Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 317: Chrono Cross

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Jeremy Parish crosses realities to recruit Nadia Oxford and Jared Petty for an in-depth discussion of controversial Squaresoft RPG classic Chrono Cross on the occasion of its 20th anniversary in the U.S. (No weird accents or speech quirks… we pwomise.)  Artwork by Leeann Hamilton. Retronauts is a listener-supported show. Please help keep things running and get early access/exclusive backer-only episodes/other goodies by subscribing at https://patreon.com/retronauts!

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out greenlitpodcasts.com. This weekend, Retronauts, goes out to all the magical dreamers out there. Hi, everyone, welcome to Retronauts episode, oh, I'm going to look this up. I can see which ones this is going to be, because this episode is timed to an anniversary. Very important anniversary, in my opinion. This is episode 317 of Retronauts.

And I am Jeremy Parrish, recounting and regaling the history of Chrono Cross. And with me on the line from faraway places such as Canada and San Fran. We have, let's go in that order. Canada. Hi, I am Nadia from Canada. Nadia Oxford with the U.S. Gamer and the Acts of the Blood God podcast. I am happy to be here again, Parrish. Glad to have you on.

And another frequent guest, or maybe not frequent, but recurring guests, regular guest, occasional guests. Just, who are you? I'm Jared Petty, and I'm happy to be here occasionally. Well, actually, I think there will be an embarrassment of Jared Riches coming up soon because I'm pretty sure our Colico Vision episode that you were on is going up right around the same time as this Crono Cross episode. So even though it's been probably like nine months since we've actually recorded together, it's going to seem like a much shorter gap just because of the...

I think I'm on that one too. Oh, are you? did you call in that one? I think so. Yeah. Wow. I didn't, I totally forgot. I spaced out because it's been at least 20 years since we recorded it. So yes, great. Here we are once again, all together. I guess the one difference between that episode and this episode is that Bob's not here. And also, this is not about ColicoVision. It's about chronocross. Two slightly different topics. Just a bit. Perhaps that time warp is appropriate, Jeremy. I mean, it could be. We are talking about chronocross. I'm pretty sure that we are currently in the bad alternate reality as opposed to

the good alternate reality, so we need to work on that time travel a little bit, but enough of real life, we can talk about video games and happier times, far away times, as the song goes, talking about chronocross. So we've put together quite a few episodes over the past few years sort of steadily progressing through the history of Squaresoft's Final Fantasy series and its various spinoffs.

And a couple of years ago, we tackled Chrono Trigger. And now we have reached the point in the chronology. We've talked about Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy 8. Final Fantasy 9 is coming up soon, and that means, oh, he's Parasite Eve also.

So that means next up is Chrono Cross. The sequel to Chrono Trigger, but more like a side story to Chrono Trigger. Masato Cato, the main creative force behind the game has said, this was not Chrono Trigger 2. It was Chrono Cross. It is a different thing.

and there are many differences, there are many connections, but yeah, it's definitely not just like a, you know, here is another game exactly like Chrono Trigger, much to many people's frustration and regret. But as long as you're willing to take this as an attempt to do something very different than Chrono Trigger that builds off the themes and kind of the world and characters of Chrono Trigger and not always in a happy way, then it is very successful in its own right, especially if you look at the gameplay mechanics, which are some of the best RPG combat and development mechanics ever, I would dare say, as opposed to... That's a spicy take right there. It is, but I stand by it. I also think that if you look at it in terms of story, it is a confusing mess. And maybe that's by design. But we can talk about the good and bad of Krono Cross. But for me, I have no ability to be objective about this game.

It's very dear to me. I remember when back in the early days of Retronauts at OneUp.com we tackled Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross in a single episode and a bunch of Chrono Trigger fans from like some fan site went on this like attack campaign against me on the internet. Like seriously we're just like what little existed of social media at the time they were, you know, just decrying me for how much I hated Chrono Cross and how I was biased against it.

What, you? You hate Corona Cross. so weird. I was like, did you guys actually listen to anything I said? But it just goes to show you that fandom is bad. Nothing has changed. The more things changed, the more they stay the same. Just as you say, social media was a little different back then in that it didn't exist as we know it, of course, but we certainly had message boards. Oh boy, did we have message boards. Yep. We did. We did. We had that gaming age forum. I, uh, did they coordinate with the ultimate the ghost and goblin kids, Jeremy? Like was, was it a united front? No, believe it or not,

this was, they were independent spearheads against me. Wow. Yeah, it's, you know, I, I have to say, I haven't really dealt with a lot of attack campaigns against me over the past decade or so. But back in the, you know, the first five or six years, I was in the press, things could get pretty spicy, pretty heated. And that, that seems, I think, you know, that seems to have calmed down maybe because I'm a white man, a straight white man, and people are like, ah, it's fine, who cares about him? Let's go attack the minorities and the, you know, the gays and the, a well-dressed, a well-dressed white man, too. So you're very, it's very hard to criticize you. Well, that doesn't go over too well, but, but anyway, enough about, enough about the terrible

forms that the internet takes and more about the great forms that the Kronos series takes, although I don't know if we can really call it a Kronos series, because the third episode in the series, Krono break, never really happened. And so this is it. This is kind of the final statement on Krono, all things Krono. Aside from the DS remake of Krono Trigger, which added a few little connections to tie into Krono Cross. Anyway, I've been filibustering for a bit. So let me just say to set the tone, or the, sorry, to set the stage, Kronokross was a PlayStation game by Squaresoft, published by Square EA and the U.S. because that was a thing that existed at the time. debuted in Japan in November of 1999 and came out here in the U.S. in August of 2000,

U.S. and Canada, and did not ever come out in Europe because Loll, Europe, I guess. So before I continue filibustering, let me ask both of you, what your experiences with Kronos have been? Like, did you like it at the time? Did you even know about it at the time? Is that something you came to enjoy later? Jared, why don't you start? Yeah, Kronos is something I definitely came to enjoy later. Critter Trigger, when it was contemporaneous, was kind of this thing of legend that I heard about there at the end of the S&S era. And I was only a little later through the evils of emulation that I first really spent the time with it that it deserved. I was in college

as the major NES and S&S emulators began to take off. And I started rediscovering games that I'd missed during that era. I know that only was, you know, three or four years before. But that seemed like a long time when you were only 19. Yeah, a lot, a lot happened in those days, more so than now. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, there were these, but I went back as, oh, my gosh, this game is unfathomably wonderful. And then, ooh, it's got a sequel. And then, oh, well, does it? My appreciation for Crono Cross really did grow much later. I was unimpressed with it when I first was made aware of it. But actually, I probably have you to thank for this. Back in the olden days of retronauts during the one-up years, there was that episode you were talking about,

and there was an episode we talked about radical dreamers in Crenner Cross, and that inspired me to go back and experience that. And I did again this week just replay it in preparation for this episode, and hadn't touched it for a while before that. So sitting down and playing it this week, I think I enjoyed it this time through a whole lot, and that kind of threw me, because I've before now, I've always looked at it as this strange, as you said, sequel to Curner Trigger, but it's not, as

the developer said. And there's a lot of sentimentality in it that I don't know if I'm just getting soft in my old age, but that kind of weird, esoteric thing that rang pretentious when I was younger, I'm enjoying and appreciating more, the melancholy of the whole thing.

I still don't like seeing, you know, all my favorite characters die horribly, but I've enjoyed the game much more this time through than I think I thought was possible. So that's my most recent experience in Carter Trigger is this week. All right. That's pretty recent. Nadia, what about you? I actually missed out on the game when it first came out. I don't know why. I was probably

moving at that point. I didn't have the money to really spend on the game. So I didn't play it until many years later, a mutual friend of ours actually loaned it to me. I don't know if you remember Lex, Vanessa Adams, from like the real old days of the internet. But she loaned me her copy back when she was around Toronto. Somehow it had two disc ones, and I don't understand how that happened, but I did eventually get the full copy or the disc four or something happened. So I was playing this game around 2006, I think it was. And I always enjoyed it from the start for what it was, because just from the very beginning, I appreciated the battle system. As you said, it is pretty great. I don't know if I'd call it the greatest, but it's pretty awesome. The music is fantastic,

and we're going to get into that, I'm sure. Graphics are our pretty good. I knew from the start, just after so many years of processing fan reactions to Krono Cross by that point, I knew it wasn't exactly the sequel I was looking for. It was kind of its own thing. So I was definitely able to appreciate it for what it was, even though, as Jared said and something else we'll get into, I'm sure I didn't appreciate some of the story choices they made. But for a standalone RPG, it's definitely up there with my favorites, probably one of my favorites on the PlayStation by far. And one of my enduring favorites have actually been thinking, having that itch, like, oh, I want to go back to it because it's on my PSP,

which is where I keep like all my ancient, I stable all my ancient JRPs and go back to them once in a while. Okay, so it sounds like I'm the kind of the old-timer here with this game. But for me, Chrono Cross kind of represents kind of a life-changing moment in my existence, honestly. So, you know, I was a big Chrono-trigger fan, really enjoyed it when it came out on Super NES. And by that point, I was like, you know, I'm all in on this role-playing thing. And that definitely solidified over the PlayStation era. So when I heard that there was going to be a sequel to Chrono Trigger coming out, I was very interested.

And as it happened, I was very heavily into game imports at the time and was working in collaboration with the gaming intelligence agency and, you know, kind of a friend of the site. and that was for people who don't know that was a site basically dedicated to covering RPGs and story driven games with a heavy emphasis on Japanese content so there was a demo

of Krono Cross that came with I want to say the Japanese release of Legend of Mana I guess they call it Manna now yeah sorry but it's official it's in trials of Manna the English language dub.

It says mana. So anyway, I was interested in both. And I think it also had like a preview movie of Vagrant Story on the demo disc. So I imported that and it arrived really quickly. So I was, I guess, you know, the internet was smaller in those days and people weren't as much on top of like everything has to be instant. So I was pretty much the first person to write hands-on impressions of Chrono Cross. I got it over, it arrived on a, on a workday, and I went home over lunch break and played through, well, I lived really close to my office at the time, so it was just like a five-minute drive. So I played through the demo on PS1, and I had a computer at the time that could record video through S-video.

So it was like really high quality, good quality, pre-HD, obviously, but it looked good. And so I captured a bunch of movies. I ripped out just the music from the demo, just like took it out of the movies because the music was amazing, did some write-ups and gave it to the gaming intelligence agency and was like, hey, if you guys post this, could you just, you know, give me a credit on there and link back to my personal site? And my site traffic went from like jack squat to like 500 views a day, which at the time, you know, for a little personal site was. crazy and it never really dropped back down. So that was kind of like the point that I went from being like some internet nobody to like someone, you know, someone that people wanted to read. So I said, okay, I'll keep the momentum going and, you know, kept writing about Chrono Cross and made a fan club as a joke for a character called Lucky Dan, who I encountered the demo.

Lucky Dan ended up being localized as Mojo. He's the living voodoo doll. But he was just so ridiculous. I was like everyone who likes this game has to be a fan of Lucky Dan. And then when the Japanese version came out, even though I didn't really read a lot of Japanese, I struggled my way through the Japanese game and wrote an FAQ on it for Game Facts. And that kind of forced me to discipline myself and try to make sense of the story. Ha ha, good luck. And at least, you know, try to provide accurate information. It wasn't always correct, but I think I did okay considering the density of this game and how much there was to it. And, you know, people were really cool and would write in and be like, oh, hey, you know, there's actually branching paths right here. If you do this other

thing, then you'll recruit these other characters and go through a different route. And so that was just kind of my first professional piece of game writing because videogames.com, which is now GameSpot, needed a strategy guide for Chrono Cross and Andrew Vestel who wrote for VideoGames.com and was the founder of gaming intelligence agency was like, oh, I know this guy and he, you know, covered a lot of Kronocross for us, and also he wrote a great strategy guide. You should talk

to him. So basically they were like, hey, can you transform, like rewrite this into a proper strategy guide and we'll give you money for it. And then they liked it so much that they gave me money, even more money, to write Guys of Arcadia strategy guide a couple of months later. So that was kind of my

entree into professional video game writing, like actual paid video game writing. And then the following year, I got an email from someone who had been reading the strategy guide and was impressed by like the fact that I threw in all these like science jokes and stuff because she was an astrophysics student. So we started writing back and forth and ended up getting really into each other. And then I basically said, I want to go like live close to this person and I'm sick of living in Texas. So I moved away from Texas. And that kind of set my life into the current course, the traditional.

trajectory it ended up taking, where I went through a lot of dumb misadventures in my personal life and ended up working at OneUp.com. So on many, many, many levels, Kronos is kind of the game that led me to where I am now in life. And fortunately, it is a very good game. I will stand by it, even though the story is chaos. But I feel like, you know, if I have to hang my hat on any one game, it might as well be this one, which is the most PlayStation-ass PlayStation RPG ever. Like, it is just everything about the PlayStation era of RPGs condensed into one game on two discs, and that's good and bad, and I love it. That is so that that is a perfect summary.

I love that. Also, I had no idea that you Krono crossed over to mainstream success with this game. Hey, hey, hey. I didn't know this story. Yeah, neither did I. Oh, that's great, Jeremy. That's really, really cool. But, yeah, it is the most PlayStation-ass game ever.

From the weird character models to the way it handles backgrounds, the combat system, the pacing, the... The 12-frame-per-second 3-D engine. There's that. Just the way, like, the story was kind of of its own butt. That was so Squarespaceoft at the time. Yeah. And it did... Because it was so aggressively PlayStation, that was what originally pushed me away from it.

I loved, loved the PlayStation, but it was just so dissonant with the PlayStation. with the snappy, beautiful, fast experience of Chrono Trigger that I was originally allowed myself to be turned off by the differences. I'm kind of ashamed of myself that my first impression of this game, I didn't give it the time I think it deserved. Because it is a beautiful RPG. Going back to it, you know, since it's been absolutely lovely. You talk about the combat system.

We talk with the music, et cetera. But I don't think I was quite ready to appreciate it in the context of its own time yet. The fact that it sort of stands as this time capsule for what the PlayStation was all about and Classic Square was all about, it kind of stands at the apex of that era and movement. I think it's in a lot of ways a more PlayStation game, maybe that even something like Final Fantasy 9. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's a sprawling, messy game.

And honestly, it looks great, but I think they didn't really have a lot of a budget for this game. So there were a lot of, like, a lot more ideas in the game than they necessarily had the time or the money or resources to fully explore. And so you do end up with things like a character who is supposed to be one of the main characters from Chrono Trigger, who should be integral to the story, but they didn't have time to flesh out that character's role in Chrono Cross. So they kept the character, but just kind of didn't bother to explore him. Yeah, he's there. and he can be in your party pretty much the whole game but

you know when it comes down to resolving the main plot line to which he should be like a the fulcrum basically given his his closeness to the character

you're pursuing he's just like hey what's up everyone he actually had better closure in the Nintendo DS version of the game with a bonus boss fight with a dream devourer

is actually probably one of the saddest moments in Chronal Trigger itself but they kind of conclude like what happened there and yeah he was kind of like whatever at the end of it all so I guess he just kind of gave up trying which is really sad we do have the ability to rename him magus or magus or whatever you say in chronocross and I certainly do that just to spite Masado Cato when I'm playing I'm like you know what he's got a goofy mask on and he's got nothing to say but it's still

him I know it All right, so Krono Cross, like I said, came out originally in 1999, and it followed on the heels, not only of Krono-trigger, but also a side, came out originally in 1999, and it followed on the heels not only of Krono-trigger, but also a side. story that has been mentioned here a couple of times radical dreamers which we really ought to do a proper episode on we don't really have time to get into it here but it's a basically like a visual novel and it's it's more it's got more of a horror tinge to it it's all basically set in a mansion and there are characters in radical dreamers and the setting the mansion the vampire mansion they're they're all revisited in chronocross but the story is very different here, the outcomes are very different, even though some of the central

themes and elements are the same. And there's a point in Chrono Cross where you're in this like frozen futuristic city trapped between time. And you find out like if there's the implication with some of the text you can come across in a computer bank that Radical Dreamers is in fact like an alternate reality, even of Chrono Cross. So basically the idea of Kurno Cross, you know, Krono Tricker was all about time travel. Kroner Cross is not directly in that you don't travel through time. Time travel does factor in. But instead of being a game about time travel, it's really a game about the consequences of time travel. What happens when plucky heroes decide we've got to save the future by going back and

rewriting the past? It turns out not everyone's happy about that, including the planet itself. and so you know things happen as a result of that and so you end up traveling between two realities the home reality and another reality where you're the playable character the main hero surge is he's kind of the the fulcrum point of that like the temporal divide the two parallel dimensions so you spend your time going back and forth between realities but there's time travel that has been you know basically the cause of everything that you're experiencing You just don't participate in the time travel yourself the way you did in Kronotrigger. Yeah, it reflects that time travel element or that multidimensional element in some interesting ways.

The fact that it still wants you to look at things from a different perspective. Chrono Trigger is all about, you know, seeing the world in different times and seeing implications, past, future. For my fairly young mind, I was always amazed just in Krono Trigger that if I opened a chest in the past, that it would be empty in the future. but if I did it in reverse, it wouldn't. And I thought that was a neatest little touch when I was younger. But Corner Cross wants you to see those implications in other ways. I think Lynx is probably the most aggressive manifestation of that, the what happens midgame where you suddenly find yourself literally in the shoes of the main antagonist,

you're walking around inside their body, and you're experiencing what turned them into a bad person. It sort of mirrors the whole theme of two worlds. It's all about the subjective experiences. And everybody that's sitting on a dock saying something esoteric and weird about the nature of reality is kind of mirroring that. It's a game about mirroring. But it doesn't just reflect that in the main plot. It reflects that interactively through several of the experiences. And I like that.

The combat system is about opposites. It's about polar, you know, light and dark, fire and ice, etc. The character experiences are about living through two different worlds and meeting two different versions of that. everybody. Thematically, it really does just lock on to that idea in a very interesting way. It's in one of the earlier examples I can think of what they try to do with Celeste, where they take gameplay and try to take a theme of story and then make it part of the theme of the way you play. Celeste is an extremely difficult game about how you keep trying to overcome difficult obstacles, and that fits both the plot of what's happening and the gameplay of what's

happening. Crown Cross is largely the same way. You literally get thrown into your enemy's body and experience the other side of reality. You'd be two versions. It's a really neat conceit. They don't always stick the landing. But I really do think it's aspirational. And I love that they tried it. It doesn't work as well as I'd like.

But I think that it's almost unique in the PlayStation Library as something that really tries to force you to look. I guess Swayk it in three, which I think that it's almost unique. be another example of that. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Nadia. I was just going to say, I think one of the first points of that game that kind of had an emotional impact on me was when you visit the other world for the first time and you find Serge's grave and you discover what had happened to him. He had drowned, which is a very sad thing to happen to a kid to begin with because he was a kid when that happens. And there's an epitaph on his grave that always kind of haunted me. And that's like here lies surge. Nothing can be given to him and nothing can be taken from.

him. And even though that game did not have the best translation, like I always remembered that as just being like kind of a very impactful thing to say. Now, I have to take issue with the claim that it didn't have the best translation, but we can talk about that later. We will get into that parish. Don't worry about it. Yeah. So the big differences in Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger or from Chrono Trigger really have to do with the fact that this was primarily a Masato Cato game. And he was, you know, a key figure in KronoTrigger, but he was not the creative lead. The Krono Trigger was, you know, put together by the so-called dream team, a collaboration between Hironobusakuchi, a Final Fantasy, Takashi Tokita, one of the lead designers and creative

forces behind Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 5 or 3. Ujihori, the lead scenario writer and overall designer of Dragon Quest. and Akira Toriyama, who of course, you know, does the illustrations for Dragon Quest, among other things. Those four were not part of this. And so it really did fall to Kato to jump into it. And his tastes are much more Baroque. Like, you know, the Dream Team, they're great at putting together RPGs that are just, they taste great. Everyone loves their flavor.

They appeal to so many people because they are light and breezy. Very shonen. Yeah, well, not just that, but if you look at the design of Kronotrigger in terms of the characters and what they can do, you have a very small party of six or seven characters, and each of them has a very finite sort of progression of skills that unlocks, and there's no real variety in how you build your characters out. You can give them, you know, little tweaks to individual stats. You can give them different armor and, you know, different accessories. but really they're going to end up being the same every time. And that's a strength of Corona Trigger because it means that every combat scenario

is really well-tuned to make use of the characters you have and to make sure that any party you put together is going to be really well-balanced. And maybe some are more challenging than others. Like if you put together a team that doesn't have any healers, yeah, it's going to be tougher in combat when you start taking damage. But it's really thoughtfully designed.

and just very tightly honed. And it feels like there's no wasted dialogue, no wasted space in Chrono Trigger. It's very efficient, as it had to be for, you know, a cartridge-based game. Chrono Cross is not like that. You have more than 40 characters you can recruit,

only some of whom actually matter. They do have, you know, special abilities that you can sometimes combine into the combo techs like you had in Chrono Trigger, But there's only a few of them, and they require a very specific party configuration. And some of them require the character's top-level skills, all of which are unlocked in esoteric ways. Like anything from, you know, in the case of Zoha, the big dude who's basically naked except a helmet, you go back to his room in Viper Manor with him in the lead of the party, and he can unlock this treasure chest that no one else can open. That's this level 7 tech.

but on the other hand you have someone like Razley the fairy and in order to get her level 7 tech you have to do all kinds of horrible things like there's this whole storyline about dwarves

like murdering fairies and there's this crazy monster that's living in the swamps like you have to let the dwarves win and let this creature that's vital to the survival of the swamp die and then you have to Razley's sister die. And if you do all of those things, then you, the worst person ever,

can have her top level technique. So... Murder in the name of fairies. Yeah. So this is, this is very much a game that kind of pulls on the, um, you know, the, the pre-final fantasy four tradition of like, if you really want to get everything out of this game, you'd better go by a strategy guide or talk to some friends on a forum or something because there's all kinds of stuff that you're never going to see otherwise. And, you're, and, you're really want to get everything. And, And that's by design, but that's very different than the Kronotrigger experience where it's all super lean and there's a lot to do, but it's all kind of compact and there's not a lot of question about like, did I miss anything? No, you got it all. Yeah, it's very much a guide game. That's where my brain went. I wrote guys for living for a while and I love games that have those, those marvelously deep elements that you can dig up, but it does seem just so in the face of the source material. and it's fairly rare the video game

makes you do awful things to get power and even to get Glenn who's arguably the second best party member you've got to be horrible to kid just like no I don't care if you die you know that's the only way to add one of the most compelling characters in the game to your party one of those enjoyable

characters in the game of your party the ferry murders the rest but it does have a kind of a collect-a-thong old school vibe to it in some ways more like a Famicom the Super Famicomacom game, which is unusual. I wonder why they made that particular choice. I've thought about that a lot.

I've never seen the Cato interview where he explains that particular direction. Of either of you, do you know why that choice was made? Which specific choice, the collect-a-thon element? The choice to make it broke, to make it play-through after play-through after-through-oriented. I mean, Kroner-trigger had multiple endings, but the fact is that to unlock every character, you've got to go through this game, what, three times? Yeah, something like that. You know, I think a big part of it was just that they didn't have a huge budget for this game compared to a final fantasy game.

So to really kind of get the most out of the experience, I think they kind of put in a lot of secrets. So people who are compelled to get 100% would really have to dig around. I mean, there's one point early in the game where the game branches into three different story paths into the mansion. So, yeah, in order to really see everything, you do need to replay it three times. And, you know, this is what I think maybe the first game ever that gives you a lot of quality of life improvements for the new game plus mode. It's not just that you take new power into it, but there's a fast forward button so you can just zip through combat. And it basically is just like, oh, yeah, you've done all the fighting and stuff. So that's fine.

You're going to steamroll everything. No big deal. What you really want to do is see all the story stuff and find all the other characters and, you know, explore different outcomes. Yeah. So I really think it was just trying to get the most out of a limited budget. it. But as for the tone shift, like, that's a good question, because I've always wondered about that how, how cheery and, of course, Chrono Trigger had its dark moments, don't get me wrong, but just all of Chrono Cross is so grim, I suppose. I mean, obviously you have, like, moments

where you meet these cute little fluffy things, and then if you want their best tech, you've got to kill everything that they love. But, yeah, I'm sure we'll get into that later, but the, just the, the discrepancy between tone, between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Tross, that's always been a sticking point for me, and for a lot of people, I imagine, and I can't really think of a good reason why it happened. I really think that was, one, a reflection of the era where, you know, you were moving into darker storytelling and people trying to be more mature, I guess. But I think also it reflects Masato Cato's particular tastes. If you look at the games that he's really been lead on and done a lot of writing on, it's things like Xenogiers and, you know, the early

Ninja Guideon games, the original Tecmo trilogy. Like, those were, those were kind of his babies. And there is, like, those are just different. They're more, you know, like, Sainan anime, as opposed to Shonen anime. So it's less about like, hey, everyone, let's, you know, use the power of our hearts to save the day. Friendship, hooray. And more like, oh, things are really bad. And maybe you're bad too. And you should really stop and, you should really stop and think about what you're doing. I feel like this game lands a little differently now than it did 20 years ago for me because it is really about like there's a lot of themes of environmentalism that was you know those were pretty on the nose at the time but it goes

further into colonialism and the existence of power structures and the fact that you're kind of recruiting everyone for your party whether they're good or bad like you can recruit the local dragoons who live in the elnito archipelago and like you know they're kind of like the local But you can also recruit a guy named Norris, who's part of the invading army. And he's really not such a bad guy, really, when you consider it. Like, everyone is just kind of fighting for what they believe in. So the question is, like, who's right, who's wrong? And really, the core storyline gets to the question of, is it like, you know, survival

the fittest? There's a whole kind of side narrative element here, kind of, you know, buried in the deeper main plot where you're looking at a reality where in Krono Trigger, Krono and company didn't necessarily travel back in time to help Aela beat Azala and the reptites. And Lavos didn't land on the planet. And so the reptites, you know, killed the stupid monkeys and became this great power on the planet. But they came to power differently than humans.

They didn't exploit the planet. They didn't, you know, strip it bare and mine it for resources. and, you know, denude the planet the way you see in Chrono Trigger, where you have to reforest an area. The reptites learn to live in harmony with the planet. So was it good that humanity survived? I mean, we, the human race in Chrono Cross, are kind of the beneficiaries of something bad.

Lavos destroying the reptite race and causing them to go, you know, fall into extinction. And, like, I think we're good, but maybe our existence isn't good. And it's the kind of game that makes you want to, you know, ask questions about that. And if you don't,

that's understandable because it's kind of buried in there and you really have to like kind of look for it. But if you really stop and step back, it does have some pretty heavy questions to ask. Yeah, I don't want to over harp on this,

but I really do think it's a game about relativity and relativity. I mean, there's a simple, the kind of time paradox, alternate universe, relativity thing going on. And then as you point out there,

it's about points of view. to Obi-1 can Obi-Wi over-simplified. It is a certain point-of-view kind of game. It hits on that again and again and again. And it also, that would be almost cartoonish in places, except it's also instilled with, I think Maui mentioned melancholy, but there's a sense of regret. Everyone in this game regrets things. Even the NPCs you meet constantly are talking about their regrets. Oh, I wish I'd have done this differently, or I wish I'd have done that differently. And it takes that same theme and sort of carries it through all the time. time. Playing it through this time makes me really wish that I had played Chrono Cross before Chrono Trigger. Interesting. Yeah, because playing them in the other order, I think I'd have been like, wow, what an interesting PlayStation game. What an amazing square RPG with these existential questions. Then I play Trigger and been like, wow, what a bright, vibrant.

But when you play them in the other order and associate them, it feels like, yay, Kroner Trigger taught us the world is great and bright and everything is, there's a fair and everyone got married and oh. But there's some profundity to that. I don't want to overstate it. It's still a goofy PlayStation RPG, but outside of something like tactics,

I think it probably has the most mature storyline and themes despite its flaws of anything from that era, at least coming from square. Mm-hmm. So, you know, Nadia, you mentioned, um, the fact that you mentioned, um, the fact that there's a point of the game where you travel to, you know, Madia, you mentioned, um, the fact that there's a point in the game where you travel to, another dimension and Surge, the main character, discovers that he's dead. What really, the real kicker is when you realize that the timeline where Surge is alive

is actually an anomalous alternate reality, like kind of the anchor point that you have, the home dimension for Surge, is not supposed to exist. It's supposed to be like he was supposed to have died. And so, again, there's like this question of, is it good that Surge is even alive? because it enables all these things to happen. It allows this horrible supercomputer to gain access to a fragment of Lavos that can reshape reality.

And then from there, the reptites dragon that they created, the super dragon god, it merges and comes back to life and threatens to wipe out all of humanity. And then there's the whole thing with the time devourer, the fragment of Lavos that survived.

It just wants to erase all of time, like to make no reality. ever happen. So it seems like, you know, this is a kind of a headlong journey into a lot of not great outcomes. And in the end, there aren't a lot of yes or no answers. No, there really aren't. And in the end, it actually turns out that, you know, by going through all these steps, you've been kind of following someone's plan to make things good, to make, you know, to set things right. but until you really stop and realize, like, oh, you know, we actually made things good again, it seems like it's just very bleak and it's all headed for disaster.

So, yeah, it can be a little heavy, a little overwhelming. And I can see where people would definitely be turned off after the lean, optimistic viewpoints of Kronotrigger to get into this sort of sprawling, messy story about how basically everything is gone wrong ever and everything that you think is good is actually it's not the way history was supposed to have been that's kind of dark

and the game does come to a positive resolution but even that, you know, is not obvious and you really have to kind of jump through some hoops to make it happen. Yeah, to me the most chrono cross moment in Chrono Cross is when you're in the Dead Sea and you're talking to like

the ghosts or the shells or whatever of Crono and Marl and Luca in that kind of that dead area just washed in a perpetual sunset and they're just telling you how you have done everything wrong and you are and you are basically a bad person and should probably try to fix it but you probably won't be able to. So go to hell. I think that's the part where a lot of people were really turned off by the game because they took those literally to be like the characters from the first game who are now dead and telling you that you suck, which is not really the case. Like, you know, someone in the game says,

Oh, those are just like echoes. Those are just memories of people who lived. But it's not actually Krono saying, hey, guess what? You're a dumbass. It is a shock to finally see these characters that you love. And it's like, oh, they're telling me I suck. So I understand why a lot of people might have been turned off, although I do still have to say a very poignant moment.

Like just I remember that scene, like it's burned into my memory. I'll never forget it. After playing 10 billion video games, I'll never forget it. Yeah, I think what helps offset at some. I think that what makes it more tolerable is the fact that there is still that tropey PlayStation high pinnacle-era PlayStation silliness to go along with that depth. And that does serve maybe as the offset. Of course there's an evil giant computer.

Of course there's a dragon god. Of course there's a time devourer. We do have this other side of it, a world of bright colors and happy themes. and canoes across beautiful, wonderfully rendered seas with gorgeous music. There is that other side of it to help offset it. I think we're leaning into the darkness of it as we should because it is fundamentally a dark story. But there is some offset there by the creators to kind of wink and go, yeah, this is a dark

story, but also, by the way, welcome to Square Enix 2000. You're going to be okay. This is going to end all right for you. you know, and I did kind of cling to that through the game. Plus, of course, the fact that the characters range between bland and nonsensical, and some of them are just so bizarre that you're like that. There is a priest who was a lucha. I love that.

Like, he plays it totally straight. He's a priest and a lucha. Exactly. And you do have that to, and it can be off-putting, but it does also help lighten the mood a little bit. But yeah, the moment you meet that guy is literally at a funeral and he's wearing the luchador mask. It's perfect. I love it. Yeah, I mean, talk about wrestling with demons.

The goofy tone of it is something that they deliberately added to set it apart from games like Final Fantasy 8 and Parasite Eve. Fittingly for a game that came out originally in 1999, I think it was Cato. Maybe it was Tanaka, the producer, said, you know, Final Fantasy, that is Star Wars, but we wanted to be more like Austin Powers. So we wanted this to be like silly and goofy. And so you really get that in the, the character designs, they recruited Nobatero Yuki of Vision of Eskiflone and also the character designer for trials of mana. They were basically just like, Nobu, just go for it, just design a bunch of characters. And they are all over the place. There is a half bunny girl who is a beast tamer and her main weapon is a rocket-powered carrot. There is there is, there is is a purple dog that lives in Surge's hometown and talks like Scooby-Doo with a list.

I hate it. There's, you know, Surge's kind of like childhood friend slash maybe love interest, Lina, who is just like this normal girl and she attacks everything with magical frying pans. I mentioned Mojo, a voodoo doll that comes to life, and its main attack, it's like one of its powerful attacks is to, to kind of lean forward so that the giant spike through its chest is a, is like a pivot on the ground and that it spins around and hits enemies. And eventually it realizes like, hey, you know, I was created to curse people, but I can bring happiness to people's lives too. And Mojo becomes Mojoi. And it's just, it's just all kinds. There's a, there's a, there's a little kid, a little alien kid named Starkey. And, uh, starkey. Yeah, and, uh,

in Japanese, he was Star Child. So, like, kind of drives home the, the idea that he's a little baby alien. But he doesn't really understand humanity. But when a character says thank you, you get a little pop up window over his head that says, Starkey learned, thank you. As if it was learning a technique or something, you know, like when you learn a special ability for combat.

But it's just him learning to be a human. There's just so much stuff like this. And then you do have the more serious characters who are built into the plot. You know, characters like the devas, the dragoons. You have Glenn, you have. of um karsh yeah he's one of the devas um but you know you have you have all those characters and you can use them if you want but you can also just be like i'm going to make the stupidest party i

can and then and then like a third of the way through the game you have to build a new party anyway you can't use any of the characters you liked because they're like whoa you suck i don't want to be in your party you're the bad guy so you have to like go out and recruit new characters so you can't really get too attached to characters and the attachments you do have make that middle section of the game where you're not playing a surge. Well, you are, but you're not. It hits harder because you're like, but that's, those are the, I, you know, I customize them. I gave them all the upgrades. Like they're, they were fighting with me. We beat, we beat Dario together. What's happening?

And it's especially poignant because the combat system is so good, and you kind of get into a flow with that after a while, as you're building that party, that it is jarring to have that taken away from. You're like, I have figured this out. Oh, no, I have new people. And that's hard. Just like, oh, well, everything I learned to do here, I have to learn again with a new bunch of folks, a new bunch of elements.

And I think that I like that jarring. I'm not a big fan of a lot of the characters. I love the, I love looking at them. I hate talking to them. Yes. Even, even, even kid who I, I don't know if it's the Cockney thing or I like that she's Australian. She's Australian.

Either way, that's the, we talked about the translation a second ago at Parish. I don't have a problem with the translation. It's definitely much better than most games of that era, especially Final Fantasy 7, but the accents drive me up the freaking wall and up to the ceiling. Like, I don't know if they use some sort of algorithm to put them on, but they're all terrible. Yeah. So in the Japanese version, you know, the Japanese language has a lot of subtleties that just don't translate into English. And I'm not just talking about like when persona games keep San and Chan at the end of, you know,

keep the honoristics on there. I'm talking like just the way people end sentences or some of the way they combine phrases. I mean, Jared, you lived in Japan for a while, right? I did for a few years. And I lived in a mountain region where people spoke very differently than what you'd hear down in. If you went down to the coast, even an hour away in Nagoya,

people spoke very differently. And you'd pick up not just tonal changes, but just complete word differences with the same meaning. And you could tell where somebody was from. My Japanese is atrocious, but even I could pick up occasionally where somebody was from just based on their vocabulary. Yeah, and it's the same for me. Like, I can definitely tell when I'm talking to someone from the Kansai region like Osaka or Kyoto, like when I've interviewed Kaji Inafune, I know this dude is from Osaka because I hear just like the way he's talking. And I'm like, that's not how people from Tokyo talk.

But there's a lot of really subtle shading in Japanese, and that really gets emphasized in fiction, especially pop fiction, like, you know, video games. And so they really helped to, I would say they really worked to distinguish the characters from another by giving them all lots of different subtle differences in their Japanese dialect. But that doesn't work in English. So what happened was, I know the localizers have said. that what they did was they basically wrote a script and like there's generic dialogue that any character can

voice throughout the game and they would run the dialogue through these scripts and kind of customize it to each character. So you did have you know like kid in her Australian lingo or Postal doing the Scooby-Doo thing

with a Lisp and so on and so forth. Then it's not always successful but kind of given what they had to work with and the constraints they had to work with and the the RAM limitations that made it impossible for them to just load you know 40 different unique bits of dialogue into RAM to be used you know if if one character or another showed up I think I think it was a pretty clever workaround again it is it can be a little overbearing but I get why it turned out that way and it is it is fun like it works better with some characters and others.

I appreciate the ambition, at least. Yeah, I'm with Nadia. I appreciate the ambition. I think my, and I agree for the era. I think it's actually a pretty spectacular translation. I just wish they to have focused on a couple. It seems like a couple of the key characters were the most obnoxious and off-putting translations happen.

I'm really convinced I'd like Kid who she spoke differently. Same thing. I love her themes. I love her attitude. But every time she opens her mouth and just like, ah, stop. talking in I don't know I I'm probably just the problem I feel like there's some sort of like I don't know like some sort of cultural meme or something that she's based on because a few years

later you had the legend of Zelda the Wind Waker where princess Zelda first appears as tetra being like this kind of roguish pirate you know pirate princess character but she's actually like this posh princess, it's just like she has to reveal herself. And so she's very coarse and tough when you first know her as Tetra. And it's very much kind of what you see with Kidd. So I don't know if this is like based on some sort of existing trope or something or if it's just a wacky coincidence, but it is interesting. It is interesting. And I think that maybe it's simply, in this case, the localization of the idiom didn't quite come through the way that we held it would because I want to hang out with an awesome investment.

venturing pirate that does cool things and leap straight into danger. But there's a, I don't know. Maybe it's just my unfamiliarity. Literally, I didn't know the difference between Cockney and Australian here. So like I said, it may just be me. Yeah, there's certain phrases she uses that are very, like very specific to, uh, she says stuff like Struth, which, um, is Australian. So I'm not, I'm not an expert on Australian or Cockney lingo either.

so I just know what I've read and what I remember. But I think in Japanese, Kid had a very coarse, masculine way of speaking. I think, you know, her personal pronoun was Ore as opposed to like Watashi or, God forbid, Atashi. So I think it's just hard to translate that into English because you don't have English language,

the English language is not nearly as gendered as Japanese. Like the role. the way people speak are not as specific to kind of your place in society. So, you know, there's not... O'Re is like kind of a hard me, isn't it? Like a very self-centered kind of version of me? Oh, it's like, yeah, it's like Yakuza Mi.

It's like, I don't even know how to kind of give an equivalent in English. But it's, yeah, you just, women don't say O'Re. They do not refer to themselves that way. Unless it's, you know, in fiction to make a point. like this lady is badass and doesn't follow the rules. Well, I do love that scene fairly early in the game where you've reached the burnout residence.

And if she and Serge are sitting by the campfire and she's explaining, look, I am just going to watch out for myself from now on and that's how it's going to be. And I think that reflects that attitude really powerfully. That's probably maybe her best scene in the game. There's not a lot of interstitial cut scenes. in the game. But you get that one there where she's sitting and talking

and just explaining, life is don't me, the most horrible hand that I have learned that I am never, ever just going to accept anything again. And that moment works really well for. So I think maybe it really is a matter of the translation because the character is, in some

way, she's the most honest character in Crono Cross, somebody that really is just speaking up for what they believe in. And yet at the same time, she's also the one that saves her. she's constantly jumping in to help other people, even though she does it aggressively. She talks about self-concern, but her self-concern keeps placing her in the path of being a hero, which is kind of neat. Yeah, Kit is a really interesting character in terms of the themes of predestination and, you know, just like, can you change fate?

Because Kid is so tied to Serge's story throughout the game, you have constant opportunity after, opportunity to let her join your party or to turn her down and you can you can constantly just say no you're not part of the team and she'll show up again you know she's her story intersects with surges again and she's like oh i can go along with you and you can keep saying no and you can keep pushing her away until you get to the the dragon fort uh like you know kind of the the first big story climax um you know you can you can refuse to help her when she's injured and poisoned after or Lynx's attack in the Viper Manor. But, you know, there's just no escaping kid.

And she will show up. Even if she's not in your party, she, like, tags along sneaking behind you to kind of follow your progress just because it's kind of similar to what she wants to get accomplished. And so, yeah, it's this really interesting thing where it's not like, it's not exactly like one of those,

you know, they call them communist choices in an RPG. Like, I won't have the T if the T. tea is bitter. No, not if it's bitter. Not if it's bitter. Okay, fine, I'll take it. Yes, but thou must. It's more like she won't be a member of your party, but she's still going to be there in the story, and you know, you can keep pushing her away, and it's still inevitable that, you know, you're going to end up with her. And the game does open with, like, you having a vision of Serge stabbing her. So maybe you don't want to team up with kid because you're like, hey, this, this girl seems nice. She talks a little funny, but

she doesn't deserve to die. So if I push her away and keep myself from teaming up with her, then maybe that'll be able to avoid that. But there is no avoiding that. That's also in the interim movie. Kid features very prominently in that as well as we're getting stabbed. So there's some interesting creative choices. And the more you play and the more you kind of explore alternate dialogue options and

alternate paths, the more you're like, oh, there's a lot here. Like they did a lot with not really quite a huge amount of, of budget or resources for this game compared to Final Fantasy, but they did their best. And, um, definitely. Yeah, I really think where the story kind of, or the game kind of trips over itself is with the story. Like I can, I, I think you can take or leave some of the goofy characters. Like, you don't, you don't have to recruit them and you don't have to put them in your party, but the story is still the story. And it's, it's a lot.

That's a good way to describe it, just a lot. I'm looking at the summary you wrote for our notes. And whereas I can, you know, I can recall Chrono Trigger's story off the top of my head, no problem. Even Final Fantasy 6, or the more complicated story, no problem. I can, I've played Chrono Cross a few times through, and you can't even begin to get me to describe what the story's about. It's just, I kind of like it because it's so ambitious, and we've talked about this game's ambition before, but it is just a big pile of mess. Yeah, evil robot, or evil computer dragon god something time ultra i don't faith i don't yeah you know frozen flame carl i the shit wait okay now characters from cronotrigger are involved but they're not them

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. I don't know. Thank you. So the interesting thing about Krono Cross's story is the Masato Kato has said this wasn't Krono Trigger 2. This wasn't, you know, a direct sequel to Krono Trigger because he wanted it to be accessible to people who had never played it before. And somewhere along the way, he really, really lost sight of that. I don't know, I don't know what happened, but this game, he got carried away. This game is, it exists entirely.

to resolve a single incidental plot point to Chrono Trigger. And that plot point could have been answered in the game in Chrono Trigger. It could have been, but they didn't. And so it was the one dangling end, and that is what happened to Shala. So in Chrono Trigger, you know, once you kind of get toward the end game and you basically are free to go attack Lavos at any time and wrap up the story, you're given the opportunity to take care of a bunch of side quests. And if you go to, I believe the guru of time and the end of time, he'll give you hints.

And he'll always say, like, someone close to you is in trouble and kind of push you toward where you need to go. So each character has kind of like a story they need to resolve. You know, Luca needs to save her mother from being crippled. Robo needs to clear out the factory in the future and save his girlfriend or whatever. I can't remember exactly what his story was. But, you know, basically every character can resolve things, except Megas doesn't have one, the villain that you can recruit into your party. He doesn't really have an optional story. But, you know, in 12,000 BC, his sister is sucked into the void of time by Lavos and disappears.

And he promises he vows to find her. So that seems like the big open-ended thing. And this is, Corona Trigger is the one time I've ever called the Nintendo Power hotline. because I cleared out all the side quest. Like I played this game, you know, the trigger exhaustively, like got all the endings and everything, but I could never figure out how to save Shala. And so finally, I called the hotline and they were like, yeah, you can't actually do that. Like when the guru is telling you that someone close to you is in trouble, it's just

kind of a general statement. So there's not actually a storyline to save Shala. Well, that storyline came along and it's called Krono Cross. That's all Krono Cross is. It is, it exists, it is 40 hours of video game, 40 characters across two realities, and God knows how many weird intersecting plot lines just to save Megas's sister Shala. That's it. Yes, but to the credit of everyone involved in Krono Cross, the music that happens when you finally

reveal and save, like, who she is, the music that plays is freaking incredible. It's like a remix of Shalas theme, which is one of my favorites from Krono Trigger. It is absolutely glorious. I don't think I can ever confess completely, even knowing the context of Krono Tricker and Krona Cross, even having spent a lot of time with both games, I don't think I ever completely understood what was happening. I understood Shalda was saved.

I didn't understand why exactly. It just happened. I was like, I think Robo's dead and Shal is alive now, I think? I don't know. But, I mean, is that really all that far? You mentioned Zeno Gears earlier, right? there's this marvelously convoluted element to a lot of RPG storytelling from that era. I'm really into today.

I mean, does Croto Cross make any less sense than Kingdom Hearts 3? It's a strange anomaly that they built such a convoluted plot around a single thread. I think that could have been resolved much more simply. But in the way, I'm kind of glad it wasn't, because the game's plot really serves more as a vehicle to deliver us to a bunch of very, interesting places full of weird people. And I get the idea that they really decided just to sort of focus on that existential play-through element of it and not go back and trim it. Maybe again, that was budget, Jeremy. He's bringing that up. Maybe this game was, you know, needed another six months of trimming. Maybe there was a 40-hour game in this 50-hour experience that would have

been much more disciplined and had a story that made sense. But I'm okay with what we got. I wonder if having just gone back to it, I wonder if somebody playing this for the first time now could enjoy it without that caveat. If they just play the blind, I think they might get very frustrated with the plot halfway through and walk away. I don't know. What do you all think? I think they might enjoy it more now because there's so much ancillary text on the internet to explain what the hell is happening. That's something that we didn't really have at the time. So I feel like maybe it's a somewhat weak story in terms of how it's laid out in the game, but at least now you have kind of a support group for it.

Yeah, that's kind of my thought as well, because like I said, I'd play the game a little bit later than a lot of people. And by that point, I had been warned, okay, this is what the story's about. It's kind of cuckoo, but it has parts that really shine through. So when I played it for myself, I realized like, okay, yeah, I see where people are coming from. It's not the greatest follow-up to Crono Trigger by far, but it's definitely. definitely, like, worth, stand on its own merits, even if it is messy as hell. But that's just, like, what RPGs were like back then.

Yeah, by the time I played it, there was definitely support out there, too, although I think it was more in the message boardy realm. But there were still, at the very least, those theories and arguments that made a lot of Japanese games so much fun from that era. We're just like, I'm not sure what happened, but I bet you can find somebody on Gaff to fight about it with. Yeah, we had a special sort of point of view. back then before we really knew a whole lot

about the Japanese side of gaming which is how we ended up with like a whole bunch of weird theories about who GoGo was from Final Fantasy 6 whereas in Japan they were like oh that's funny that's a reference to Final Fantasy 5 a game we never really played by that point Yeah didn't someone come up with a theory that it was Aldous

Huxley? It was something like that It was a whole thing like and it that endured for a long time In my head canon it will always be Aldous Huxley I think that regardless of the reality I think it's much more fun if Aldous Huxley is walking around their Final Fantasy. That's kind of great.

So we should talk a little bit about the story, kind of to give it a rundown, because it is so convoluted. But basically, the game begins with a kid named Surge, a teenager whose girlfriend or special friend, maybe future girlfriend, is like, hey, you keep oversleeping because you're an RPG protagonist, and that's annoying. You're supposed to meet me. So now I'm going to make you go out and, like, kill a bunch of lizards. to get me a necklace. So he does that and then is kind of like has this weird moment on the

beach where he hears someone calling to him. And then all of a sudden he falls through a portal into another dimension, a dimension where he quickly discovers that he died when he was age seven. So that's kind of a bummer. And from there, you know, there's this just a lot of things happen. He keeps meeting this girl named kid who seems to know a lot about him, but not in like a creepy way, just like she seems wise for her year. even though she has a very coarse manner about her. And he just kind of bounces around between different groups and intersects with a guy named Lynx,

who is literally a giant catman in a military outfit, who seems to have strange designs on him. Anyway, so Lynx, it turns out, is actually his dad. Sure. Here's where things get wacky. You've got to have a kink. All right. So, Lynx is his dad because basically the point at which reality bifurcated into two parallel dimensions was when he was, he drowned on a beach at age seven.

But that resulted from an event when he was three and was attacked by a panther demon that poisoned him. And his, you know, like the local medics couldn't help him. So his father and his father's friend set out on a boat to find medical help for him on a different island. and there was a huge storm that was caused by kids' alternate reality self, who was trapped in part of Lavos, who heard Serge crying because he was in pain. It was like, I'm going to send you to this weird, frozen city from the future that's stuck in the past, and you're going to find help there with the medics.

And he did, but while he was there, three-year-old Serge also touched a fragment of Lavos that was enshrined there because the power systems and safeties were off on the island because of the storm. And that made him the only person who could link up with the fragment of Lavos. And at the same time, the computer that ran the island was like, wait a minute, that wasn't supposed to happen.

I'm supposed to have the power of Lavos. But the computer couldn't take it back. So the computer was like, your dad is now going to be a cat man and is going to do my bidding. And so four years later, his dad, Wazuki, hadn't turned completely into a cat man yet, but he was kind of under.

the computer fate's control. And so he just let Serge die as he was drowning out in the water. And it drove him crazy and that's when he became links. But the bifurcation there is because in one reality, Serge did die, but in another reality,

the guru of time sent a kid back into the past to save Serge from drowning. And so in one reality, he was dead and the anomalous reality, he was alive. someone else take over it but yeah this

I mean I can't pretend to understand it I don't it's not even one of those drug-induced storylines I really do wonder what the design doc meetings for this game were like yeah I would have to be a fly on the wall for that yeah

you see some games and you're just like you know I really I just wonder what was being smoked but this doesn't feel that way I feel like somebody just decided they wanted to create something that if there were, in fact, two realities and there's one person that's alive and one in dead and the other, then you would have all kinds of crazy convoluted paradoxes like this. But I think that for the sake of storytelling, you usually boil down and distill that stuff. I think they wanted to throw something that was appropriately complex at us. And honestly, it just didn't work. that's my theory, is that they were like, you know, there's a lot of dangling ends and

participles here. Let's just give it to them. The player can handle it. And the truth of the matter is, we probably can't because it's nuts. That's my take on. Yeah, I didn't even get to the main part, which is that a kid is actually like a clone echo of Shala, the princess from the kingdom of zeal, who is kind of the fulcrum of this entire story. When she fell into the void of time, she merged with Lavos, the, you know, the galactic destroyer, and became the time devourer. And the, I think the only thing preventing the time devourer from just like going hog wild and destroying all reality is the missing fragment, the frozen flame that was enshrined in the futuristic city Chronopolis that Serge became connected to so that once he actually makes a connection with it, then the time devour is able to become, you know, achieve its full. strength, but the goal there really is for Surge to be able to separate Shala from Lavos and rescue her. And so that is the overarching goal of the game, but you don't really realize it until the very end.

Yeah, that's a thing. You really don't know a thing about Shala until the very end of the game. Which is a pretty square thing to do, right? There's always that 11th hour twist. You're kind of waiting for it at this point. You played enough of. And you're like, but the fact that it's Shala really was off-putting for me. I was like, oh, yeah, Shala, I remember her. She's kid, kind of, not sort of. Like, I expected Lovos to show up at some point. You've got this giant planet-eating elemental monstrosity.

Sure, that's a great resonant point for a game. We can probably go back to Lovos if it's in the same series. I did not expect to hear from Shala in this game. And so the fact that this became that one untouched thread that you were talking about shocked me. But it all the more made me go. first time I encountered before I knew the background of the game. It's like, where the hell is Megas here? Like, if we're making a game about Shala, where's the one character that's most emotionally tied to or that's been searching through time for? Like, why is that

not touched at all? And I've read the interviews that say it was budget related, but it seems strange that they decided that the Catman clone computer element was the part that was important to focus on and not the one character that having an emotional investment in his sister. Yeah, I agree. I feel like the focus was shifted to the wrong part of the story because there was definitely potential there to tell this really interesting story about like, what happened to Shalak? Because that was a major point for me as well.

But just it turned out to be so convoluted that I just lost interest halfway. Yeah, I find myself looking going, okay, well, when can I go back and do another field of fact? I want to fight a battle again. Yeah. That's just a lot of the experience with pro-neutral. goes, well, here's another character in my party. Who can I kill with them? Well, here's another strange area.

Wow, the music's beautiful. But when it comes to the story, eventually, I just gave up and, like, just tell me where on the nap to go next so that I can try a new element and see what we can belong. And look at these beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds from the 90s. Exactly. But, you know, I didn't even get to the part about how there's a parallel dimension. I mentioned before that, you know, there's the reality where the reptites transcended, you know, and survived and destroyed the stupid monkeys.

But they created this floating city called Dinopolis that is like an earth-friendly, sustainable paradise. That's pulled backward in time when Chronopolis is pulled backward in time because Chronopolis is, you know, the ultimate expression of human technology, which was made possible by Lavos's interference. And Dinopolis is, you know, kind of like the equivalent on the parallel track where Lavos had nothing to do with any of it, and it's just all focused on the coolness of the planet, the good nature stuff.

So then there's, you know, the dragon god, and there's this girl that you constantly encounter throughout the story. She even becomes part of your party when you are playing as not Surge, Harley, who is actually, it turns out the seventh dragon, the lunar dragon, who was created by the dragon god when it was broken into six parts and trapped so that. She could go through the process of rescuing the six parts of the dragon god so it could re-merge into the dragon god and destroy humanity. And she just kind of disappears.

She just kind of like the dragon god awakens. And it's just like, oh, well, we'll never see Harley again. Where'd she go? I'm done. Peace out. Oh, I got a question for you, Jeremy. I mean, you've talked about the very special place this game has in your life. It was foundational to your career.

It helped you in choosing to relocate. and follow up the opportunities that happened there. You invested yourself in the game in a different language. We've talked about the themes and we've talked about the characters and the beautiful music and the amazing bad.

Is this actually... Can any game with this story be a good video game? I convinced myself it was before this call and now I'm not sure again just as we do this exercise. The fact that they invested so much sincerity into so

terrible a story is it how does that it's not even terrible it's just it's just ridiculously convoluted it's it's very animate borderline nonsensical but man if that's the like if if story can keep a game from being good we're this entire

medium is in big trouble especially yeah you're right you're right no this is a great game and a lot of it most of it has to do with the core mechanics that we haven't talked about yet but as an expression of the console RPG, the turn-based mechanics of a console RPG, it's fantastic. And all these things kind of tie together.

Like, the story actually does tie to the combat system, because in Chrono Trigger, you had four elements. You had light, shadow, water, and fire. Here you have six elements, and these six elements are actually artificial spells, artificial magic that were, that humans have extracted. from the six dragon gods, the six fragments of the dragon god. So the elemental system exists in pairs. So you have blue and red, which is fire and water, or water and fire, I guess.

And then you have green and yellow, which is earth and... I think it's wind? Yes, wind and air. Or wind and earth, yeah. And then you have white and black, which obviously is light and shadow. So it's a more complex elemental system than in Chrono Trigger, but because everything pairs up, then, you know, you kind of have these dualities. And so a big part of the central game twist is that Surge and Links, Surge is tricked by Links so that links can take Surge's body in order to gain access to the frozen flame because it was linked to Surge's DNA. So they have to switch bodies.

and you end up playing a third of the game in Lynx's body, but this actually has a big change on how the game plays because Serge is a white element, which means he has light-based powers, and Lynx is dark element. He's black element, which means he has shadow-based powers. And so you have to rethink a lot of your approaches

and the sort of super-powerful light attacks that you can rely on, you can no longer rely on, and it's extra rough because you end up bumping into a lot of enemies who are white-based. And, you know, because these elemental pairs exist in, you know, in these binary pairs, the linked elements are very powerful against each other. And so it makes the game really challenging when you are a shadow element character going up against these, like, super powerful light element characters.

And on top of that, there is this element called the field system where basically the sort of, I guess it's like Dark Souls tend to. or demon souls tendencies or whatever like light and shadow basically the most the three most recently used elements affect the color balance of the field and there's a little icon indicator to show like what the current status of the field is when when the tendency of the field gravitates toward one one color or another anything of that color is elevated and boosted in strength and everything of the opposite color is reduced so you have to really be mindful not to let, you know, a white element character act too many times

in a row because they will turn the field white and then Serge will be just like completely beaten down. This is a huge thing in the most memorable battle in the game, which is the battle against Serge's father's friend, Miguel, who's just like a dude. He's just like a dude in like a safari hat and shorts. But he also has like this legendarily powerful weapon. And, he is the opposite element of surge and gets a ton of moves and he can just like everyone gets ruined by him when I when I had this guide that had my email address in it for 10 years after this guide went out people would still write to me and be like I need some help with this guy I'm like I'm not a helpline do I look like Nintendo power no sorry it's in the guy he was strong and

pissed that's a bad combination he wasn't even pissed he was just kind of sad and regretful he It was like, sorry, buddy, I got to kill you. But they do this beautiful thing. I'm so glad we're talking about because this is the best thing about the game. I think this incredible, incredible turn-based combat system. I don't think anybody's ever done it better before since turn-based combat. And they managed to make the combat very complex without feeling complicated. Once you got your head around it, and it's not too hard to do that, you're just like, okay, so I'm weighing.

field effects on one side. I'm weighing my intrinsics on the other because every character has an intrinsic also that makes them powerful or vulnerable against certain things. And then I've got my elemental selection and my party order. And then my stamina, which allows me to, you know, do I play cautiously and preserve my stamina, which governs the number of moves I have in a turn? Or do I go all in and try to finish them off at this last second? Because it'll let you go into a negative. Like you can take that risk and swing with a haymaker at the end of a round and hope you connect just the right way. And then having struck hard, you don't have to strike again. But if you lose, you leave yourself vulnerable for this long period of time

and you're watching the field and you don't quite know what your opponents are going to do to alter the field too. It's just so rich. Yeah, there's a lot to keep track of, but not in a bad or confusing way. It's just very engaging. Yeah. It makes every, every battle. I mean, I get tired of fighting ghosts on the pirate ship after about the 40th time. There are moments that that it becomes a grind. But by and large, every battle is energetic. They're also fairly quick. Even the battles outside of boss fights that are a little challenging when you run

into an enemy you're not quite ready for, they're still fairly fast. You're either going to win or lose pretty quickly. And that's nice, too. It's not quite as snappy as we can in two, but it doesn't linger, which is really nice. And you don't have that really annoying. Every spell takes 20 seconds to cast PlayStation. thing most of them are shorter animations and that's really nice too yeah and on top of that you can escape from any battle at any time as long as you have a character alive if you choose run

you will run now when you're fighting a boss you can't actually like leave the boss room usually but what you can do is you know heal up uh restock your your gear like rebalance how your elements are laid out change your party if you need to like it's it's it offers you a lot lot of freedom to escape and kind of, you know, try to pitch things back in your own favor, which is helpful. But yeah, the stamina system is really interesting. You kind of touched on that, Jared, but the specifics are very nuanced and thoughtful. You mentioned going into the negative. So every character for each turn of combat, not that combat turns exist in the traditional sense, really, but basically like every cycle of combat, you gain seven points

of stamina. That's where you top out. And you can invest these stamina points in different actions until you are at zero. So instead of just like attacking once, you basically have seven points to invest in actions. So if you use a weak action, that's one point of stamina. A medium attack is two. And a strong attack is three. And you might say, well, I'm going to just do two strong attacks. And you can do that, but strong attacks have a really high percentage likelihood to miss. And you actually build up your probability of hitting successfully by hitting in succession. So if you attack multiple times with weak attacks before launching a strong attack, then your strong attack is much more likely to hit. So you have to kind of trade off like, do I want to risk it on

these two powerful attacks that may may miss out or do I want to do some little puny chip damages and then hit extra hard for my final final attack. On top of that, you also have the elements. Like anytime you cast an element, which is the equivalent of magic, but also like skill techniques, whatever, those always take exactly seven points of stamina. So at the start of a turn, you can just use an element and that's your turn for that character. But as you mentioned, you can go into negative. So you can build up, you know, like with two strong attacks or a strong or a weak medium strong attack or just a bunch of weak attacks. Whatever you want to do and whittle yourself down to one stamina point and then cast an element. So you do get extra turns,

like an extra attack basically in that turn. But that puts you at negative six. So basically you miss a turn. So you're kind of out. I guess it's kind of something that they explored, similar to something they explored with like bravely default but not quite the same yeah so so there's a lot of strategy and sometimes it is good to just go all in and like have your party spam attacks as quickly as possible because there are special skills you can only use when the field is completely weighted in your party's favor yeah like in a specific color so maybe you want to just like use three color techniques as quickly as possible so you can shift the field in your favor you know, to weaken the enemy

or to be able to cast a summon because you can only use summons when the field is completely one color, one solid color, the same element as that summon. So there's a lot to keep in mind. And on top of that, on top of that, you can only use each technique once

per battle. They're expendable, but not in the permanent sense, just in the sense that, you know, once you use say a character's level three skill that's unique to that character, that's the only time you can use it for that battle unless under very specific circumstances you can recharge them. But generally, it's pretty much like one and done. So you have to think, like, when's the best time to put this to use? Like, when should I attack physically? When

should I use techniques early in the battle? Or do I want to soften the enemy down to the point that they, you know, start using desperation moves and then try to end it really quickly before they, you know, use too many of those desperation moves on me. It's just, it's a lot to think about. It is. And the fact that it's all taught, the game does, I think, a pretty good job of teaching you how this works, ramping you up to it. You talked about the light and heavy elements and how making a bunch of, it's almost

like boxing. You make a bunch of jabs to create an opening for your big haymaker, or you can choose to just take that risk. Every battle demands a different approach. That's all like the planning on your side. And then your enemies are going to do unexpected things. There's nothing more terrifying in Krona Cross than an enemy you haven't faced before. Yeah.

Because you don't know what they're going to do in the field. And that, especially later in the game when the field does everything, just being like, yeah, I've got my plan. Oh, no. It happens so often. And it makes turn-based combat tense in a way that it almost ever is. I love Dragon Quest games. And I love their simplicity of combat. I like that so much of combat is about preparing for the battle instead of the battle.

But this game adds a richness that I've rarely encountered in RPGs from anyone, from any developer. I think this is my favorite RPG combat system. And it's been really, I don't think people have stolen from it enough. You mentioned Bravely Default. That does some with it. But I really do wonder why this hasn't been robbed more and used as inspiration for the combat systems. And maybe my context is too narrow there. Can you all think of places where folks are stolen from this? No, it seems, it's pretty unique, at least from my angle. I could

be wrong, and I'm sure people will correct us if we are. But no, I think bravely default, maybe Octopath Traveler comes the closest. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of developers just want to put their own stamp on RPG combat. So instead of saying, oh, that was good in Chrono Trigger, we should also do that. They'll say, oh, that was good in Chrono Cross. We should not do that. Instead, we should do the press turn system where, you know, hitting an enemy's weakness gives you an extra turn or something. So, you know, everyone kind of has their own ideas about how to make RPG combat interesting and different. And I appreciate the variety. I would like to see, you know, a follow-up to Kronos cross that makes use of these specific mechanics or, you know, builds off them in an interesting way.

But I don't necessarily want to see every RPG work like this. I like the variety. Oh, no, I like Friday myself, but I wouldn't mind, I wouldn't mind after 20 years seeing somebody try this again, wherever they did it. It's something from Inix that kind of leaned in and said, I don't need exactly a field every time, but I do like seeing turn-based combat played with in creative ways. I mean, I really enjoy the way Etriottis handles it, for example, and I want to see it iterated on more than I have. It's strange to me that personas become such a big deal and that being a turn-based system when those are often kind of scoffed at in Western RPG communities. But I think this game proves that there's still some beautifully unexplored areas

or under-explored areas we could look at and draw new combat systems from. It's one of my favorite things about RPGs. As much as Lightning Returns drove me nuts, I love the fighting. I love that weird rhythm-esque-based combat system and seeing the things people come up with. It's one of my very favorite things about playing games in the show. All right. So finally, to kind of wrap this up, we do need to talk about the soundtrack.

Absolutely. I mean, would you say this is Yasunori Mitsuda's finest soundtrack? Yes. It is up there for certain. To me, his most beautiful work, if not Chrono Trigger, and then Zeno Blade Chronicles, too. but it's close I'm going to go with Krono Cross

but you know I am biased so the corollary to that is this is this the best video game soundtrack ever it's again up there I can't give it the number one spot though although it's funny how my number

one spots are mostly occupied by Mitsuda because he's just that brilliant yeah I mean that was that was kind of a trick question I don't believe that there is a best video game soundtrack but this is one of the all-time greats. I agree. It is.

This is up there with something like Symphony of the Night is something I just want to listen to constantly. The PlayStation era was so good. Bring back the PlayStation. Everyone just went freaking hog wild and it was perfect. Everyone was like, we've got good, powerful audio hardware. Let's just go as hard as possible. Let's go too hard.

It's good. And they did. They did. So Chronocross, you know, kind of builds on some of the stylistic elements that Mitsu explored in Zenogears, it has a very strong Celtic feel to it but he also pushes more toward a

Mediterranean feel, which is appropriate because the entire game does take place on an archipelago and it has a very tropical like Okinawa feel almost. In fact, Surge's main weapon, or his only weapon, is basically an

ore with blades attached to both sides, which is based on a real Okinawan weapon. So they're really yeah, they're really kind of drawing on, you know, that sort of tropical culture and climate and civilization, like just how everything works in the tropics. So you do get a lot of that Mediterranean feel. And the soundtrack, I think, really matches the colorful, vibrant backgrounds of the game. There's so much, just so, it's so lively. It's all, you know, hand-drawn or pre-rendered static backgrounds when you're exploring. But it's just, it's liable. It's lively.

there's so much like light sourcing and uh bloom effects thrown over it it's just a beautiful game to behold uh it really is and then he he supplements that celtic slash mediterranean vibe with splashes of progressive rock which of course is always great so there's a whole rock opera whole ass rock opera in that game yes absolutely with nicky yep magical dreamers yes it was perfect i i have a real bias towards rock opera so i'm I'm good with that. No, that's one of the most beautiful things that happens. It is, it's like it's unfiltered creativity.

It's a marvelous experimental game. I'm not to brought up the tropical vibe. I mean, how often are you playing a JRP or any RPG and just like, oh, by the way, we're going to travel through a tropical archipelago of color and light now? Everything kind of jumps off the screen at you. It's got that PlayStation Fugly sometimes, but it's, it's amazing. seeing what happens. It's almost like an Amstrad game. They just turn the saturation up and everything's just jumping out at you and it's like, okay, now we're on canoes and there's volcanoes

and there's rivers and swamps and forests and everything's got a, we're all kind of, we're fishing, we're doing our thing, we're just sort of living our lives. It's really marvelous. And the music does reflect that. But the progress stuff is delightful. I'm with you, Jeremy. me any opportunity for something, you know, nine-minute, nine-minute electric guitar solos or double keyboards are always, always welcome in my video games. Yeah, the one that really stands out for me is the battle theme for fate, the supercomputer in Chronopolis. Yeah, I still remember that.

Yeah, it's got like this kind of, like, low-tempo sort of, you know, it's kind of bass guitar driven, but then you get basically like Hammond organ in there, like these strong, just like bursts of Hammond organ and synthesizers that start yep, yep, there's a like the do do do do do do do do and you get this like synthesizer kind of winding its way

in and out it's just so good I wish I could fight fate more so I could keep hearing that song but it's just the one battle it's kind of like Genova yes it's very Genova like kind of creepy too I was going to say it's a creepy fight because the fake computer has Surge's face on it as I recall oh there's that too that's

Right. Now, I think I pervert to Genova. Genova's great, but I love the music and that seems so much. But kind of the main themes that wind their way through the soundtrack and you keep hearing over and over the motifs. I mean, obviously you hear the Chrono Trigger theme and then you also hear the Radical Dreamers theme and that's kind of become kids theme. And, you know, those really mixed together, I think, best in what is it called, Chronomantia. which is a world map theme from late in the game where it's basically like the the chrono trigger do do do do do do but it's also mixed with the radical dreamers theme and they just kind of keep shifting back and forth and there's all these layers and it's just like this constant sort of sense of rhythm with like shakers and stuff and it just it feels so good like I was listening

to it this morning and I just I got chills from it it's so good I always appreciated the Dead Sea area, which is kind of terrifying on its own. But it also uses parts of the dome keepers music from Chrono Trigger, which is like one of the most melancholy pieces of game music ever composed. And that's actually like Chrontrigger, which is a very mostly happy game, except when he gets to the future. I always found that like getting the wings of time and putting the new to sleep that was serving the guru of time, like is one of the most like, just saddest things I've ever done. And it has like the Keepers Dome in the background. And they use part of the Keeper's Dome for the Dead Sea music, just at a different tempo.

And I always just thought that was like a really, really cool addition. I hadn't noticed that, but that's a great call. Thank you. And then you have that, I mean, I think it's probably the most well-known song from the game, but the first time you get to another world and you've just seen the tonal shift. So you've been on the beach and nothing speaks to the fact that something is very different and suddenly very sad, like Dream of the Shore near another world, where the Spanish guitar and then this just this mournful violin coming in. And I had never, especially the fact that

they used that as an overworld theme. It's your introduction to another world. And just like, oh, something is very, very wrong. The map has not changed much. The colors are still bright. But the first time I experienced that, you talked about chills. It was the same for me. I was like, oh, my. It's one of those songs that was so beautiful that I just stopped playing as I heard it. stopped and listened because I really am a sucker for overt melancholy and it

speaks. It just says so much about what's about to happen in the game. It's so very purposeful and thoughtful. Yeah, one trick that Mitsude really uses to great effect here is to give each area of the game that you visit in both worlds a different theme based

around the same melody, but the arrangement is different. So like the town of Goldov. When you experience that in another world, which is like the, you know, the reality where Serge is dead, it's just like an acoustic guitar piece. And it's great because it's like you actually hear whoever's playing it, like their hands moving along the frets and

along the strings. It's like nylon strings. And it's like, you know, it has an authenticity that you didn't really hear in video games. And you still don't really. But then when you play that, you go back to Goldov in another, in the home world, it's the same melody and you know same instrumentation but the tone is just really different it's more it's more somber and it's less sparse like there's there's more going on and like it gives you the sense that oh yeah this is this is a place i've been but not as i know it and everything's going to be different than what i've experienced before right exactly it's like being at home

versus being basically not at home somewhere familiar but not at home i love that There are so many tracks on this game, in this game, on the soundtrack that just take me back to a time in this game, on the soundtrack that just take me back to a time and point. place. Like the Dreamwatch of time. I don't know where that shows up in the game, but in the demo that came with Legend of Manna in Japan, you play through the demo basically to do like the lizard killing thing and then you hear the voice. It's like, surge. And you get sucked into the other dimension. And then it basically gives you a preview of the game ahead and just like little snippets of things, scenes and characters walking around, showing different environments. And it's all set to Dreamwatch of time. And it's all set to Dreamwatch of time. And it

just was so entrancing. Like, it was, it was mysterious, and it just promised this rich adventure. I wanted to know more about these beautiful locations. I wanted to know more about all these characters. We were like, wow, it seems like there's a lot of playable characters. There's got to be at least eight or nine. I can't, this game's going to be so big. But yeah, like, it just really takes me back. Another one is the fortress of the ancient dragons. And I just remember that this came out around the same time that I bought my first car as opposed to getting me getting a hand-me-down car from someone that barely worked. And I just remember driving around with it in the car with this soundtrack and the CD player. And just like this music came on. It's so moody and kind of sparse came on at night. And it was just like this moment that I don't know why, but whenever I hear it, I still remember driving around in my, my tiny little Nissan Centra driving around the highway at night, just listening to this music. and be like, wow, so spooky. I love songs that do that,

that kind of take you back to that place where you were, especially when it's kind of a nighttime environment. Yeah, it's a transportive effect and not to draw too pretentious a line between them, but when you're talking about a game that could transport you through time, it's nice to have music that could do the same thing. I can think of several themes from this that have a similar factor. I just like, oh, I remember sitting in that dorm room,

and I remember how the air felt and how the day, You know, it's just, it's odd and powerful and kind of wonderful that the music of this game. There's just so much, there's so much damn love in it. You can hear, you can hear the effort in the notes. I don't know why Musuda put so much into this or how, why it landed so perfectly. But for somebody with that amount of talent to pour this much into a into a two-disc game is just stunning. It's always a good sign to me when a game, is two discs and the soundtrack is three.

It means they did it right. All right, Nadia, there's one last note here you have. I'm assuming you put this here because it mentions Canada. Yeah, that would be me. Yes, there's actually a note I put in there at the very end was we had an Olympic figure skater. He retired quite recently. Kevin Reynolds, he did a routine to a medley of Krono Cross and Krono Trigger, and you can look that up online.

He was actually, as a skater, extremely popular in Japan because he's a very anime-looking guy. He kind of has the spiky red hair going on. In fact, I think his nickname in Japan was Krono. So he always, he had a few routines. They're very, for lack of a better term, nerdy. One of his last routines, I can't find video of it, but apparently he did it to Illusionary World in Final Fantasy 4, which is, I think, the theme for the town to summon monsters, so I want to find that one. But, yeah, he's always done, like, very, like, he did Tank from Cowboy Bebop. But the one from Chrono Trigger, of course, is the one that's going to stick in my mind.

Because, number one, it's incredible because in Matsuda, number two, I just love it when the younger skaters do, you know, kind of less traditional music for their routines. Because it must confuse the hell out of the olds, who are, like, so used to, oh, you got to have the symphonic scene of Beethoven, remember right? No, no, we're into video games now. pops, you can get used to it. Here comes some undertale, old man. I would love to see a routine to undertale. It's got to exist somewhere. I love that. I was having a conversation

with my wife recently, and I, you know, I'm a weird dude anyway, but when I was a kid, I thought that I didn't care about music for a while. I was laid on discovering that just how marvelous and wonderful the world of music

really is, and I thought that I didn't listen to anything. And it was only really much later in life that I understood that I loved music. I just loved this pseudo-archastral slash chip tune world of video game music, that that was what I was humming to myself when I wasn't sitting at my computer or playing on a console. If I was on a road trip and I started singing to myself, it was very often just the melody of something like this. And I think that obviously I think folks in this circle understand it,

were talking about the olds, you know, probably most of them, a good portion of the most compelling instrumental music of the last 40 years has been video game music. And it's one of the greatest cultural contributions of the medium to the wider. To me, one of the signs of good music was like my father is very musical. Like he has a very rare Gibson guitar, 12 string, steel string. He's extremely musical. And if he took notice of music in a game I was playing and pointed out how good it was. That to me was like a sign of approval because he didn't care about like games themselves, but he did actually notice several tracks in Final Fantasy six really stood out to him, especially the theme for the Velt. So anytime he kind of gave

his approval and like, okay, that's actually a pretty good, that must be a good song because someone who doesn't care about video games noticed it. All right, so I think we've had a lot to say about Krono Cross. Most of it positive. And, you know, we could keep trying to decrypt the plot line for, for all eternity, basically. Like, that would be our, you know, we'd have to travel back in time to do all that. But no, like, I continue to learn. new things about this series. Like, it just occurred to me this morning while I was watching

some Doctor Who while I exercised that Ayla and Leah, the cavegirls, are almost definitely references to Lila, the companion to the fourth doctor from the 70s. Like, of course, of course, a time-traveling cave girl named Lila. So now there's Leah and Ala. Uh-huh. Right. Okay, I get it. So yes, it's fun to kind of like pick apart the little references and nods and things like that. It's not just Biggs and Weser anymore, folks. But, yeah, chrono cross. If you had one wish to

apply to chrono cross, what would that be? Like a, you know, future wish, a wish to change the past, anything. Let's wrap by saying, what's your chronocross dream, Jared? My crotocross dream is that people have the opportunity

to play it before they play chrono trigger magically. Like I stated earlier, and that someone comes through and perhaps provides a little more context in the story for these hooks so that people can have some gap, you know, they're not going to know who Shaley is,

but if we could provide a little in-game context to why that matters and then let them play this first, I think they could enjoy it much, much more than if they're coming in with a Krona-tricker approach. I think that's possible for a lot of people right now that haven't played Krono-tricker. It's been a very, very long time. You'd go out, play Kronokross first, and I think

you're really going to enjoy it. I think if you play it after Chrono Trigger, you're going to have comparisons in your mind you just can't get away from. So let's create a world where Chrono Trigger is, or Chrono Cross, pardon me, is mandatory pre-reading for Chrono Trigger, and that way you can enjoy them both. Hmm. Interesting. I will say that Chrono Cross is still available for sale from Square Inix's store. They did a reprinting of it, a repressing, and they still have some copies available. it's really cheap like 10 bucks it's also on PlayStation Network as a PS1 classic so either way I think you should be able to play both of those on PlayStation 5 so now you have a reason to buy

PlayStation 5 so and if anyone has not played Chrono Cross it's very accessible as far as a game from 20 years ago goes yes I bought my new copy on that 99 that you're talking about the one I played through I plugged in my old PS3 back in and and played it and yes I was like I got a shrink-wrapped copy of Chrono Cross for 99 that's weird it does have the ugly green greatest hits bar, though, right? It does. Alas. All right, Nadia.

I would like to see a world where we get a definitive edition of the game, kind of like we did recently with Zeno Blade, and we put it on the switch, and maybe get a little more content in there the way that Zeno Blade got a little more content to link the first game and the second game. I would just like to see this on the

switch again, or just for the first time. You know, maybe a little bit touched up, not necessarily like totally redone. But yeah, I'd like like to see it kind of brought into the modern age. Yeah, as for myself, I'd just like to see them do something else with the Kronos series. It would necessarily have to be in the vein of Krono Cross, but I would like for them to get the team back together. I mean, the dream team is, you know, there's been a diaspora.

I think the only person still at Square Soft or Square Inix is Takashi Tokita. But, you know, Yuji Hori is still around. Serenobu Sakaguchi is still around you know Hori still works with Square Nix publishing Dragon Quest games designing them of course Misut is still around Masato Kato

he's with monolith so that might be a little trickier but I feel like there's potential there like you could get the band back together for one last road trip and let it be the crowning achievement of the PlayStation 5 generation

we don't need more Final Fantasy we got a lot there's 15 of them and then some, just give us one more Corona. That's all we want. But just make it like I don't know, a synthesis of the best parts of Trigger and Cross. I'm sure that could be worked out somehow. How would you feel if it were done something like Mario Odyssey

where it becomes a passing the Torch game, where you have a team of young people that grew up on it, put it together in drawing from the inspiration. Mario Odyssey is so meta in that regard, going all the way back to Donkey Kong to talk about how this story has played out. Now it's being handed over in a group. Do you think you could do that with

Chrono Trigger and Cross? Yes, but they'd probably have to look into the indie gaming space. There are tons of designers and people making indie RPGs that are like, Chrono Trigger is very good. Let's do that. So I think they would want to look beyond just the walls of Square Nix to

kind of find that inspiration. But yeah, that's good by me too. All right. So that is our very lengthy conversation about Chrono Cross, and we're going to let it wrap up here. So we'll end by saying, please check us out on the internet. If you're listening to this, then you know what Retronauts is. But did you know that you can get it on any podcatcher you like just about?

I'm pretty sure we're just about everywhere. And if you really like us, you can support us by going to patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for three bucks a month, you get early access to every episode, a week early, with higher bitrate quality. For five bucks a month, you also get bonus episodes every other Friday that are exclusive to Patreon as well as exclusive columns by Diamond Fight and more stuff. So give that some consideration, please. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Your support makes this show possible.

Nadia, where can we find you? You can find me at usgamer.net. That's for a lot of my ridinglands these days. And I am also the co-host of the Acts of the Blood God podcast. Please listen to us. You can also find us on USgamer. and we look forward to hearing from you or seeing you or having you listen to us, whichever works.

Jared? Yeah, you can find me at the Top 100 Games podcast, which is a little show I do with friends where every week we count up from a hundred, we're counting up week by week from 100 to 1 talking about each guest picks for the best games of all time. So guests that comes in at number 100 talks about their pick for the 100th best game of all time. Next week, new guests, they pick number 99. We're up to, we're in the 70s right now.

I don't know when this will go out. So, uh, but it's a, it's a fun little thing. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's silly and, uh, it's a, it's a lot of, it's a fair bit of fun. I think people might enjoy it. And you can find me on Twitter at, uh, Petty comma Jared, where I'm generally ranting about something or other or talking about melancholy, you know, that kind of stuff. All right.

And Jared, I think I owe you one of those top 100 podcasts. So we should talk about that sometime. Uh, anyway, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish as game. on Twitter. You can find me writing stuff and creating videos for limited run games. That's what I do in my Bruce Wayne time. And then on my Batman time, you can find me on YouTube making video game history videos on my YouTube channel. It's just Jeremy Parrish. That's me. Go check that out. And of course, there's always Retronauts. We'll be back in one week with another episode. So please look forward to it. And until then, go steal some stars.

Thank you. Thank you.