You can’t say Chrono Cross doesn’t have its heart in the right place.
Sometimes things get complicated. Not to spoil a twenty-year-old game for anybody, but the main plot of Chrono Cross is a tale of time travel, an intergalactic parasite, and two warring realities that are either inadvertently or deliberately feeding that previously mentioned parasite until it can destroy not only the world, but all of space and time. If Serge fails in his duty as the silent protagonist, not only will 1999 AD face destruction, but also everything that has ever existed backwards and forwards in eternity. But no pressure, dude, not like you also have to deal with the fact that your dad is a mutant cat that wants you for your body, or that the most reliable friend you have is continually being poisoned and/or brainwashed. Not like you have a lot going on in the midst of this cross-dimensional crisis!
But there is a consistent throughline in Chrono Cross: the environment is getting wrecked by humans. The first thing you have to do in this game? Murder some local lizards so your girlfriend can have a nice necklace. The last thing you do in the game? Repel a gigantic flying tower that is somehow powered by an alternate universe where dinosaurs lived in perfect harmony with nature, and it is only here because the planet felt so threatened by humanity, it needed a “super dinosaur” to battle a nation founded by a super computer. … Okay, yeah, things get complicated quickly here, but the message is the same: humanity is a threat to the planet. Over and over again, Serge is presented with a world where people are surviving and living their best lives, but the world is suffering for it. You will kill the local lizards (and their mama!). You will destroy the Dragon Tower and its attendant super dinosaur. You will save the world. But the world might not be 100% on board with these outcomes.
And this is all perfectly encapsulated at the Hydra Marsh. Kid is poisoned, and the only way to cure her affliction is by killing the last remaining hydra. You can see the difference in Hydra Marshes thanks to dimensional travel (and there’s even a friendly dwarf near Kid’s hospital if you need it spelled out immediately). In the world with the hydra, the swamp is a vibrant location home to many kinds of creatures (albeit most of them are actively trying to kill you). In the world where the hydra has already been hunted to extinction, only true monsters remain, and the swamp has become lethally poisonous. You know what is going to happen if you hunt the hydra on Kid’s behalf. Your world will become worse, and a great many other species are going to die. And, to be more than clear on this sad fact, Chrono Cross does not make this a simple “background” possibility: when you inevitably kill the hydra, the dwarves of Home Swamp will be displaced, and you will then be tugged into a war between homeless gnomes and besieged fairies. With the hydra dead, the viable world is shrinking, and more problems arise immediately. Kid may be saved by hydra humour, but an entire society is going to collapse without it. As the planet cries out in pain, more and more people suffer in ways they never, ever expected…
And, as I played this section a couple weeks before I was in France during a heatwave that escalated over the Summer of 2022 to watching Europe practically melt off the face of the Earth… Well… I can’t fault for Chrono Cross for having at least one clear message.
Maybe we should do something about this whole “humans threatening the world” thing…
Even Worse Streams presents Chrono Cross
Night 3
Original Stream Night: April 26, 2022
Recruited this week:
- Korcha
- Greco
- Razzly
Random Notes on the Stream
- We all hate Korcha.
- “There are ranks of -cha”… but Mel does not rank.
- First dimension hop! Get used to seeing this FMV!
Final Fantasy 13 borrowed some ideas from Lost… Bad ideas. Like fake funerals.- Beeba are racist. Just realized that tonight.
- So many bosses in this stupid swamp. Basically wall-to-wall boss fights of no plot importance.
- A discussion about Ogre Battle naturally segues into a discussion on how great Queen is
- There is a discussion of Keenspot and Keenspace and the sheer level of insanity contained therein.
- We have a boat! Yay! But waves are “moving like a fat guy’s back”.
- A pirate ship of deadbeat dads is where we close for the day.
Next time on Chrono Cross: Skeletons of all sorts of varieties.
The raid on Viper Manor is the totality of the plot of Radical Dreamers (and for more information on Radical Dreamers, tune in next article/Friday – Giggling Goggle Bob). Kid, Serge, and some magical boy venture into the lair of Lynx the Probably Cat Man, and, by the end of the adventure, they are all fighting over a magical artifact in the ruins of a lost civilization. They are in the basement. It was a long night. Regardless of how this all happened, with Chrono Cross being a sort of remake/expansion of Radical Dreamers, it seems only natural that a good portion of the game would be given over to what was the entirety of the previous game. And does it work? Well…
And, while it can take up a lot of time (watch that stream), the encounters are location appropriate. There are trapped chests, doors, and some manner of evil lamp that descends from the ceiling. The presence of a literal army of NPCs negates the solitary tension that permeated Radical Dreamers, but there is never a point during this adventure in Chrono Cross where you feel safe at the manor. Even when solving some of the stranger puzzles in the basement, there is the feeling that you could be forced into a battle with a slightly-larger-than-regular robot at any time.
We vote “rock star”, so Nikki once again becomes part of the party.
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
But fighting is available soon enough. Leena tasks Serge with a mission to hunt down lizard scales, and hunting is literally involved. Lizards and Nu-like Beach Bums haunt the place, and you are welcome to hone your physical skills on a respawning army of ineffectual “monsters”. Poshul the Pink Doggy can come along, too, if you want some practice involving a partner in your ecological assaults. And there is treasure to find! It is everything you could ever want from a JRPG… but with one important difference: it doesn’t matter.
Against all odds (well, 6%), we have the exact same party as the first PS1 playthrough.
