Chrono Cross: A Game that Defies Time
In 1995 Squaresoft created a game named ‘Chrono Trigger’. This game dealt with time travel and battling, but it is the sequel which was released in August of 2000 called ‘Chrono Cross’. In this sequel RPG the main character Serge is ripped from his home called his Home World and found upon Opassa Beach in “Another World”. This “Another World” is a totally different dimension from his Home World. Everything for the most part looks the same, but it is 10 years into the future and instead of Serge being alive, he had died 10 years prior to the date in “Another World” in his “Home World”. This all sounds very confusing, and it is, but once you get a hang of the concept it is quite easy to grasp a hold of.
In ‘Chrono Cross’ there are 45 different recruitable and playable characters. From an adventurous boy named Serge to a big purple dog named Poshul, and from a pirate named Fargo to a fairy named Razzly, all the characters have unique background stories and special acquirable skills.
Chrono Cross has a very unique way of handling its skills though. Basically when you engage in battle there are the options melee attack, use a skill, defend or run away. Melee attacking has three levels. You may select 1 which is the weakest of the characters attacks, 2 which is a mediocre attack, or 3 which is a characters strongest kind of attack. If you choose 3 you have a higher chance of missing then using a 1 attack. You can attack more than once per turn, and these numbers accumulate to the number level of a skill you can now use from your skill inventory. So for example, if you use a 1 attack then a 3 attack and miss, and then another 1 attack you can use a level two skill. The higher the skill level, the more powerful in most cases the skill is. There are alot of factors in skill power like an enemies weakness and the field color. The field color is even more complex. But lets say you use a blue skill, then an enemy uses a red skill, and then you use a green skill over time. The order of the field would be green in the most inner circle, red in the second circle, and blue in the most outer circle. If the field fills with one color then if you use a skill of that color it will be enhanced. An even better thing is when the field is filled with the color of an enemies weakness, this even further enhanced the color of that skill. Plus ontop of all that, each playable character has their own color assigned. Serge, the main character, is initially a white based character, so he is weak to black attacks, and black is weak to white. The main enemy Lynx is black based, so it kicks into the story line a bit to make it more interesting.
All of that is just basic melee; it gets alot more complicated with healing, traps, tech skills, and other skills as well.
The weapons in this game look unbelievable. Everyone can upgrade their weapons and armor by bringing the right materials to a shop and have them forge it for you. As the game progresses, most of the materials get alot harder to obtain. But the better the weapon, the better the damage, so it is a necessity to upgrade whenever you can. Also there is a broad range of different kinds of weapons. From daggers and swords to even a blaster gun of a pistol, this game has it all.
After all of this explaining, I will conclude with this: Chrono Cross is a great game. Even though it was made for the original Playstation it is worth just buying for someones Playstation 2 collection. If you loved the Final Fantasy series, another series brought to you by Square, then you will love Chrono Cross. Since Chrono Cross has aged the price shouldn’t be too high either, so why not pick it up? Just pop the game in your console and get lost in time.
