Long awaited sequel

I’ve been waiting for Chrono Cross for a long time. A sequel to Chrono Trigger, one of the best RPG’s ever made. The expectations for this game have been huge and the developers have taken quite a task. Even though Chrono Cross is a sequel, not many of the original games characters appear in it and the ones that do, aren’t playable and don’t play a major role in the story.
Nevertheless, once you start the game, you’ll notice the similarities. Even the music has lots of familiar tunes from the first game, although in a remixed form. The development team behind Chrono Cross, is almost the same one as in Chrono Trigger, and many of these people have also been working on Xenogears, so they’ve proved themselves as makers of great RPGs.

The main character is Serge, a young boy from Aruni village. Serge is a frequent visitor to the peaceful beach near his home. One day he visits the place, as usual. This time something strange happens. Nothing seems different from usual, but something’s definitely changed. This seems obvious, because once Serge returns to his village, nobody knows him anymore. The villagers tell him that there indeed was a kid named Serge in the village, but he died years ago.
Serge decides to visit the boy’s grave, hoping to find some information of what’s going on. At the grave he is attacked by villains for an unknown reason. Serge seems outnumbered, but then young woman named Kid appears, helping Serge to defeat the attackers. Kid accompanies Serge and the two start investigating what has really happened to Serge.

All-new battle system

Battles are different from Chrono Trigger. Although there aren’t random battles in CC either, only thing that’s left from CT’s battle system are the techniques and certain spells. For example, main characters for both games, – Serge in Chrono Cross and Crono in Chrono Trigger – learn the Luminaire-technique and both are of white element. There are other big differences to other RPG’s as well. No traditional items to be used in battles, healing is done only with magic and there are no stat boosting items to be used in battles.

The spell system is element-based. There are six elements: white, black, blue, yellow, green, and fire. Each of them represent nature: white represents light, blue is water, green is wind and so on. Every character an innate element color. The innate color effects numerous things in the game. Every color is resistant to spells and attacks of same color but vulnerable to opposing color. Let’s take an example: If the innate color is red, that character doesn’t take as much damage from red spells as others with different colors do, but blue spells damage him/her more.

Other significant difference is the creation of weapons. You don’t just walk to the blacksmith and buy a shiny ‘n spiffy new axe. You have to collect the parts for it first. There are different ways of acquiring parts: from battles treasure chests or trading them for elements in towns. If you want to make weapons, you’ll need things like iron, fangs, mythril and denatorite. Same thing with accessories. Although you can obtain some weapons and armor from battles or treasure chests, you’ll have to make most of them by yourself.
I think they should’ve just stayed with the traditional RPG Commerce Systemâ„¢ where the blacksmiths have their own damn materials and don’t force you to run across the country looking for them, item shops sell items and not just elements and so on. In addition to that, I also like to have the possibility to use items during battles instead of spells only.

Chrono Cross has an amazing soundtrack composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, who has composed music for games such as Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, Tobal No. 1, just to mention few of them. The music in Chrono Cross has many different genres and the tuned have taken influence from music all around the world.
Graphics that can easily be considered as one of the finest ever seen in Playstation. The world is very colorful and background are really nice. Even the characters are well animated.

The game has an exceptionally large amount of playable characters, around fifty. The only RPGs with more playable characters (If strategy RPG’s are not counted), that I can think of, are both of the Suikoden games. The downside to this is that only a few characters actually play a big part in the story.
There’s no need to play Chrono Trigger first to enjoy Chrono Cross. I recommend that you should, however, as there are numerous references to the first game. Regardless, Chrono Cross is a great game and is, alongside to Legend of Mana, the first Square product for a while that I’ve really enjoyed playing.