Chrono Trigger is a stunning masterpiece with beautiful pixel graphics, engaging gameplay, fantastic music, memorable characters, and a well-paced, well-constructed time travel story. It's no wonder it's hailed by many as one of the, if not the, greatest video games of all time, and it's fully deserving of such exemplary accolades.
Chrono Cross, its sequel, is fine.
Chrono Cross is about a teenage boy named Serge who one day finds that he's slipped into a parallel universe where he died ten years previously, and so goes on a journey to return to his home dimension and discover the truth of his alternate self's death. The game takes place in the El Nido Archipelago, which... was not present in the original Chrono Trigger.
So upon first glance, it's not entirely clear how or why Chrono Cross relates to Chrono Trigger. The setting is different, the characters are different, the graphics are different, the battle system is different. Time travel, which was the central hook of Chrono Trigger, is nowhere to be found in Chrono Cross, which instead focuses on traversing two parallel worlds. Rest assured, however, that Chrono Cross' plot does eventually link back to Chrono Trigger.
But is it worth it? I don't think so. Chrono Cross' biggest weakness, in my opinion, is the "Chrono" in the game title. It's a fine game, but not a great one, and directly inviting comparison to a giant like Chrono Trigger only makes that clearer.
If you want the short version of the review, pretty much everything is going to boil down to "it's good, but not as good as Chrono Trigger." If you want the long version, read on.
Let's start with the story. It's good, but not as good as Chrono Trigger. (I warned you!)
One of the reasons Chrono Trigger has been so highly-praised is for its story, which smartly uses its central conceit of time travel, avoids any dreaded fetch quests or filler, and has a compelling core mission but contains twists and turns in the details. Chrono Trigger opens with Marle being sent back in time, the inciting incident. This first quest serves as an introduction to time travel, and rescuing Marle directly leads to the trial sequence, which we escape by going to the future, which is in ruins. The party sets out to learn what caused this, discovers it was caused by Lavos, and vows to prevent this future from coming to fruition—and the rest of the game is indeed about trying to prevent the Day of Lavos. While there are some sub-quests, the overriding mission never changes.
Chrono Cross begins when Serge, our protagonist, finds himself suddenly in a parallel dimension where things are mostly the same... except he died 10 years ago. Soldiers then try to capture him for unknown reasons, but a girl randomly helps fend them off. They then go break into the soldiers' headquarters... basically because the game tells us to. And so on and so forth. In the end everything ties together and makes sense, but, unlike Chrono Trigger, the individual sub-events don't tie naturally into each other and there's no clear overarching goal for most of the game.
JRPGs have a reputation for having convoluted, overwrought stories, and... Chrono Cross plays right into that. Convoluted JRPG stories can be really fun, but not everyone likes them, and Chrono Cross feels like it's missing a simple, solid core around which to twist its narrative. Chrono Trigger is founded on a comprehensible goal: travel through time to prevent the apocalypse in the future. It's an easily digestible adventure story! Chrono Cross, meanwhile, can't be summed up so simply. I suppose you could say "travel between parallel worlds to save the world," but I don't think that captures the essence of the game the same way the one-line Chrono Trigger summary does. As a result, since every component of Chrono Trigger plays into the unified underlying plot, the individual pieces are easier to remember, making the game overall more memorable, while Chrono Cross feels like it's composed more of disjointed scenes which fall apart in memory.
This also ties into the characters which, again, Chrono Cross doesn't handle quite as well. The issue is that Chrono Trigger had a tight party of half a dozen heroes, meaning each one had a unique role in battle and could be fleshed out. Chrono Cross, meanwhile, has a whopping 45 potential party members. Each party member does get the spotlight when introduced and has a unique side-quest (for their level 3 tech), but when you have a roster that large you can't fully develop every single member. While you're always required to use Serge, your other two slots are almost always free—meaning that the characters generally aren't woven tightly into the story, since the story needs to function regardless of which party members are present. The battle system also makes all characters basically play the same. So they feel interchangeable, because they essentially are interchangeable, both in terms of plot progression and in battle.
I will give Chrono Cross credit for uniquely tailoring every party member's dialogue for every scene. In the moment it feels like the scene really was written for those characters. But that unfortunately does not alleviate the long-term interchangeability.
As for the battle system, it's like a cross between active time battle and turn-based combat. Each character has a stamina gauge, which generally refills at a rate of 1 (per tick). Actions consume stamina, and performing an action that uses more stamina than you have sends your stamina into the negative. Your characters can then move again once they've regained stamina up back to 1. The stamina gauge effectively functions like the action gauge in an ATB system, but there's no real-time component and if there is ever a point when all gauges would be filling the game just skips ahead to the next turn.
There are only four actions in battle: attack, element (magic), items, and run away. Attacks are divided into three types: weak, medium, and strong which in turn cost 1, 2, and 3 stamina. They also provide a tradeoff in accuracy, but each successive attack on your turn increases your accuracy, so going weak-medium-strong is a standard rotation with fairly high accuracy, whereas strong-strong costs the same amount of stamina but is much less accurate. Items are fairly straightforward. And while running away is straightforward as well, it always succeeds and is available in every battle. This is one of Chrono Cross' unique features, but it's more interesting in theory than practice. For most bosses, running away will either just immediately re-trigger the fight or have them stand there until you re-engage. Convenient, but not particularly exciting or innovative.
Elements (the name for magic in this game) are more involved, but ultimately still not engrossing. Each character has an "Element Grid" consisting of a certain number of slots at each level of Element. Each character's Element Grid governs the Elements they can take into battle and increases as they grow in level. Elements get slotted into a character's Element Grid, and then each battle that character can use that Element once at the level in which it was placed on its grid. Each Element has a level range, so a "2±6" Element could be played in anywhere on the grid (levels range from 1 to 8), whereas "4±2" would be restricted to levels 2 through 6.
The crux of the issue is the fact that every character can equip (nearly) every Element, which, as discussed above, makes them largely interchangeable. If you don't care about the remaining intricacies of the Element system (which do little to mitigate this problem), you can skip the next three paragraphs.
To use Elements in battle, you need to spend 7 stamina and a number of Element points equal to that Element's level. Regular attacks generate a number of Element points equal to the stamina consumed when they hit, which is another reason accuracy is important. Putting an Element in a lower or higher level than its base level will make it weaker or stronger by a corresponding amount, but as far as I could tell status Elements were not affected by the level they were cast at, which leads to a fun mini-game of how to structure your grid. (The obvious approach is to put offensive and healing Elements in your high level slots and status Elements in your low level slots, but you want to have some attack and healing Elements in low levels as reserve as well...)
Each Element and character also has a color. (Red, blue, yellow, green, white and black.) Each character gets a boost to using Elements of their color, and is weak to the opposing color. Additionally, there is a Field Effect, which basically just tracks the color of the last three Elements used. If the Field Effect becomes filled with one color, that color will be boosted and the opposing color will be weakened. However, since you have three party members and each combatant (including enemies) tends to get the same number of turns, filling the Field Effect often requires the enemy to cooperate, either by using an Element of the proper color or using a non-Element attack, so the Field Effect is relatively difficult to set up for the minor effect of boosting an attack or two.
If you recall, I said that every character can use "nearly" every Element. There are two types of Elements that are limited. First are Summon Elements, which are powerful attacks that can only be used by a character of the same color, and only when the Field Effect for that character is active. However, while Summons are powerful, I didn't find they were powerful enough to justify how difficult they were to use; I much preferred having a powerful spell I could always use than a super-powerful spell I could rarely use. The other type of Element is Techs, which are character-specific. Each characters has three Techs, at Element levels 3, 5, and 7. However, none are disproportionately interesting or impactful (most are just an Elemental attack of some kind), and, like all Elements, each can only be used once per battle, so I did not find they added much.
Elements can only be used once per battle, which sounds a bit scary because it means you can run out, but in practice no boss is tanky enough for that to become a real concern. And the game's difficulty, or lack thereof, undermines the whole battle system. There are interesting ideas, rewards the battle system makes you work towards, and characters that play around with the system (for instance, most characters have a pyramid-shaped Element Grid with many low-level slots and few high-level slots, but there's one character who inverts this with a few low-level slots and many high-level slots), but the game is easy enough that it doesn't matter. Why should I optimize my loadout and work towards using Summons and Field Effects when nearly every battle can be handily won with pretty much any loadout of offensive Elements with some backup healing?
In Chrono Trigger, each character had a unique set of Techs that set their niche in battle, and reflected and conveyed their personality. In Chrono Cross, every character is an attacker/off-mage/healer/buffer/debuffer or a mage/off-attacker/healer/buffer/debuffer, depending on whether their strength or magic is higher. Chrono Trigger also featured Double and Triple Techs, where two or three characters would work together for a bigger effect, which increased your tactical options and was an important factor in forming your party. Chrono Cross also has Double and Triple Techs but, while they were readily clear and available in Chrono Trigger (every character pair had three Double Techs and every party composition had a Triple Tech), there are many fewer in Chrono Cross, there is no in-game resource that explains which pairs and triplets of characters have Double and Triple Techs, and, again, the game just isn't difficult enough to justify going through the hassle.
While I haven't been too hot on Chrono Cross so far, there is one game system that they pulled off phenomenally: the level system. In fact, Chrono Cross might have the best level system I've seen in any game. The level system is brilliant in its simplicity: each character's level is determined by the number of stars you have, and you get stars for beating bosses. So your entire party is always at the appropriate level. It's fantastic! And don't forget that you can run from any and every battle without fail, so you're not forced through battles you don't want to complete. The lack of grinding (you can't grind, even if you want to) is a particularly smart idea with the massive character roster, since in a traditional experience-based level system, unless inactive members also received characters most of the roster would likely fall hopelessly behind.
The fact that the game auto-levels you based on the bosses you beat sounds great, but if you consider it a bit further you might feel that it takes away the feeling of character development. After all, part of the fun of RPGs is building the characters your way, so if levels are set for every step of the game, that takes that element away. But fear not, for Chrono Cross complements its level star system with "mini-levels": every time a character completes a level, they gain a "micro-level," which typically involves gaining 1 or 2 HP. After a few "micro-levels" they will gain a "mini-level," which provides a few modest stat boosts. They'll then be unable to gain micro- or mini-levels until you get another level star.
What this means is that the characters you take into battle will grow and develop more than characters you don't—but the core level star system ensures that characters you never use are still strong enough to take into battle if you decide to give them a chance, so there's no need to grind micro-levels on all the characters. I also want to emphasize the fact that the micro- and mini-level system is based purely on the number of battles; there's no experience system. So if you want to grind up a bunch of characters you can go back to the first area of the game and gain micro-levels just as easily trouncing early-game enemies.
Chrono Cross respects your time and keeps all party composition options open at all times, which is really all you can ask for. The only complaint I have is that it feels like they were cognizant of the fact that grinding is essentially impossible in their level system, which is good, but as a result tuned combat difficult way down. Obviously you don't want people to get stuck, but I wish there had been a bit more challenge and strategy.
Chrono Trigger has wonderful pixel art, while Chrono Cross has 3D graphics. I don't want to go into great detail because one, this is an incredibly subjective topic, and two, this is a video game review and not an essay on pixel art, but I think most people would agree that pixel art ages better than 3D graphics. And that is particularly true for 3D graphics from 1999. While there are some pretty locales and the graphics serve their function, it feels very much like they were heavily constricted by the graphical limits of the time. (If it isn't obvious already, I played the original PS1 version, not Radical Dreamers.)
Chrono Trigger also has a fantastic soundtrack, and nearly every entry is catchy and memorable. While the opening video to Chrono Cross is beautiful, nothing else in the game did it for me the same way anything in Chrono Trigger did.
As I said earlier, Chrono Cross' biggest flaw is the fact that it invites direct comparison to Chrono Trigger. It's fine, but not a masterpiece. The levelling system is absolutely brilliant, I'll give the game that. But the plot, while it eventually comes together, is missing a central, cohesive hook, and the cast is too large and thinly spread to provide a strong core for the game either. There interesting ideas in this game, but they typically either aren't explored deeply (such as the ability to run from any fight) or force a lack of depth (such as the massive character roster). Chrono Cross is enjoyable to play, but I'd recommend (re)playing Chrono Trigger instead any day.
By the way, Chrono Cross reminded me a lot of another JRPG. The active party consists of three characters, the element system involves three opposing pairs, and the game uses 3D graphics that are incredibly detailed for the time period. Figure out what I'm referencing? The answer is here. And it turns out that that game's development team and Chrono Cross do have a lot of overlap! In a lot of ways, Chrono Cross is less a sequel to Chrono Trigger and more a spiritual precursor to that game. That game is great and shows what the team could do when untethered from "Chrono," so you can add that to the list of games I'd always take over Chrono Cross.
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