things slightly differently than in the description if you wish). And don't worry, they're all very short and we have a lot of unused location slots to make coding easier

EDIT: Done: http://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/CE/Endings.html

EDIT: Just noting that since they're NG+ endings (= little treats), we don't have to worry that much about the quality of the dialogues there, unlike in the main ending.

[Agent 12]

Those look great! It'll be nice to give people a chance to see a bit of Sorin's past! OK, you got that last part of the ending, chapter 14, and a quick beta test.  I'll work on the endings (you'll probably want to give me feedback but none of them sounded too complicated) and any bugs that pop up.

oh man were close.

--JP

[Chrono'99]

I'm having trouble implementing the expanded ending... Crono and Marle's self-imposed exile relies on the fact that they're not monarchs anymore, they have no more responsabilities in the Present and Marle's father has just died. However, in the current ending they're still monarchs, still have responsabilities and Marle doesn't seem to feel sorrow. To allow for the expanded scenes, I think we need to merge the current ending with the former one in which the Truce people ended the monarchy. We need to adapt it. It would be something like this:

• Crono/Lucca/Marle gate in to Denadoro Mts. Cut to Crono and Lucca in Lucca's House. They can explore the various locations freely. This is unchanged from the current ending.
• When Crono and Lucca arrive in Guardia Castle, Marle is at the entrance with a bunch of Porrean soldiers telling her they're coming to replace her because she's unfit to rule. A few Truce villagers are supporting these soldiers (but the Mayor and Fritz aren't here, as this would make them specific "culprits" instead of this event just being history moving into modern times). This is adapted from the former ending.

If you didn't do all the sidequests:

• Cut to Crono, Marle and Lucca in the Guardia Mt Vista. They say mostly the same thing as in the current ending, except it ends on a dramatically bittersweet note, with Crono and Marle still sitting, Lucca staring at the vista, and a few seconds of total silence before the screen fades to black and To Faraway Times kicks in in the credits (note I forgot to put that song in the current ROM by the way).
• Credits.
• Belthasar/Frozen Flame cutscene.
• Magus/King Zeal cutscene.
• The End

If you did all the sidequests

• Cut to Crono, Marle and Lucca in the Guardia Mt Vista. They say mostly the same thing as in the current ending, except Crono and Marle decide to go to other dimensions as in the previous big description I posted above. Unlike in the previous description Lucca is present, so Crono and Marle say their goodbyes to her on-screen I guess (they say they're leaving for a long time and might never return so Lucca remains in 1005 in case Belthasar contacts this era). Crono and Marle use the Gate off-screen and we go to the credits directly.
• Credits.
• Belthasar/Frozen Flame cutscene.
• Magus/King Zeal cutscene.
• Gaspar/Crono/Marle reunion.
• The End

And finally, I don't know if I'm asking for too much, but I propose that only Magus is aware of the Dream Devourer still being alive after the death of King Zeal. I replayed the ending and it's strange that every character knows that it's not over, when we know that none of them will be involved in Chrono Cross apart from Lucca, Robo and Magus. It takes away from the ending because King Zeal dies but reveals that the DD is still alive, so we would expect the story to continue naturally without any interruption. There's no reason the game ends here if everyone in the story knows it's not over (the Entity closes the Gates but the Neo-Epoch is still there for time traveling). So, I believe King Zeal shouldn't tell about the DD, and Magus should still see it but keep this knowledge to himself. The Frozen Flame should explode to trick everyone and rematerialize only in the Belthasar/FF cutscene, much to his surprise. This way there's a real closure and the necessity of CC is treated as a cliffhanger rather than unfinished business. Thoughts?