(This review has heavy story spoilers in it if you care about that kind of thing)
When Chrono Cross came out I mostly recall pretty severe reactions to it, mostly focusing on how it only let you level up from designated fights (mostly on the main path). There were probably other complaints like the spell system turning every character into barely distinguishable mush, but it was the adverse reaction to finite levels that I remember the most. Much later Paper Mario: Sticker Star and a few other RPGs that dared to excise experience points would meet a similar fate of universal outcry: random encounters that don't offer experience were a cardinal sin for an RPG (yet, oddly, RPGs that mask this under the guise of level scaling get far less flak- almost as though it's more about perception of growth than reality). This is the main reason I finally got around to playing it 20 years later. I thought perhaps this might be another Metal Gear Solid 2, where I skipped an amazing game based on misplaced outrage. Instead, I discovered that fixed level ups basically don't even register as a problem next to everything else.
When Chrono Cross came out I mostly recall pretty severe reactions to it, mostly focusing on how it only let you level up from designated fights (mostly on the main path). There were probably other complaints like the spell system turning every character into barely distinguishable mush, but it was the adverse reaction to finite levels that I remember the most. Much later Paper Mario: Sticker Star and a few other RPGs that dared to excise experience points would meet a similar fate of universal outcry: random encounters that don't offer experience were a cardinal sin for an RPG (yet, oddly, RPGs that mask this under the guise of level scaling get far less flak- almost as though it's more about perception of growth than reality). This is the main reason I finally got around to playing it 20 years later. I thought perhaps this might be another Metal Gear Solid 2, where I skipped an amazing game based on misplaced outrage. Instead, I discovered that fixed level ups basically don't even register as a problem next to everything else.
The battle system is, put simply, an unfinished mess. There are basically two primary crippling factors: spell animations are ludicrously long (even for a PS1 RPG), and they didn't bother to actually balance the battles. For the vast majority of the game, random encounters pretty much did 10-20 damage to my 100-400 HP characters. There were occasional spikes, but stupid long attack animations followed by comedic low damage were the standard. This right here is the actual reason people felt slighted by the leveling system: the hard to avoid battles are quite literally time wasters with middling rewards.
You might say, "the bosses are where all the real challenge is in an RPG anyway!". But this actually reveals a deeper flaw with the game's element system, which basically lets you put almost any ability on any character (with some caveats). This results in every character feeling the same, but it also makes the (VERY FEW) difficult battles in the game a bummer because you'll realize how to beat a boss during the battle, but be completely incapable of adapting to it without running away or dying. Then you get to enjoy the chore of rearranging all of your abilities to deal with it, followed by putting them back afterwards. So even if the game had been tightly balanced with its fixed level system, it would also have been a real chore to play (I almost wonder if they realized this themselves, and lowered the difficulty as a hot fix). Even as someone who enjoys messing around in RPG menus to prepare for a hard battle, it just wouldn't work here.
On the flip side of this, Chrono Cross is a profoundly chill game. With the level scaling and low difficulty it's pretty easy to get through it while only occasionally adjusting your equipment/abilities, while skipping as many battles as the game lets you get away with (not as many as you want- enemies are hard to dodge on tight pre-rendered corridors). I played a non-trivial amount of it with a hot drink by my side, and it was sometimes a good time. The game also tries to integrate a small amount of adventure game into it by having the player use key items or bring specific characters to certain place. Sometimes this is satisfying, but it gets annoyingly obscure too. The final boss is probably the greatest example of this: it throws numerous clues at you for how to beat it- but only in the final dungeon that gets sealed off after the game even informs you that those clues were critically important. It's not hard for me to imagine getting cruelly stonewalled for months by this in a pre-internet world. Still, every dungeon tries to have its own little gimmick, and while they don't make them fun to traverse they do keep the repetition at bay.
The story is a lot harder to critique. A simple explanation is: there are a lot of great moments, but the game doesn't build off any of them. The first one is where you realize you've been warped to an alternate world based off all the villagers having subtle to radical changes in their life. This part is a great use of the RPG format, allowing the situation to sink in as players discovers it on their own before triggering a more explicit cutscene. The subtle changes approach is really effective in the village, but the rest of the game doesn't do that much interesting with it. You'll have a monster extinct in one world but not the other, one version of a city celebrating while the other prepares for war, or an entire village transplanted into being slave labor on a luxury boat. Some of these might be interesting on paper, but none of them are as haunting as the first reveal in execution. It's also really hard to pinpoint the exact reasons because the game inconsistently gets pieces of it right: sometimes the characters involved just don't have meaningfully different personalities despite radically different circumstances (which is what makes the concept haunting to begin with: having the face the reality that your circumstances shape you), often the visual differences between the worlds don't exist, and it often just doesn't feel like there's an interesting story to the differences. They're just slightly different because... they needed to put something different there, and it made sense within the setting.
The next great moment that everyone talks about is where you end up body swapping with the antagonist, Lynx. The reveal execution is perfect, where the game just stops and waits for you to move with the dpad- only for you to realize to your horror that you're moving Lynx now. Shortly after that you return to your home village once again, only to realize everyone you know and love are secretly horrible racists. It's executed much like the previous moment, letting you just explore around town at your own pace and soak up how different people are around your new body. It's another great use of the RPG format. And like the last one, the game just doesn't use it in any meaningful way after the initial reveal. The story quickly gets tired of explaining the situation to everyone, and doesn't do much meaningful with your new identity (not even trying to use his army against him or anything). Maybe the biggest waste of the concept comes at the end of the game, where it's revealed that Lynx was never a real person- just the protagonist's father mutated into his greatest fear and with no free will of his own. So rather than having any epiphany about the villain's motivations after walking a day in his shoes, it actually becomes a meaningless twist because Lynx was never a character to begin with. You can certainly argue that it still ties into the broader themes of the game (and that it titillated many English Majors that you literally turn into your father), but it just feels kind of wasted to me.
On the flip side of this, Chrono Cross is a profoundly chill game. With the level scaling and low difficulty it's pretty easy to get through it while only occasionally adjusting your equipment/abilities, while skipping as many battles as the game lets you get away with (not as many as you want- enemies are hard to dodge on tight pre-rendered corridors). I played a non-trivial amount of it with a hot drink by my side, and it was sometimes a good time. The game also tries to integrate a small amount of adventure game into it by having the player use key items or bring specific characters to certain place. Sometimes this is satisfying, but it gets annoyingly obscure too. The final boss is probably the greatest example of this: it throws numerous clues at you for how to beat it- but only in the final dungeon that gets sealed off after the game even informs you that those clues were critically important. It's not hard for me to imagine getting cruelly stonewalled for months by this in a pre-internet world. Still, every dungeon tries to have its own little gimmick, and while they don't make them fun to traverse they do keep the repetition at bay.
The story is a lot harder to critique. A simple explanation is: there are a lot of great moments, but the game doesn't build off any of them. The first one is where you realize you've been warped to an alternate world based off all the villagers having subtle to radical changes in their life. This part is a great use of the RPG format, allowing the situation to sink in as players discovers it on their own before triggering a more explicit cutscene. The subtle changes approach is really effective in the village, but the rest of the game doesn't do that much interesting with it. You'll have a monster extinct in one world but not the other, one version of a city celebrating while the other prepares for war, or an entire village transplanted into being slave labor on a luxury boat. Some of these might be interesting on paper, but none of them are as haunting as the first reveal in execution. It's also really hard to pinpoint the exact reasons because the game inconsistently gets pieces of it right: sometimes the characters involved just don't have meaningfully different personalities despite radically different circumstances (which is what makes the concept haunting to begin with: having the face the reality that your circumstances shape you), often the visual differences between the worlds don't exist, and it often just doesn't feel like there's an interesting story to the differences. They're just slightly different because... they needed to put something different there, and it made sense within the setting.
The next great moment that everyone talks about is where you end up body swapping with the antagonist, Lynx. The reveal execution is perfect, where the game just stops and waits for you to move with the dpad- only for you to realize to your horror that you're moving Lynx now. Shortly after that you return to your home village once again, only to realize everyone you know and love are secretly horrible racists. It's executed much like the previous moment, letting you just explore around town at your own pace and soak up how different people are around your new body. It's another great use of the RPG format. And like the last one, the game just doesn't use it in any meaningful way after the initial reveal. The story quickly gets tired of explaining the situation to everyone, and doesn't do much meaningful with your new identity (not even trying to use his army against him or anything). Maybe the biggest waste of the concept comes at the end of the game, where it's revealed that Lynx was never a real person- just the protagonist's father mutated into his greatest fear and with no free will of his own. So rather than having any epiphany about the villain's motivations after walking a day in his shoes, it actually becomes a meaningless twist because Lynx was never a character to begin with. You can certainly argue that it still ties into the broader themes of the game (and that it titillated many English Majors that you literally turn into your father), but it just feels kind of wasted to me.
And finally you have the ending of the game. It's pretty much two dungeons filled to the brim with nonstop plot twists, betrayals the characters were never privy to, reveals the true nature of the world, and much more while your characters contemplate the meaning of life. Even when you think it's done revealing things, it just keeps going by re-contextualizing things a couple more times just for good measure. When the game runs out of dungeon material to reveal things with, it says screw it and reveals a few more things by just having ghosts deliver text box after text box of exposition before finally letting you tackle the final boss (this is a game that features a lady trapped in infinite time being slowly merged into a monster for all eternity, and the game doesn't really stop to reflect on the emotional cosmic horror of that whatsoever because it doesn't have time for it with all the trans-dimensional time wars going on). It's a spectacularly convoluted mess with some fun scifi concepts, and I had a smile on my face the whole time. I don't know that it's necessarily good, but I loved how far it would go to top itself. An element of that is just that Chrono Cross is more interesting in 2019 than it was in 1999. This is a game with themes and it's going to scream them at you as loud and emotionally as possible. It's a game where an NPC will summarize how humans have been razing the planet and this swamp is fucked because of it in a single text box. It's the kind of game where the ending is going to have metaphors about sperm and eggs. It's that kind of game. I miss that kind of game.
That all sounds pretty great but here's the catch: these are almost all of the good moments in the game. There's four times more plot in the final 4 hours of the game than the rest of the game put together. Despite all the cool concepts I just listed above, the game actually spends most of its time on oddly dry world building? Yes this is a world where a super AI is controlling humanity for all eternity, but let's talk about the Acacia dragoons and how one of them died recently and that turned their leader Command Viper cruel and bitter along with his wife's death, and... actually I have no idea why any of these people or their problems are important to the main plot even after beating it. I'm sure many of them have detailed side stories I missed from not doing an obscure side quest or choosing the wrong branch. It's just a really boring world that has excessive detail in some places, but is also extremely vague in others ("I guess this part of the world just has 6 dragon nature gods watching over it but no other part of the world for some reason"). And while it feels lovingly made in a way where you can probably look at it and say "boy it's super obvious how that super AI was controlling this person", it makes for a really uncohesive whole with bumpy pacing (made worse by having forty-five characters to split their attention between, and a silent protagonist being the sole omnipresent character which isn't enough to give the game a constant to thread to work with). This all comes to a head in one part in particular where you just need to beat 6 bosses across the world while the plot slows to a standstill entirely. While this kind of free roam quest might be joyful in an RPG where the systems are good, it just magnifies the problems to the forefront in this case. I only barely got through it.
Chrono Cross has a sort of predecessor called Radical Dreamers, a short text adventure that answers the same hanging plot thread of Chrono Trigger, but in a very different way. While playing through Cross I had a pet theory that the reason the game felt like it had an absolute boatload of filler was because it just took key moments from Radical Dreamers and stretched them out to a full RPG. After actually reading a plot summary I realized I actually had it kind of backwards: many of the pointless characters of Chrono Cross were actually the entire setting of Radical Dreamers. This game feels so weirdly disconnected because it has an entire other game's characters crammed into it for no reason. Of course there are also many other pointless characters that don't originate from Radical Dreamers, so it isn't a perfect explanation of this inexplicable mess. But it's all I've got.
So is it a good game? No, not really. The visual design is a wonderful blend of blue sky ocean mixed with distressingly alien locales. The soundtrack is incredible. It plays really poorly (somewhat better with an emulator to fast forward the animations). The story has great moments in an ocean of bland. Everything good is just completely drug down by the bad. The best thing I can say is that it kept me hooked, but often just out of how many fascinatingly poor design choices it has. It's hard not to respect how hard it tries to be different despite being a sequel to a big game, but it just doesn't work out in the end.
That all sounds pretty great but here's the catch: these are almost all of the good moments in the game. There's four times more plot in the final 4 hours of the game than the rest of the game put together. Despite all the cool concepts I just listed above, the game actually spends most of its time on oddly dry world building? Yes this is a world where a super AI is controlling humanity for all eternity, but let's talk about the Acacia dragoons and how one of them died recently and that turned their leader Command Viper cruel and bitter along with his wife's death, and... actually I have no idea why any of these people or their problems are important to the main plot even after beating it. I'm sure many of them have detailed side stories I missed from not doing an obscure side quest or choosing the wrong branch. It's just a really boring world that has excessive detail in some places, but is also extremely vague in others ("I guess this part of the world just has 6 dragon nature gods watching over it but no other part of the world for some reason"). And while it feels lovingly made in a way where you can probably look at it and say "boy it's super obvious how that super AI was controlling this person", it makes for a really uncohesive whole with bumpy pacing (made worse by having forty-five characters to split their attention between, and a silent protagonist being the sole omnipresent character which isn't enough to give the game a constant to thread to work with). This all comes to a head in one part in particular where you just need to beat 6 bosses across the world while the plot slows to a standstill entirely. While this kind of free roam quest might be joyful in an RPG where the systems are good, it just magnifies the problems to the forefront in this case. I only barely got through it.
Chrono Cross has a sort of predecessor called Radical Dreamers, a short text adventure that answers the same hanging plot thread of Chrono Trigger, but in a very different way. While playing through Cross I had a pet theory that the reason the game felt like it had an absolute boatload of filler was because it just took key moments from Radical Dreamers and stretched them out to a full RPG. After actually reading a plot summary I realized I actually had it kind of backwards: many of the pointless characters of Chrono Cross were actually the entire setting of Radical Dreamers. This game feels so weirdly disconnected because it has an entire other game's characters crammed into it for no reason. Of course there are also many other pointless characters that don't originate from Radical Dreamers, so it isn't a perfect explanation of this inexplicable mess. But it's all I've got.
So is it a good game? No, not really. The visual design is a wonderful blend of blue sky ocean mixed with distressingly alien locales. The soundtrack is incredible. It plays really poorly (somewhat better with an emulator to fast forward the animations). The story has great moments in an ocean of bland. Everything good is just completely drug down by the bad. The best thing I can say is that it kept me hooked, but often just out of how many fascinatingly poor design choices it has. It's hard not to respect how hard it tries to be different despite being a sequel to a big game, but it just doesn't work out in the end.
