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[the_master]

I remember restarting the game over and over at a friend's house to see what character we'd get

 

[Joyful]

 

[lostinblue]

What a fantastic, timeless game. For me it's the best playstation game, and one of the best RPG's ever. I actually bought a PSP to play it the minute I saw that its built-in emulator could run this. I thought it was impressive, and I still do, looks very good on a handheld.

Soundtrack is the most often mentioned part and a big achievement considering it's all MIDI and they had size constraints on a per level basis (meaning all pieces were made with different budgets in mind) - but the game punches well above it's weight in pretty much all areas.

Graphically, it's fantastic for a playstation 1 game, I always felt it was more like a Dreamcast game (the way the battle mode uses 3D is quite fearless/agressive, specially - there's real detail there for a psone game - didn't feel lowpoly at all), texturing on 3D objects is crisp (the dragons spring to mind), animations are varied and loop well, battle models are quite detailed, equipment changes actually appear on screen and can be checked on the menu that allows you to rotate the characters, all of it is very modern/holds up well. Not to mention the awesome digital drawing backgrounds that still make me drool. I really think this, Baten Kaitos 1 and Baten Kaitos Origins would look really good in HD (mostly same devs), and this and Baten Kaitos Origins are true timeless gems at that. (if you like this game, do yourself a favour, and play BKO)

The team was using the old dev equipment from the FF8 team (who were going into FFX development) and most of them left square because, Chrono Break was cancelled and they were supposed to help with FFXI MMO development.

I had access to some chrono cross imagery in high res at some point leading me to think it was drawn at a far bigger resolution than 320x240 (at least 1024x768), but it's possible that those assets are gone at this point.

The bifurcating game structure, replayability (some characters warranted as much), new game plus. The way it ties in with Chrono Trigger although not important at the point it does is actually clever, and most importantly, because it does so late in the game, the game has a heart of it's own and stands on it's own knee's.

In my book - 10/10 Perfect.

 

[Touch fuzZy. get BizZay]

Cross is a bit of a blind spot for me. Anybody got a link to like a really good youtube video that looks back on it and goes into detail showing cool parts?

 

[april6e]

Does anyone else feel the story in this game was utter crap? I was surprised at how difficult to follow and nonsensical it was for such a highly praised game. Loved the combat and game mechanics though and those two things saved the game. It was extremely fun having dozens of characters to choose from and most of them were well balanced.

Of course, it sucks that you only could have 3 party members at a time. And I'm assuming almost everyone at least used the main character and

Spoiler

Glenn

, which only left one slot for player expression.

 

[Grand Theft Scratchy]

The team was using the old dev equipment from the FF8 team (who were going into FFX development) and most of them left square because, Chrono Break was cancelled and they were supposed to help with FFXI MMO development.

I like video game trivia so that's interesting to me. And I agree about the character models in Chrono Cross looking really good for a PS1 game.

Also really liked the magazine ad. This game and Final Fantasy X would be the last few times we would see SquareSoft before they merged with Enix.

Spoiler

 

[lostinblue]

Compilation of game backdrops:



-> https://www.neogaf.com/threads/chrono-cross-300-backgrounds-enjoy.1432148/

 

[Bankai]

I never played it! Though I played & finished Chrono Trigger a couple of years back on my SNES mini/classic, for the first time. I was a SEGA kid, so I missed all the SNES classics back in the day.

Is it still worth it? Any continuation on the story worthwhile?

 

[martino]

Very underrated game. One of the best game soundtracks ever.

Not by me at least

it's time to release it on pc version and let modder update it to 4k goddness.

 

[Magic Carpet]

I really liked the music in this game. But the actual game it self..... Meh.
It was one of the first game soundtracks I tried looking for. Before game soundtracks were sold separatly.

 

[Radical Dreamer]

What a fantastic, timeless game. For me it's the best playstation game, and one of the best RPG's ever. I actually bought a PSP to play it the minute I saw that its built-in emulator could run this. I thought it was impressive, and I still do, looks very good on a handheld.

Soundtrack is the most often mentioned part and a big achievement considering it's all MIDI and they had size constraints on a per level basis (meaning all pieces were made with different budgets in mind) - but the game punches well above it's weight in pretty much all areas.

Graphically, it's fantastic for a playstation 1 game, I always felt it was more like a Dreamcast game (the way the battle mode uses 3D is quite fearless/agressive, specially - there's real detail there for a psone game - didn't feel lowpoly at all), texturing on 3D objects is crisp (the dragons spring to mind), animations are varied and loop well, battle models are quite detailed, equipment changes actually appear on screen and can be checked on the menu that allows you to rotate the characters, all of it is very modern/holds up well. Not to mention the awesome digital drawing backgrounds that still make me drool. I really think this, Baten Kaitos 1 and Baten Kaitos Origins would look really good in HD (mostly same devs), and this and Baten Kaitos Origins are true timeless gems at that. (if you like this game, do yourself a favour, and play BKO)

The team was using the old dev equipment from the FF8 team (who were going into FFX development) and most of them left square because, Chrono Break was cancelled and they were supposed to help with FFXI MMO development.

I had access to some chrono cross imagery in high res at some point leading me to think it was drawn at a far bigger resolution than 320x240 (at least 1024x768), but it's possible that those assets are gone at this point.

The bifurcating game structure, replayability (some characters warranted as much), new game plus. The way it ties in with Chrono Trigger although not important at the point it does is actually clever, and most importantly, because it does so late in the game, the game has a heart of it's own and stands on it's own knee's.

In my book - 10/10 Perfect.

I love u

 

[lostinblue]

Is it still worth it? Any continuation on the story worthwhile?

It is derivative, but it's worthwhile, it's not lazy or forced and adds a bit of an overlay.

It only happens later on and it's best to go into it without foresight. That said, it's never important for Chrono Cross to link up with Chrono Trigger in any way.

Does anyone else feel the story in this game was utter crap? I was surprised at how difficult to follow and nonsensical it was for such a highly praised game. Loved the combat and game mechanics though and those two things saved the game. It was extremely fun having dozens of characters to choose from and most of them were well balanced.

Of course, it sucks that you only could have 3 party members at a time. And I'm assuming almost everyone at least used the main character and

Spoiler

Glenn

, which only left one slot for player expression.

It was never strange or lacking to me because as you said, the game balances a lot of things right, the pace IMO is right (if it was measured like music with something like beats per minute), the variety of locations is also right as well as branching paths and specific bits of story for some main characters.

The Chrono Cross team certainly bit more than they could chew with the amount of recruitable characters they went with, that's precisely where a lot of the story went, into creating a believable ecosystem for their relations to exist. I haven't played it in a while, but I feel like I still remember most of the connections, it all kinda made sense.

While I don't need 45 playable characters by any means, when it came to using them, even if they were useless to the story, they were balanced and certainly made it so that the game had plenty sufficiently fleshed out characters (more than most RPG's), it was a joy back in the day to have to explore a world, choosing to engage with someone and seeing a face avatar, it made you wonder if you could recruit them or what their role in the story was.

It also created, with multiple playthroughs a feeling of alternative timelines, since sometimes you had to pick one, or one character wouldn't join if you recruited for example, an enemy of his. That is different than most RPG's where character recruitment acts as collectathon and you want to recruit everyone or you missed something.

You can't focus on characters (what made the world feel so alive) and their quests, and then conclude in the final stretch that in reality most of them, albeit interesting are also a way of padding because they can never be more than supporting characters (and in some instances underdeveloped - as there are certainly tiers, some characters are not that connected to you and your quest, but connected to characters you recruited). I think if they streamlined those the game would still have a lot of playable characters, more than most RPG's, probably something like FF6.

But I enjoyed the derivative designs, some were weird and those are often scrapped. Some characters feel like such a figment of the 90's.

I don't think story was bad or forgetable by any means, on paper it was clearly very well written with no shortcuts taken, it's just the conundrum that they created themselves. I think the game at some point wants to stay in the middle forever because that's where most of what it created exists, but then the game has to get going and definitely switches gears, when it does they at least get the feeling right. Final stretch is kinda bleak, but I think also because of the dilema of having to go in that direction, despite what is going on it feels like saying goodbye, and realising there's some things you can't return to.

I always felt in all their infinite differences, this and Majora Mask weren't so different, as far as pseudo-semi-direct sequels go.