Time Extend
Revisiting the sequel that feels like it’s from a parallel universe
Back in time with Chrono Cross, the poignant sequel that feels like it’s from a parallel universe
The first hour of Chrono
Cross is deceptively sleepy. It opens, like many a Japanese RPG before and since, with the game’s protagonist Serge awakening in his home, a village in the archipelago of El Nido. Through the window, clouds nose about a balmy equatorial ocean. Down the hall, Serge’s mother fusses at dishes and scolds you for rising late – after all, aren’t you supposed to be meeting that girl you like? Heading out the door, you find children playing tag with their pets while elders gossip about events in the wider world. In a meadow, the village chief holds sparring lessons, running through the basics of elemental alignments and stamina. It’s a study in rural tranquility, genre tropes settling around your shoulders like a comfort blanket. Near the entrance, a shortsighted old man launches into a tour guide’s spiel before breaking off in embarrassment when he realises you’re a local.
So begins what seems to be just another tale of rag-tag pastoral adventuring, of mute heroes rising from backwoods origins to roam and defend a world marinated in cliché. Chrono Cross is that game, on some level, but it’s also that game through a mirror. In one hut, you meet a fisherman who boasts of the trophies that adorn his walls, but confesses to wondering whether his life could have taken a different course. It sounds a peculiar note in a setting that feels impervious to change, snug as a fly in amber. There are other flickers of unreality down at the pier, where Serge’s sweetheart Leena watches over her siblings as they frolic in the shallows. A boy takes a running dive into the water as you approach. Leave and return to the village, and you’ll see that same boy taking the plunge, again and again.
Then comes the big twist. Following a quest to collect Komodo dragon scales to make a necklace for Leena, you meet her on a remote beach and are suddenly elsewhere, the ground liquefying beneath your feet as the sea fills the sky. When you regain consciousness, the world has altered in myriad ways. Returning to your village, you are greeted again by the old man, this time as a stranger. Your mother has vanished and your shack is now a grubby bachelor’s pad: in an absurd touch, there’s a Komodo dragon in your bedroom who charges you for the privilege of sleeping there. The initially upbeat map music is now a rolling lament, and the wistful fisherman has become a recluse who worships a straw idol as protection against life’s unpredictability. There’s still that boy, trapped in his endless dive off the pier, but Leena no longer recognises you, though she muses that you remind her of somebody she once knew. At her suggestion, you wander along the coast to a lonely gravestone, high above the waves. The name on it is your own.
Two decades old this year, Chrono Cross is a tale of parallel realities that dwells poignantly on how a life might turn on the slightest detail, stretching out threads of yearning and regret between dimensions. It is about the strangeness of realising that everything you know could have been otherwise, an exploration of mutability that comes across most strongly in the game’s obsession with the sea. Dungeon environments often resemble ocean floors, overwhelmed by starfish, huge scallop shells and spires of weedy bone. Larger towns like the city of Termina are hung with nets, cages and oars, skiffs sliding under bridges as you shop. The game’s title screen hovers against swirling polygonal vistas of a coral reef, fish darting among the menu options. Even the combat has a certain undertow, each battle map suffused by an elemental energy field which at once empowers abilities of the same element and is altered by them. Tactical applications aside, this creates the sense of being submerged and participating in a complex tidal flow.
As with many stories about alternate dimensions, Cross can be off-puttingly convoluted, its second half awash with quantum hijinks, various world-saving/ ending McGuffins and obscure nods to its predecessor, the landmark 1995 RPG Chrono Trigger. Playing it for the first time, fans of Trigger may have felt like they’d stumbled into a parallel universe themselves. Though notionally a sequel, Cross is more of a reworking of Trigger’s core themes: it’s the product of a reality in which Final Fantasy
VII had changed the commercial rubric for RPGs forever. The new game’s director, Masato Kato, had written and planned
IT HAS A BEWILDERING EXTRAVAGANCE OF PARTY MEMBERS – 45 IN ALL, RANGING FROM CHEFS TO LUCHADORS
scenarios for Trigger, but his experience as a writer on VII together with mecha odyssey Xenogears (itself once pitched as a Chrono Trigger sequel) is a stronger influence on Cross. Moreover, by the time Cross entered development many of the original Trigger team had moved on, among them writer Yuji Horii and designer Hironobu Sakaguchi, creators of the original Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy respectively. These shifts – together with the advent of expanded memory budgets on CD-ROM – are obvious in the switch from the SNES game’s top-down landscapes to lushly painted, angled backdrops. While classic Trigger elements such as synchronisable character special moves return, combat now unfolds on separately loaded 3D stages from a giddy variety of camera angles. The real point of departure, however, between Trigger and Cross is how each game thinks about time. Where the SNES game steamrolls through its world’s history, bundling together allies from several periods on its way to an apocalyptic reckoning, Cross sticks to the here and now but offers two uncanny versions of it. Rather than making the link from what is to what was, as Trigger does, it is about reconciling what is with what might have been. Every character, thing or place in the game is illuminated or shadowed by its double: a rock star who is a different gender in the other universe, a jaded waitress versus a waitress who hasn’t yet given up on her literary aspirations, a wild expanse of sea that, in one world, contains a massive sci-fi facility, and in the other, its wreckage.
Quests often see you literally introducing a person to their otherworldly counterpart to bring about catharsis or explore a theme, though the breaching of the dimensional barrier isn’t always this benign. Much of the game’s doubling and displacement is concentrated in the person of Serge, asked first to endure a reality in which he is an anachronism, then forced out of his own body and into one literally shaped by a fear of loss. This latter twist pays into a fantastic mid-game reset, where you must gather a new party as the second character, ultimately reuniting with your old allies towards the finish.
All of which may sound rather sombre, but part of why Cross is a joy to return to is that it’s often very silly. While given its marching orders by Final Fantasy VII, one of the sterner series entries, it’s closer in spirit to IX, the daydreaming prankster of the series. Hence its bewildering extravagance of recruitable party members – 45 in all, ranging from apoplectic chefs and teenagers in tutus to luchadors, mushroom men, sneaking homages to Street Fighter’s Vega and squidgy aliens that evolve based on the elements they wield. Few of them have any major bearing on the main quest, but they make for vivid company, and many are on heartfelt journeys of their own. They also
offer a generous spread of skillsets in combat, though the ability to plug abilities and spells into each character’s element grid (á la Final Fantasy VIII) means that they can feel interchangeable once you’ve worked out a killer strategy.
The game’s battle system is stylish and engrossing but also deeply peculiar. Given the context, it’s probably most provocative for refusing to explain its handling of time. There are three tiers of attack, with weaker strikes making stronger ones more likely to hit. Attacks also cause the character to gain element ranks and thus, the ability to cast spells, but drain a stamina gauge. Stamina replenishes while other characters are acting, and, in a twist on the usual partybased format, you can switch between them freely, landing a few light blows with one in order to restore another’s stamina reserves. There are no turns as such – rather, actions advance time till an enemy can act, with more dangerous foes able to act more often. There’s absolutely no indication of this on-screen, however: instead, you must work out the action frequency of each monster as you go. It’s a baroque mess to rival the likes of Resonance Of Fate, but the business of learning each opponent’s “clock speed” while portioning out time between party members is quietly resonant: it continues the theme of soldering together timeframes in the narrative.
At the time of writing, Chrono Cross is the last Chrono title in existence. Despite a warm reception from critics and fans, the series foundered in its wake as key staff moved on, some joining Tetsuya Takahashi’s new studio Monolith Soft to work on unofficial sequels to Xenogears, others gravitating to the better-selling Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. Square toyed with a third game titled Chrono Break, but dropped it before announcement; concepts from this project would later appear in the mobile spin-off Final Fantasy Dimensions II. It’s probably too much to hope, at this stage, that the publisher might return to the series, but it’s also hard not to, given the impending Final Fantasy VII remake and the arrival of “new games in the old style”, such as Octopath Traveller. If any JRPG of the ’90s deserves to be brought forward in time it’s surely this, one of the smartest, saddest and strangest ever made.