Chrono Cross

General Information

Chrono Cross can also refer to:

Chrono Cross Sections

Release: November 18, 1999 (Japan), August 15, 2000 (US)

Chrono Cross is a PlayStation Role-playing game|RPG created by Square Co., Ltd. (now Square Enix) with a story that builds upon Chrono Trigger. However, Chrono Trigger team members Hironobu Sakaguchi (Supervisor), Yuji Horii (Supervisor, Initial Scenario Writer), and Akira Toriyama (Character Design) were notably not a part of the Chrono Cross development team. Indeed, few of the original staff participated on the game as they had been reassigned to different teams over the years.

Chrono Trigger had a "sequel" released in Japan called Radical Dreamers for the Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom, but it was a text adventure. When Chrono Cross was being designed, part of the Radical Dreamers' plot and characters were used. However, Chrono Cross cannot be viewed as a mere remake of Radical Dreamers as they have a lot of differences and incompatibilities. Chrono Cross sold to expectations in the United States, but disappointing Japanese sales lead some to speculate that the Chrono series has been halted.

Chrono Cross was released in United States in 2000 and features music composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. The game was hailed by professional reviewers, but a minority of Chrono Trigger fans denounced it as an inferior sequel. In almost all cases, this is a result of these players wanting to control the old cast of Cross's predecessor and play a more direct sequel.

The game has 45 possible party members to acquire, all of whom come with several abilities of their own, with some combining into Double and Triple Techs.

Because of the incredibly vast number of possible party combinations, this game contains a system to modify base text for each character's accent. Whereas other games would need to program different blocks of text for each character, this game uses the same text and modifies it based on the character using it. An example of its coding in the script:

Member Name:
l.et's2 .go.suffixe, Serge..
the w.ater1 .Dr3agon .mus1t .be.
be.yondth1is1 .point...

Plot

The story of Chrono Cross revolves around the character Serge, who, as a small child, is supposed to drown, but is saved by a powerful force. The resulting shift in the world's history creates two distinct parallel dimensions. In one dimension, he survives and lives for 10 years before the game begins. In the alternate dimension, he drowns in a beach near his home.

The plot itself revolves around Serge's unknowing efforts to free Schala from the Time Devourer, a fusion of Lavos, the ultimate enemy with the capacity to destroy the planet from Chrono Trigger, and Schala, a princess of Zeal and sister of Magus who has immense magical power and disappeared to the Darkness Beyond Time accidentally due to Crono's influence in history. Years in the future, Belthasar, a former guru of Zeal, discovered that the Time Devourer had formed and planned to consume all spacetime; he thus set in motion an almost ludicrously complex chain of events meant to give rise to and guide Serge to venture to the Time Devourer and use an artifact known as the Chrono Cross to restore the dimensions to one and free Schala from Lavos's grasp. While the plot is sound, its delivery is criticized and many players resort to a guide to understand its intricacies Chrono Cross Condensed Plot Summary

While Chrono Cross incorporates elements from Radical Dreamers, the stories of the two games are incompatible. To resolve the scenario continuity issue and to acknowledge the existence of Radical Dreamers, the designers suggested that the events of Radical Dreamers did happen, but took place in a parallel dimension. This can be found by reading one of the computer consoles in Chronopolis, a city which was pulled back in time due to a failed experiment. Chronopolis now monitors the El Nido Archipelago, in an attempt to prevent a paradox from occurring which would prevent its existence in the future. The most notable difference is that Magus is absent from the game. While confirmed to be Magil in Radical Dreamers by both the game and its creator, Magus does not assume the identity Guile in Chrono Cross, as is commonly assumed. It was noted in an interview that the developers originally planned for Magus to be in the game, but scrapped the idea due to difficulties representing his story amongst forty-three other characters.

A small number of fans voiced displeasures at the dissimilarities between Chrono Cross and its predecessor, citing a new cast and a different battle system as cause to debase the game as a sequel to Trigger. Masato Kato, series creator, also said in an interview that he did not consider the game as such when working on it. However, the game is sold and billed as a sequel, and fulfills all the qualities of such a label; it takes place in the same world (although on an island), sufficiently continues and builds upon the storyline of the previous game, wraps up several loose ends from the game (without sacrificing plot integrity; these naysayers accuse the game of plot holes that were nonexistent), and contains the same thematic elements and overtones (changing history and the power of free will).

Square applied for a trademark the name Chrono Break in late 2001, resulting in speculation by fans of the possibility of a sequel. However, the trademark was dropped in the United States on November 13, 2003, confirmed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The trademark still stands in Japan. It is suspected that the project had been planned at one point (with one of the original Chrono Trigger project leads at the helm, and not the Chrono Cross/Xenogears/Final Fantasy XI staff), but cancelled before production could begin.

Chrono Cross was never released in Europe, with Square citing a combination of economic and technical expenses involved in converting the game for release in PAL territories.