Chrono Cross's Cast's Presentation Problem

Y’know, I thought I’d pretty much covered it when it came to the way that Chrono Cross utterly fails in terms of its cast. The few characters it pays any actual attention to are generally awful, and the rest of the cast are virtually non-entities thanks to no development and the Accent System eliminating any chance at their even having distinguishable personalities. Squaresoft was not prepared to deal with its bloated cast size, but let’s face it: looking at Serge, Kid, Lynx, and the few others that Square actually did attempt to characterize, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t competent enough to handle a regular-sized cast, either.

But I’ve been thinking about Chrono Cross a bit lately, and its large cast, and trying to figure something out about my position on the game that’s been bothering me. Because if I’m to be objective, I have to recognize 2 facts: A, there are games that I consider to be good RPGs with large casts in which many characters don’t get much more development than the majority of Chrono Cross’s cast, such as several Suikodens, or the game I Have Low Stats, But My Class is Leader, so I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord, a game whose once amusing title I have begun to curse every time I need to reference it. And B, there are also games that I consider to be good RPGs whose casts did not, by any stretch of the imagination, need to be as large as they are, such as Fire Emblem 14. So why do I scorn and mock the ways in which Chrono Cross’s cast’s size fails, but not these other games, which share some of the flaws I’m so eager to point out in CC?

Well, for starters, the Accent System.

But beyond that stupid, lazy cheat which I shall never tire of ragging on ever, I think it all has to do with how these other highly populated games present themselves.

First of all, the other RPGs I’ve mentioned don’t usually have the other problems that Chrono Cross does. The characters that do get significant focus in the good Suikoden titles aren’t poorly written the way CC’s plot darlings are (and even the bad Suikodens are lousy for different reasons), for example. And even if Fire Emblem 14’s cast is clearly far larger than it needs to be, you can’t fault Nintendo’s effort with it; just about every party member has multiple chains of conversations with other characters within which to develop, and personalities defined by more than whether or not they over-pronounce vowels. I mean, they’re definitely not all winners--Hisame in Fire Emblem 14 can almost entirely be summed up as “likes to make pickles,” and it would be an uphill battle to try to argue that Midori, Shiro, or Kiragi are any better--but at least it’s clear that, whatever limitations of skill Nintendo’s writers may have had from 1 character to the next, they were putting in the hours to exercise said skill. With Chrono Cross, well, the full scope of a cavegirl’s character is that she’s a cavegirl.

More importantly, however? It’s all in the presentation.

Suikoden games may have a lot of cast members whose gravitas is, shall we say, a lot lighter, just like Chrono Cross does. One can’t deny that plenty of the service-provider characters in Suikoden who do things like run inns, man shops, and operate elevators in the heroes’ castle are as 1-note and unexamined as Chrono Cross’s Funguy, or those tiresome Dragoon devas. But here’s the thing about Suikoden titles: as a general rule, they’re stories about pivotal wars and social movements, depicting great, all-changing moments in the history of 1 wold’s civilizations. As such, Suikoden creates a mood of everyone in a country pitching in for a grand, united cause, all citizens doing their part and putting in their best efforts for their nation and fellow patriots, no matter how great or small that part may be. So even if the character development of the bath attendant or groundskeeper aren’t as deep or present as the game’s generals or strategist, that fact doesn’t lessen the game’s appeal and quality--the light impact and involvement of such characters is expected.

Chrono Cross, unfortunately, is an adventure structured far more in the standard, personalized style of most RPGs. Even though it’s a journey whose stakes can be world-saving or higher, the typical RPG focus and formula is inevitably a personal one, wherein the essence, actions, and history of the protagonist are a fundamental, inseparable core to not only the game’s events, but how those events came about. It’s not some grand venture of all the people of the land coming together as a coordinated effort to show the power of a nation united. It’s a story about Serge and the (sort of) people who travel with him to tackle a giant problem in which he is inextricably linked. Yes, Suikoden stories also have the personal element mixed in, and generally interweave it quite well, but in the end, they’re still grand struggles of armies, supply chains, strategists, communities and cultures. Even if many of the party members in Suikoden games are invested in a much more personal fashion in the adventure, it’s fully expected and acceptable for many others to be lighter on character development because of the way the games overall set an expectation of cast contribution. But Chrono Cross doesn’t have that luxury, as a more typical RPG approach, and so it’s a noticeable disappointment and flaw that the majority of its cast are empty shells defined by no more than their superficial traits. The expectation is that characters in CC should have weight, interact significantly, just actually matter, and they largely don’t.

The game I Have Low Stats, But My Class is Leader, So I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord is another example of this. IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL* has almost 100 party members, and the majority of them don’t really get any more focus than the average Chrono Cross character’s 5 - 7 minutes of screen time that covers their introduction, recruitment, and sidequest material. Admittedly, the characters in IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL all interact with one another in various ways over the course of the game--real interactions, I mean, not that Accent System shit--so they’re still substantially better developed than the Chrono Cross bunch. Still, the major problem of little to no real development past what the character actually is physically is still there. You won’t find more depth or plot importance in IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL’s barkeep, illusionist, and priest than you will in the barkeep, illusionist, and priest in Chrono Cross, for example.

But the difference in presentation once again makes that flaw more acceptable for IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL than it is for Chrono Cross. The former game is, as can be easily gleaned from the title alone, a lighthearted RPG, more focused on a bit of humor than some grand, sweeping adventure of alternate dimensions and devourers of time and whatnot. The whole thing of having a damn army of party members to save the world just by sheer numbers is the joke and the point. No one’s expecting stellar personal stories from the barber and the pet cat who got press-ganged into a heroic world tour solely because they happened to live in the same town as the expedition’s leader. They’re there because they’re instruments in the joke that the game’s making.

Chrono Cross, on the other hand, doesn’t have that excuse. I mean, yes, it absolutely is a fucking joke of an RPG, but it wasn’t trying to be. As I’ve pointed out before, CC is an RPG that handles itself with a typical seriousness--and the gravity it comports itself with is constantly, irrecoverably undercut by the absurdity of half its cast. So yeah, the teacher and her entire class of students being hauled along on a life-threatening field trip in IHLSBMCiLSIREIKtFtDL may clearly have no real reason to be there and limited character development as a result, but it’s forgiven because that’s the joke. CC, on the other hand, just leaves you wondering why the hell a living voodoo doll has chosen to come along for a 50-hour ride that has nothing to do with him.

Finally, Fire Emblem 14 is a game with a large cast--in fact, it has 2 dozen more party members than Chrono Cross! And it certainly didn’t need to be that big. Only a third of them are actually necessary for the game’s events. The game would have gotten along exactly the same without the retainers, for example, and of course, the children are a famously superfluous bunch. And yet, FE14’s huge cast never felt for a moment to me to be so over-stuffed and bloated as Chrono Cross’s.

Of course, a major part of that is that Nintendo actually gave enough of a damn to make sure every party member was given decent time to develop as a character, as mentioned. But even if the cast of FE14 had the same ratio of significant characters to empty ones that Chrono Cross does, I believe I’d still regard FE14’s cast as far less unnecessary. Yes, even the children! Because for the most part, the FE14 cast actually have a vested, personal interest in the game’s conflict. Granted, there are a couple of characters in Fire Emblem Fates who are just loosely along for the ride (Anna and Benny, for example),** but for the most part, everyone in Fire Emblem 14 has a strong, recognizable reason for traveling with Corrin. They may do so out of a feeling of duty and responsibility as a future ruler, love and devotion to Corrin herself, the obligation of their job as a personal guard to another party member, a desire to protect or prove themselves to their parents, or even just because they’re a gold-digger and Corrin’s army contains like 70% of the members of this world’s aristocracy...as a general rule, you can point to almost any of the nigh 70 individuals in FE14’s playable cast, and say, “Yeah, I know why they’ve signed on with Corrin, that reason makes sense, and they’ve got a purpose for being there.”

On the other hand, in Chrono Cross, you can walk into a random house, and walk out 2 minutes later with a masked wrestler who’s spontaneously pledged his life to the service of some kid he’s just met. Or a penniless artist’s kid, who has decided to start his own journey of self-discovery by following a murderous-looking cat-man into lethal combat, and who held the weapon he’ll be using in said life-threatening battle for the first time just before walking out the door. Or a blacksmith who has inexplicably decided to hitch his looking-for-a-rare-smithing-material wagon to the quest of a total stranger. Basically, any time you walk into a building in Chrono Cross, there’s like a 10% chance you’re gonna walk out of it with some rando who is completely willing to throw themselves at monsters, dragons, and killer robots for the sake of a guy they didn’t know existed 10 minutes ago.

Did the retainer characters in Fire Emblem Fates have to be there? No, by and large the game’s story would have continued along unchanged without them. Would the game overall be a little less silly without magically aging up all the babies of your preferred FE14 ships so they could join the war effort? Oh, absolutely. FE14 has far more party members than are needed for its story to be told. But at least they’re all there for a reason of their own, reasons that make sense of their being willing to fight to the death for their leader’s cause. None of FE14’s cast are a fucking talking turnip that inexplicably decided it owed Corrin some debt of honor just because she happened to dig it up one day.

So yes, there are other RPGs with large casts--larger, even--who commit some of the same major sins with those casts that Chrono Cross is most remembered for. And yet, CC is still the one that stands out for its mistakes, and it does so alone. Because even when these other games neglect many of their abundant cast, their overall presentation as stories of large-scale conflict or of amusement rather than gravity lessen the need and expectation for them to fully flesh out every single individual in their scope, in contrast to Chrono Cross’s basic approach of the personally-driven and serious RPG adventure. And because even when these other games clearly have many more party members than they required, those characters are still at least usually there for a relevant, sensible reason, in contrast to Chrono Cross, where a mermaid weighs Serge’s helping a band put on a show as being equal to the act of putting her life on the line to fight the forces of fate itself. Chrono Cross truly was a spectacle of failure, and even decades later, I still find myself coming to new understanding of its gross shortcomings.









* I’m starting to think I may kill the man who made this game.


** Which, by the way, still isn’t as bad in Fire Emblem as it is in a more typical RPG like Chrono Cross. While certainly nowhere near to the same degree as Suikoden, FE also has a certain focus on the whole large-scale war thing (even if these “wars” only seem to be fought by the dozen or so individual characters you select for any given battle; FE16 was the first title, to my knowledge, to mildly involve actual battalions of soldiers). So it’s neither unusual nor out of place for a character in Suikoden to have no more personal a stake in a conflict than, say, being a mercenary who was paid to join the party, or something like that.