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
, 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.