A Big 'Ol Review of Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition

This the official "Laugh at me because I pronounced it masa-myoon instead of masa-moo-nay" thread. Reply here to rake me over the coals.

I was 14 when this game came out. I was super impressed by the "complexity" of the story and tried to explain the entire thing to my dad. A few days later he sat me down and we had a long talk about drugs.

Up until Act 3 I was watching this like "Man, I loved this game, why did I never finish it?" But now I remember.

So I showed the explanation about the plot to my boyfriend and asked him to give me a summary and he actually did it and said it wasn't that complicated. I'm just baffled.

The way you get more and more manic while going over the story in Act III is so on point and really well done.

I really appreciate this review and agree with almost everything. I think the characters deserve a little more credit. There are definitely some characters that just exist to fill a slot, but I think the philosophy behind the character writing is different than CT. In CT, you're there for every major character moment. In CC, one of the major themes is how we affect each other and how we only get glimpses of people's lives, including playable characters. The attack on Razzly's village epitomizes this for me. The village was fine before you showed up, you may or may not have been the cause of the attack based on your choices, and even though you help where you can, you never get to see if the village ever recovers and Razzly has to live with the consequences while you move on. We get so many small moments with various characters and it's almost always implied their lives carried on before Serge and will carry on after. CC definitely lacks the strong obvious character writing, but I think it makes up for it with a lot of subtlety and implications. The characters are a mixed bag, but I found both the playable ones and NPCs to be compelling enough that I wanted to save them just so they could live their lives how they wanted. Also, you're absolutely right about the battle theme.

Hey, that was Koudelka! Nice! Also, there IS a mini-level system in the game. Every time you gain a star level, every character has a counter reset to 0, and after X number of battles, that character gains a mini-level with various stat boosts. In addition to this, you can also get single-stat boosts after battles, but only a few per star level. If you do not gain these mini levels between star levels, they are LOST FOREVER, and due to the semi-random nature of star stat gains, it's possible for unused character to start lagging far behind. Also, characters who are dead at the end of a boss battle miss out on star level stat gains. This is one of the reasons why Serge feels so much stronger than other characters, he's ALWAYS in your party, and always gets those mini levels.

I love your story synopsis at the end. Laughing so hard. But it's also the perfect explanation.

The prospect of a cast of 45 characters was executed so well on one level, and then so poorly on another. I love Suikoden for the same reason: When you make that many character slots, you REALLY have to push your creativity when it comes to character design , but also gain the ability to tell interesting stories with a crazy new set of tools! sadly, any chance of seeing games with such expansive rosters are restricted to the realm of Gacha these days, but boy would I like to see a single player RPG try this again, and do even better!

I would argue a lot of chrono cross' problems come from limitations that the team couldn't ultimately get around. They wanted to explore the guile/magus situation and they wanted each character (and even more!) to be fully fleshed out and they wanted the story to be able to weave itself over time but you can really tell the exact point in disc 2 they ran out of time/budget, a problem that may feel somewhat familiar to xenogears fans. As for the remaster itself, the fact it only fixes some of pip's issues (his stat growth for form changes is still wrong) when none of those existed in the original JP release is such a sin. If it wants to be the definitive version of the game and can't even fully fix well known problems (there were many other issues with how pip worked in the NA ps1 version and to the release's credit, some were fixed) then what is even the point. Chrono Cross deserved better than a port that is just debateably worse than the original release.

48:19 Mind flip. I loved how convoluted the story was

This has to be the best review/analysis Chrono Cross related I've ever watched. I've been a passionate fan of this game ever since I played it back in 2001 and still to this day keep getting details I missed. You've earned yourself a new suscriber.

@Silvar: I think Leena is one of my favorite characters. The Home World Leena is entitled to you, but the Another World Leena (who's Serge is dead) is much more respectful of you (and actually goes with you on your quest, as opposed to say Home World who just stays there. She's also the Marle Expy to Kid's Lucca. Also green eyed redhead.

54:48 "It serves to do nothing but answer a thousand questions that you never even asked, while asking a million questions that will never be answered." THE GOD DAMN GENIUS OF THIS IS UNDERRATED. It absolutely sums up the entire game in one sentence. I had to pause and slow clap to my screen.

If it wasnt noted, a patch came out that makes the framerate flawless. Its so fast and well done that in speedruns it has to be a separate category.

15:27 I do not regret not saving Kid, Glenn is a beast and the 2nd best character in the game for me, with Einlanzer and his story...I love that guy

12:50 Thank you for including Legend of Dragoon. So late in the PSX life cycle, a lot of people missed out on a gem.

I’ve loved this game since I was a kid but admittedly never gave the story much of a critical eye. I think you did a good job encapsulating the odd parts of the narrative while hi-lighting the elements that make CC unique.

Holy shit, the explanation of the plot of Chrono Cross in Act 3... There is that "Mind blown" meme, but all that convoluted story-line explanation left a nuke to blow my mind. You are amazing at explaining everything for this game

My theory is that Cross's battle music only existed to make you appreciate the very few battle where it is NOT playing. When you battle Miguel with this languid melancholic music, it hits real hard. (Also I'd have bought this remaster in a heartbeat if they had a HD version of the bangin' opening, but alas...)