I can’t believe I missed this thread! That room in the Black Omen is, to me, the most interesting unresolved question in Chrono Trigger. Here’s what I think about it:
I am not sure of the intent of the game designers when they made that room, but I have an idea. I disagree with the opinion someone had earlier that those doppelgangers are put there for us to wonder about. I think the room has a definite, thematic purpose, and my gut instinct is that I would be able to understand this purpose if I had been able to play the game in the original Japanese. But I am going to try and guess at it anyway.
The Black Omen has very little dialogue, and of course the Black Omen comes at the end of the game, so I would suspect the meaning of the doppelganger room is made clear by playing the entire game. In other words, if we look only at the doppelganger room, then we might not be able to understand what its significance is. For instance, by the time Frodo and Sam destroy the One Ring, we already know what they’re doing and why it is important. Similarly, by the time the player reaches the Black Omen in Chrono Trigger (Japan), he or she should already be knowledgeable thematically to understand everything that’s going to happen in there. I feel strongly that some of these cultural undertones were lost in the translation.
Going on my assumption that there is a purpose to the six doppelgangers, besides idle fancy, I would imagine that the doppelgangers and their limbo at the heart of the Black Omen represent the relationship between Lavos and humanity. It is a way of saying there’s a little Lavos in all of us, and that we have been corrupted from our true nature because of this. Thus, to defeat Lavos absolutely, we must not only destroy Lavos’ physical form, but also overcome the enemy within ourselves. I think the whole point of the doppelgangers is to show us that Lavos is a part of us, and we are a part of Lavos, and that we ourselves are therefore as much a part of the problem as of the solution.
Chrono Trigger and definitely Chrono Cross are steeped with motifs that link most of humanity’s highest creative achievements with Lavos’ destructive emanations, and I think seeing the six doppelgangers is supposed to cause the player a moment of soul-searching. Maybe call it the moral of the story: “Oh! Lavos isn’t truly foreign Lavos is inside us.” What was it that Masa said? “I guess it means that a Hero’s power comes from within.” Precisely! And, to put it all together, so too does a hero’s weakness also come from within. Are we merely pawns of Lavos, who controls our DNA and plans to rain destruction upon the world? No more than we are pawns of our own temptations for corruption. But there is an important difference! If we are not pawns of evil, if instead we are accomplices to it, then we can reform our own conduct.
It is very much a tough-love message. In the Chrono series, humanity is made to atone for being the source of so much blight upon the world—this comes up much more strongly in Chrono Cross than in Chrono Trigger, but the Kingdom of Zeal also represents the same idea—and yet at the end we are allowed to be a pure species at heart, a noble one, merely under the corrupt influence of an outside enemy that has wormed its way deep within us. The message is that we must become better human beings, and while this is certainly not going to be easy, both we and our world deserve to work hard for it.
Upon getting through the shell and fighting Lavos, we get to learn that Lavos has been using the life force of all the creatures in the world to sustain itself. That supports what I’ve said here, but in the English version it comes completely out of the blue. We never hear about it anywhere else in the game until that point. If my little theory is true—that is, if the meaning of the doppelganger room was lost in translation—then the Japanese version of the game probably deals with this topic in greater depth, perhaps throughout the game.
