Chrono Trigger's Prison Disarmament Feature

The heroes of a tale being captured and locked up is a common trope in pretty much all forms of media and genres, and certainly no less so in RPGs--if anything, it might happen a bit more frequently than average in this particular storytelling landscape.  But RPGs do definitely stand out for just how very lax jailors are with their heroic detainees.  Aside from the fact that most cells and prisons in RPGs are not terribly difficult to escape from by virtue of poor design and poorer guards, the standard internment procedure for most RPG holding facilities as regards captives’ possessions is “toss it all in an unlocked box down the hall, preferably still within eyesight of their cell.”  And that’s if these super-powered world-renowned warriors who have been mowing enemy soldiers down by the hundreds are relieved of their equipment at all; in most cases, wardens hold right of property to be so sacred that prisoners are tossed in their cage still fully armed and armored, without so much as a bag check to see whether the sack of 99 healing potions hanging on their belt might also contain a full assortment of explosive attack items.

(It does, but in fairness, no RPG character I've ever encountered seems to connect the dots between "The walls of this cell are some bricks that were laid down hundreds of years ago" and "I'm currently carrying 36 Grenades, 14 Hi-Bombs, and 1 item that is literally just called Real Actual Nuke").

Every now and then, though, you come across an RPG imprisonment that views detainment as more than a polite suggestion, and the incarcerated heroes actually have their swords, shields, guns, spears, armor, magical accessories, bombs, portable heavy artillery, monster-summoning crystals, knives, bows, axes, hammers, poisons, crossbows, vials of varying acids, darts, maces, spell scrolls, orbital laser cannons, and whatever pathetically insufficient everyday object the team mage is pretending is a weapon removed, and placed somewhere that isn't just 20 paces in a straight line away from the cell's most accessible exit.*  And 1 of the earlier and more interesting examples of this can be found in Chrono Trigger's sequence aboard the Blackbird, in which the party has been captured by Dalton and locked in a cell.

You have to give credit to Dalton: he may be an idiot, but he's still smarter than at least 90% of other villains who lock their foes up.  The guy sees an anthropomorphic frog hauling around a broadsword longer than he is, he takes it.  He sees a gal with a haunted look of emotional desperation in her eyes and a crossbow in her hands, he confiscates the hell out of that crossbow.   Hell, he even literally disarms the damn robot; Robo's tossed in the brig sans his hands, somehow, theoretically just as harmless as the rest of them.  And for good measure, the guy removes all their crap, grabs their item sack, pockets all their cash, and then divides it all into multiple treasure chests that he stashes in half a dozen unconnected spots on his ship.  Just about the only oversight Dalton had was not to realize that the titanium weapons of war that Robo was carrying on his wrists were nothing compared to the hands that Ayla's packing.

Well, that, and employing underlings that can be fooled by the Sick Prisoner routine being played by a robot.

And you know, it's actually a pretty neat little gameplay mechanic, 1 of many bits of technical flavor that contributed to making Chrono Trigger so memorable.  By splitting all the gear to recover up into multiple locations, with the party being at a severe combat disadvantage until the weapons and armor for each member are restored, what might have been a very short and uneventful little hiccup in the story has its duration extended, and becomes more memorable for its application of new strategy and mechanics to the usual dungeon-exploring grind.  Either you've got to rely only on a much weaker Ayla alone in combat for a time, or you're actually forced to briefly engage in 1 of the earliest incarnations of a stealth section in an RPG as you try to navigate your way to an equipment chest that's unguarded, and either way, it makes the Blackbird arc stand out, which would otherwise have been very difficult to do given that it's basically filler between some of the biggest moments in the game's story.  Coding in a mechanism to disarm and distribute the party's stuff was a creative flourish that Chrono Trigger used to its full potential.

…Except that, when you think about it, it kind of didn't.  In fact, for a feature that the creators had to invent and work out the mechanics of, it's surprising that they only used it this 1 time in the game.

I mean, it's not like there haven't been scenarios previously during the course of Chrono Trigger where this idea of disarming the party for a time could be implemented.  1 of the many memorable sequences of the game is Crono's trial, and the incarceration and prison break that it leads to.  Crono gets shoved into his cell fully geared up for war, and while the war in question occurred 400 years prior, I'm relatively sure that most law enforcement experts in our own world would still raise a disapproving eyebrow at the idea of putting a guy in lockup with a fully loaded, bayonetted rifle in modern times.  Hell, Crono only gets more stuff to give him an edge in battle once he's behind bars; if he did well enough in the trial, there's a bag of healing items waiting for him on his cot.  Sure takes the piss out of the mint on a hotel pillow; next time I go out of town, I'm gonna book myself into a prison tower and enjoy some proper luxury.

So, like…if they'd invented the mechanics for enhancing an imprisonment stint in the story, why not also apply them here?  Get their money's worth out of the extra programming?  Hell, with Crono alone in the jail, it simplifies the retrieve-your-stuff goal down to just 3 chests (equipment, items, money) to find instead of the 5 for the full party later in the game, so it'd actually be an ideal "tutorial" version of the later mechanic.  Not that the Blackbird sequence is complicated enough to NEED that, of course, but still, ramping-up new mechanics is the elegant way to introduce them.  And while Crono's escape sequence is overall completely fine and functional, it's only especially noteworthy at the beginning and end of the mini-adventure, so if the Blackbird event is any indication, adding in the element of sneaking around to find your stuff  probably would only have made the section stand out all the better.

Heck, they could've employed this mechanic again to some degree later on in the story, too.  After the prehistoric party Ayla throws for Crono and company, the party wakes up missing the Gate Key, and have to track down who stole it, which turns out to be Kino, before it was in turn stolen from him by the reptites.  The developers could have extended this theft to not just the single plot doohickey, but the entirety of the party's stuff, and make the act of following the reptites' trail one of also hunting down the party's other scattered belongings along the way.  Again, it'd even serve as a useful case of preparation for its use later, as Ayla's mandatory new addition to the party would introduce the fact that she can be relied on to battle even when the rest of the party is unable to.  Heck, it'd even make a little more sense overall; instead of Kino (who, let's face it isn't the brightest even by caveman standards) somehow managing to grab the most important item that Crono's got by some inexplicable ooga-booga intuition, his having just taken ALL of the heroes' stuff feels more realistic as a bit of petty lashing out.  And the reptites subsequently discarding/hiding the stuff they grabbed from Kino on their way back to their leader until they're left with the most interesting device would be a good reinforcement of the idea that they're overall more intellectually advanced than the humans, too.

I mean, obviously it's not like Chrono Trigger is lacking for having only ever employed its mechanic of separating the party from its gear once.  The Blackbird area is made memorable by it, and Crono's jailbreak and the prehistoric search for the Gate Key are both fully adequate and enjoyable parts of a great plot overall.  Still, kind of like the party-split dynamic that Final Fantasy 6 utilized less than it could have, the de-equipped scavenger hunt mechanic that CT invented for Dalton's imprisoning the party could have been used to decent effect earlier in the story, during events that were already present and suitable for it.  It just seems like a bit of a missed opportunity for Squaresoft to have gotten the most bang for its buck on this interesting nuance they'd coded.











* All the deadly implements of murder will still be stored somewhere on-base, of course, but hey, there's only so much sanity we can ask.

Chrono Trigger's Party Members' Pseudonyms

Aliases are not exactly an uncommon phenomenon in RPGs.  I mean, they aren’t in all of fiction, really, but they prevail especially often in this genre.  And that fact isn’t terribly surprising, either.  RPGs have the usual array of story-related reasons for characters to have multiple names and identities to go by which inevitably work their way into a plot twist later on--taking on a new name to go undercover (like a guy named Ryu beating the shit out of some hermit minding his own business named Baba so he can steal Baba’s identity because damn it all he’s gonna get those backstage passes 1 way or another), or making a clean break from the past (like a guy named Clyde taking on the name Shadow because he wants to avoid the messy business of child support checks), or deceiving the heroes into believing that their new best buddy is not actually a complete shitbag using them for nefarious ends (like a guy named Ghaleon deciding that his name just wasn’t sus enough and to begin moonlighting as the Magic Emperor), among many other examples.

But RPGs are also inordinately fond of of both the Plot-Induced Amnesia and the Rebellious Princess tropes, far more than most other narrative ventures, and these story paths are almost always accompanied by pseudonyms, since the schmucks in question either can’t remember their own names or view being known as royalty as a hindrance to adventuring (hell, sometimes it’s a 2-for-1 schmuck like Legrand Legacy’s Finn doing both routines).  It doesn’t always make a lot of sense--I really don’t know who Tales of Vesperia’s Princess Estellise thinks she’s fooling by choosing “Estelle” as her codename, that’s like someone named Jonathan going undercover as Jon--but it certainly does happen a lot all the same.

Oh, and also, goddesses who have reincarnated as humans and don’t remember that fact.  Holy fuck do RPGs ever love playing that card.  You can even get bonus pseudonyms out of that one--Erim from the Lufia series and Althena from the Lunar series each have (at least) 3 separate named identities, and can you imagine how many different monickers Hylia would’ve collected by this point if she didn’t just keep getting slapped with “Zelda” every time?  Woman would have so many aliases that the FBI would put her on a list just out of reflex.

Even considering how prone to pseudonyms the genre is as a whole, however, Chrono Trigger is a peculiar case.  Because while other RPGs might be content with 1, maybe 2 major characters who have separate names for substantial plot-related reasons, over half of Chrono Trigger’s main characters are known by pseudonyms!  There are, after all, only 3 characters in the party whose names are genuinely their own (Ayla, Lucca, and Crono), while the remaining 4 are known by adopted monickers.  Marle is actually Princess Nadia, Magus is actually Janus, Frog is actually Glenn, and Robo...well heck, Robo ought to count double, because he’s actually R66-Y AND Prometheus.*

And I can’t help but wonder: thematic, or a coincidence?

I mean, it’d be a hell of a chance occurrence to have 4 characters’ arcs all substantially involve adopted names in the same game, without the writers having intended the concurrence for any higher purpose.  Particularly since CT’s writers were all quite competent--it’d be out of character for this to just be a case of some oversight.

And it’s worth recognizing that each character’s pseudonym has different context and reason for its existence, but all could be seen to share a narrative purpose.  Marle chooses to be Marle, for positive and self-affirming reasons.  While the choice to hide her identity of Nadia might have briefly, at the start, been a matter of convenience (as she didn’t want Crono to treat her differently due to her status), after that point, being Marle is clearly a decision she makes for her own sake--”Marle” is who she really is, while “Nadia” is a restriction imposed upon her by people and circumstances she despises.  And while she does reconcile with her father and (presumably to some degree) her position as a princess, she and her character’s arc have made it clear that she’s not giving up the name she gave herself.  “Marle” is an identity, her identity, and “Nadia” a castoff that, at best, she won’t object to being called when her royal life does have to crop up.

Like Marle, Frog chooses his pseudonym--but for him, it’s clearly for negative reasons.  The name is a way of hiding within his cursed form, avoiding acknowledging his past failure as Glenn and hiding that truth from the world, particularly those he loves and respects, like Queen Leene and King Guardia.  While “Marle” is an identity of self-affirmation and freedom of individuality, “Frog” is one of shame and/or fear, an identity created to coincide with the cursed body that serves as a physical representation of Glenn’s failure and loss.  In terms of the identity of “Frog,” Glenn’s story is one of coming to terms with his past and an identity built on its consequences, and bringing honor and self-value back into his life as Frog.  While “Marle” is a positive identity to start with, “Frog” is one in which a healthy self-attitude must be grown--and even then, it’s almost certain that the identity of “Glenn” is the preferable one and would be who the man seeks someday to be again.

Robo, meanwhile, is an interesting variation.  Unlike Frog and Marle, Robo doesn’t choose his pseudonym, instead being dubbed such by Crono, who apparently either has no creativity whatsoever or just didn’t give half a shit.  “Robo” is the name of the character who develops from essentially nothingness from the moment that Lucca repairs him.  Unlike Marle and Frog, there’s not really any conflict of identity for the majority of the game for Robo--he doesn’t remember his previous life the way they do, and he isn’t given a chance, when meeting his assembly line brothers, to decide whether he wants to exist as Robo or as R66-Y, as they turn on him automatically.  While being called a defect distresses him and of course he doesn’t particularly like getting the crap kicked out of him, the incident never offers a choice to Robo regarding which identity he wants--by the end of it, the beings who have saved him are the ones who named him Robo and there’s nothing else left for him as R66-Y, so of course he’s going to be Robo going forward.  The choice only comes late in the game, and unexpectedly, as Atropos reveals that he had another identity as Prometheus before, and that he’d been meant to be an infiltration unit of sorts.  It’s a questionable claim, actually, given that Atropos herself is only being all genocide-y because her programming’s been tampered with by Mother Brain, but at the time said claim is made, Robo has no particular reason to doubt it.  Either way, the identity of “Robo” is the one that’s been given the time and opportunity to grow, and given things and people to cherish, while “Prometheus” is still just a theoretical that can’t be remembered, so the choice, while still significant, is nonetheless probably easy for Robo to make.  Though it was a name given to him, Robo has grown into his identity as such, and now chooses to be that self just as much as Marle does.

Magus, of course, is grumpy and not a team player even when it comes to narrative tools like character development, so we can’t really say for sure what the emotional circumstances are that tie him to his current name.  Maybe it was a name given him by Ozzie that he grew into like Robo, or maybe it’s something he wears because he’s ashamed of what he was as Janus like Frog, or maybe he legitimately only ever started feeling like a person in his own right once he was away from everyone who knew him by his former identity like Marle.  There’s a good chance it’s none of the above and more an edgy new-name-for-a-new-identity-of-VENGEANCE sort of thing.  Could also be something else entirely.  Regardless, we can’t say for sure exactly what the story of “Magus” is, only that he willingly keeps it.  But the absence of an answer is an answer too, in the sense that the mystery still makes it a different case from the other pseudonyms, from our audience perspective.

So the story of each character’s pseudonym is different, but they all clearly work toward similar purposes of showing identity as something consciously chosen.  Marle, Magus, and Robo all arrive at a destination of voluntarily embracing these identities, and even though Frog’s story is a bit different, it still revolves around him using a name to undergo an emotional journey to come to terms with and accept himself--it’s just that in his case, he’s arriving at an acceptance of “Frog” and more importantly a willingness to return to “Glenn” someday.  So there’s certainly a theme to be read here, one of the human will to choose their own self and to consciously defy or own the identity given to them by others.

I just don’t really know if this theme that you can find was actually intended.

I mean...yeah, okay, when the majority of your cast run in the same thematic circle, most often it’s for a reason.  Look at Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, after all.  The theme of ascension, of rising above the restrictions placed upon you by the universe, is all over the place in its cast’s stories, with succubi overcoming the Evil in their natures, and Hell Knights subtly working outside Law’s methods to achieve success, and broken PTSD-suffering fallen paladins being nurtured back to believing that a day might come when they’ll be okay again, and so on and so forth.  It’s all over the place; there’s very few major characters that don’t tie to this ascension theme in 1 fashion or another.
 
But at the same time...well, ascension is a theme that exists within and permeates PWotR far beyond just the main cast.  The story as a whole plays with it, the main villain ties to it, and it’s the very purpose itself of the true ending.  By contrast, as far as I can see, this concept of self-determined identity represented by pseudonym isn’t a part of Chrono Trigger as a whole.  Human will and potential is a major theme of the game, and I suppose that’s at least somewhere in the same ballpark as self-determined identity, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to assume they’re intended to be connected, particularly since the method of the latter (the pseudonyms) doesn’t appear in any other significant part of the game.**

So...I’m inclined to say that the peculiar prevalence of pseudonyms in Chrono Trigger’s cast might, indeed, be more coincidence than contrived.  Maybe it was intended to tie to the game’s ideas on existential will and potential, but I just don’t see enough evidence of it.  Maybe the writers didn’t somehow overlook the fact that the game had so many main characters running around with aliases, but just recognized that what they’d made still works and wisely decided not to mess with it.  Anyway, the point is that I have fully wasted my time and yours considering a question no one was asking, and arriving at a conclusion that requires no shifting of one’s perspective on the matter in the slightest.  Aren’t you glad you read these things?




















* I mean I guess Frog also has a second pseudonym of Mr. Toad thanks to Crono’s mom, but just because all these amphibians look the same to her doesn’t mean that we should humor her blatant and disgusting racism.  Why, she was even shocked that one of Frog’s kind could articulate himself!  Truly disgraceful.  I ask you, where were Nintendo’s censors that day?


** Yes, Lavos is given a name by Ayla (like how Robo was named by the party), but it’s no pseudonym, because it’s the only name he ever possesses, nor is it part of any story of identity.  And yes, Gasper’s name is only revealed late in the game, but until that point he only has a title (Old Man), not an actual alternate alias.  And again, it isn’t used to explore any concept of identity.

Chrono Trigger's Anime Cutscene Selection

When you stop to think about it, Squaresoft’s choice of placement and priority for the cutscenes in Chrono Trigger’s Playstation 1 rerelease is...not all that great.  Like, look at the first anime cinematic in the game.  Not the obligatory opening, mind you--the first one in the game.  It’s the scene in 2300 AD, when Crono, Marle, and Lucca first discover Robo.

I would like you to think about that for a moment.  The first cutscene shown in Chrono Trigger is meeting Robo.  That’s, what, a quarter of the way through the entire game?  A fifth at the very least.  20 - 25% of the game will have passed by before you see its first cinematic.  By that point you’ve forgotten that the game is supposed to have them; it takes you by surprise.

And also think about what exactly has transpired by that point.  Not to say that meeting Robo isn’t an important event in Chrono Trigger’s narrative, but they didn’t make a cutscene for meeting Marle, Lucca, or Frog.  There wasn’t one for the sudden, jarring turning point in which Marle is erased from history before Crono’s eyes.  You see no anime representation of the moment that the party first beholds the ruined world of 2300 AD (normally I feel that establishing shots are a waste of FMV, admittedly, but 2300 AD’s setting is a rare case where it’s warranted), nor the dramatic exit Crono is forced to make from the trial after his sentencing.  By heavens, there is no cutscene for the moment in which Marle is transported through time, nor when Crono follows her!  The monumental, dramatic moment in which time travel is first introduced to this game, the beginning of all that is to come, arguably the most fundamentally significant event in this world’s entire history, and Square decided that it wasn’t worth special commemoration.  Mind-boggling.*

And while the middle of Chrono Trigger is generally good about emphasizing the really important plot moments with a cutscene, the cinematics go weirdly silent in its last quarter/fifth, too.  The very last anime FMV you see in the game, aside from its ending, is Crono’s demise.  Everything after that is in-game portrayal only, for so long that by the end of the game you may have once again forgotten about the anime FMV altogether.  There’s no cutscene for the cataclysm following the Ocean Palace disaster.  Nor for the moment the new Epoch is revealed, or when the heroes find Magus at the cape.  There isn’t one for Robo confronting Atropos or Mother Brain, or the party entering Fiona’s Shrine and finding Robo at its center.**  There’s no special scene for the ghost of Cyrus emerging from his grave, or Marle leaping through the stained glass window of the courtroom to save her father.  The Rainbow Shell, the Sun Stone, the Green Dream...all denied the fanfare of a cinematic.  Likewise, there’s no animation devoted to the emergence of the Black Omen, the final confrontation with Queen Zeal, or the revelation of Lavos’s inner heart.  Squaresoft did not see fit to commemorate Crono’s salvation!

And sure, yeah, I get it.  The Playstation 1 had limited space on its discs.  FMV was expensive.  And Akira Toriyama is, for some reason, a highly respected artist, so I can only assume that he’s expensive, too.  There could only be so much anime footage put into the game; the line had to be drawn somewhere and cuts had to be made.  

But did 1 of those cuts really have to be the first time portal opening and drawing Marle into it, starting the whole epic adventure?  You’re telling me THAT is less important than seeing Ayla jump on a dinosaur and fly off?  Squaresoft didn’t have the resources to iconize Crono’s friends overcoming death itself and holding all of time within their hands for a moment, to bring him back to the world...but it COULD justify animating an inappropriate, classless prophecy of Guardia’s fall that has nothing to do whatsoever with THIS game to begin with?  Neither Marle nor Lucca, respectively the heart and mind of the party, and arguably the 2 most indispensable characters to the entire story, have a single damn cutscene to call their own within the game, but Squaresoft did take the time to needlessly, hamfistedly cram a portrayal of Janus’s prediction of doom into Chrono’s death scene?  Hell, the animated opening’s good, but it’s just an opening--I’d have gladly traded it for the chance to use its comparatively extensive length on seeing a full portrayal of Marle disappearing into time, Lavos arriving on the planet as he crashes down onto Tyrano Lair, Lucca and Taban unveiling the Telepod at the Millennium Fair, and the moment in which we’re introduced to Schala.  You know--stuff that’s actually significant.

Also, not for nothing, but the Playstation 1 wasn’t the last time Chrono Trigger was rereleased.  It’s come out a few times since.  While admittedly SquareEnix has predictably botched its newer rereleases with their signature incompetence for smooth adaptation of gameplay and aesthetic mechanics, it’s not like there hasn’t been opportunities for them to call up Toriyama, throw some money and animators at him, and have him whip up a few new cutscenes for the game.  Frankly, distracting him from producing Dragon Ball Super could’ve been SquareEnix’s generous gift to the world.  What, they could code superfluous bonus dungeons that add nothing and further inflict the harm of association with Chrono Cross on the later releases, but adding something actually enjoyable for the players was out of the question?  But of course, that would require SquareEnix to treat Chrono Trigger and its fans with the barest shred of respect, so of course it’s impossible.  I wonder if we’ll ever know why the company perpetually seems to resent this game so damn much.

Look, it’s not like Chrono Trigger wasted its FMVs like so many other RPGs of the era did (with the exception of the crappy fall of Guardia one, of course).   Stuff actually happens in its cutscenes, that stuff is animated well, and the events portrayed are significant to at least some degree.  I haven’t had reason to say this sentence often in the past 20 years, but: Square could have done much worse.  And further in fairness, CT’s Playstation rerelease got a HELL of a lot more dedication and quality in its FMV additions than the contemporary rereleases of Final Fantasy 4, 5, and 6 did.  Their new cinematics were restricted to openings and endings, and they certainly didn’t look as good; FF5’s CGI portrayal of its cast was actually ugly as hell.  I may not be impressed by Toriyama’s limited style, but I’ll take it over Yoshitaka Amano’s world of indifferent tow-headed barrow-wights any day.

Still, the pacing of Chrono Trigger’s anime cutscenes IS jarring with their lack of presence in the game’s end and especially beginning.  And even if none of their scenes are undeserving of an FMV, a lot of other moments in the game were undeniably more significant than some of the ones that got animated.  CT’s cinematic gallery is certainly good, but it definitely could be better in this regard.
















* You may notice that I neglected to mention what might be the most important scene in the entire game, that of the discovery of Lavos and his actions in 1999 AD.  Well, while I can believe the other major events prior to finding Robo could be portrayed well enough by a newer anime cutscene, I think that the moment in which Crono, Marle, Lucca, and perhaps even ourselves all watch in dawning horror as the end of the world unfolds before us is as perfect as it can be in its original form.  Anything embellished, anything given better visuals or dramatized, would lessen the scene’s power, make it more alike to things that have been seen before in other stories, other media.  Much like the scene of Crono’s demise, the subtle, flawless makings of this moment are Chrono Trigger’s alone, and I cannot believe it could ever be adequately replicated.


** Hell, if they wanted to use Robo’s only dedicated cutscene on him sitting around deactivated, couldn’t they at least have given him the dignity of making it this moment in Fiona’s Shrine? Robo sitting as a monument unto himself, his long work done and Fiona’s dream realized through his labor? Would’ve been a lot more respectful to the guy than just surrounding his scrap heap ass with rats in 2300 AD.

Chrono Trigger's Cutscene Comparison

For most RPGs with Full Motion Video, the events contained within the cutscene are an active part of the game’s sequence of events.  If you take out the anime cutscene in Tales of Berseria of Seres offering herself to Velvet as sacrifice, you’re going to miss the scene of her death and the revelation within her last words to Velvet.  If you remove the pre-rendered conversation between Adam and Eliza in her office from Deus Ex 3, you’ll be left without crucial information about the story of the game and its characters.  If you excise the boat scene in Lunar 1, you won’t have any idea, going forward, of just how incredibly boring it is when Luna sings.

Chrono Trigger, on the other hand, originates from the Super Nintendo, a full console generation before FMV cinematics became a reality for gaming.  As such, its anime cutscenes, added to the game when it was later re-released on the Playstation 1, represent an interesting situation: they show several major events in the course of Chrono Trigger’s plot, but they’re a duplication of events already playing out in the game, rather than the sole depiction of said events.  When you reach 1 of the correlating moments in the story, you’ll see the event transpire both within the game itself, as CT was originally designed, and also in its anime rendition.

Which naturally leads us to today’s question: Which version of Chrono Trigger’s narrative is better at these points, the original in-game scenario, or the anime cutscene version?  Well, rest assured, everyone, I am here today to answer this question so pressing and interesting that it never occurred to anyone in the past 20 years to bother asking it!



OPENING

We start with a pretty close call.  Both opening sequences to Chrono Trigger create an exciting montage that make great use of the game’s appealing diversity in settings, characters, and events, and while each opening is displaying a different set of scenes in a different order from one another, they’re pretty much equally intriguing and accurate representations of what the game offers.

Each opening has a couple potential flaws, but they’re totally negligible.  The fact that the original opening’s battles are staged is clear to anyone familiar with the game, but that’s insignificant since the point of the opening is to introduce you to a game you AREN’T familiar with.*  Each does technically show spoilers for the game (even such major ones, in the original, as the Kingdom of Zeal and Lavos’s emergence!), but most of what you witness in the cinematic will be forgotten by the time the player actually encounters the event, particularly with the scenes the anime version portrays (since they’re not a direct display of how it will play out in the game).

As far as which is better...I like the way that the original synchronizes the race with Johnny to the change in the music, and it has a slight advantage over its anime counterpart in terms of its ending--while the Epoch blasts off into another time at the end of each opening, it’s the original sequence that perfectly times it to the final few notes of the song, the exact right thrilling conclusion to the dramatic build-up that the opening has created.  Nonetheless, one really can’t deny that the pace and animation quality of the anime opening has an advantage in catching and holding the audience’s attention.  I also like the fact that the anime starts softly, reaping the benefit of slowly and gently intriguing the audience before it jumps into the flashy, exciting stuff.  And while we’re talking about the quiet beginning of the anime version, having us look fondly through Crono’s eyes at a picture of him and his friends is a great way of invoking a pleasing nostalgia, somehow more so than the actual original opening can!  Lastly, I like the fact that the anime makes a point of briefly showcasing each of the game’s main characters, lightly introducing them in a way that gives the audience a taste of them, yet doesn’t give anything away.  While the original certainly does show all the members of the party doing stuff (besides Magus, obviously), it’s the anime version that calls attention to them as characters rather than simply parts of the plot’s larger whole.

Thus, although each version is a great specimen of what a game’s opening should be, when one takes everything into consideration, it’s the anime introduction to Chrono Trigger that’s the better version, I feel.

In-Game: 0
Anime: 1


FINDING ROBO

Now this one’s much easier to award the win to the anime version.  In the original Chrono Trigger, discovering the deactivated and abandoned Robo is...well, it’s pretty much just a case of walking up to him and hitting the A button.  After all, the anime version is only covering the actual approach and initial discovery, not the dialogue and events that follow of Lucca deciding to fix him, Marle’s finding an insight about Lucca’s character, and Robo’s subsequent activation.  So this is basically just a case of whether it was better to have the player walk up to something and investigate it, or display the approach and discovery in anime format--no competition.

I will say that the cutscene has its flaws, though.  It begins strangely comically, with a rat’s goofy eyes blinking to a silly sound effect before we see the scene proper.  It doesn’t really feel right to this moment in the game, to me.  I mean, you’re still in the midst of the exceptionally portrayed apocalyptic world of 2300 AD, and this is the first major location that Crono and company have come to since only recently witnessing, to their horror, a visual record of the day the world was destroyed.  This dome seems completely empty and abandoned, a worse state even than the previous domes of residence we’ve encountered.  Put all that together, and...should this moment really start with something vaguely lighthearted?  Still and all, that weird start is done with very quickly, and the rest of the scene is adequate.

...Well...sort of.  I mean...if you’re gonna use a cutscene to introduce Robo, is showing him sitting in a scrap heap really the best way to do it?  Couldn’t they instead have had the cinematic portray the moment of his activation, with the energy sparks and spinning and whatnot?  Would’ve been way more dynamic.

Still, it’s a fine enough cutscene, doing well with showing just how alone and wrecked Robo is when he’s first discovered, and neatly displaying Lucca’s enthusiastic science-first questions-later attitude.  And like I said, there really isn’t any notable competition for it here.

In-Game: 0
Anime: 2


MEETING AYLA

Ayla’s introduction is awesome either way you slice it.  In its original format, she comes leaping on screen for a jump kick against 1 of the reptites that have mobbed Crono’s party, then proceeds to kick the ass of several more, before running another off the screen.  The previous fight has established to the player that these things are resistant to physical attacks, and yet here this out-of-nowhere cavewoman is wrecking each of them with a single hit.  Badass!

Being a bit divorced from the game’s visuals, the anime version doesn’t carry the same inherent gameplay-created implication to the player that Ayla must be incredibly strong to be so devastating with clearly physical attacks.  Also, I gotta say that it’s annoying that this cutscene (like Ayla’s official art) prominently displays her using a club, when she never actually does in the game, or is even implied to ever do so.  Weapons are for sissies; when Ayla wants something immediately and violently reduced to its component parts, it’s a hands-on approach or nada! 

But despite that, and although the in-game version gets the job done very well, I have to hand the victory once again to the anime iteration.  It’s fast, it’s exciting, it’s animated really well (this might be the best damn animation the whole game has, even!), it gives us an opportunity to see what reptites look like up close, it adds to Ayla’s combat prestige by showing her beating the crap out of even more of them, and it even makes her exit from the scene better--she’s actively leading a bunch of the enemies away from Crono and company to help them further, not just deciding to single 1 out to particularly work over off-screen.  I even dig Crono’s dumbfounded “I gotta tap me some ooga-booga ass ASAP” stare at the end of it.  Ayla kicks fucking ass, and this cutscene escalates on the original in showing that.  A well-earned point to the anime.

In-Game: 0
Anime: 3


FROG WIELDS THE MASAMUNE

Possibly the most cool and epic moment of Crono Trigger is that in which Frog accepts the mantle of Destiny, even if it had been meant to be worn by Cyrus, takes the Masamune in hand, calls his heroic pledge to the heavens, and cuts a freaking mountain in twain.  And this time?  The point goes to the original version.

Don’t get me wrong, the cutscene is a worthy contender!  Frog moves and acts with awesome purpose, the moment is appropriately epic, the skybeam is appropriately shiny, the mountain’s splitting is clean.  And the anime has an advantage in the windstorm that converges on Frog as he brandishes the Masamune--that’s a cool touch.

But honestly, the in-game version is just better.  First of all, it’s way, way more meaningful that Frog is not already carrying the Masamune, but instead asks that Crono give it to him, finally ready, having confronted his memories of Cyrus 1 final time, to become the world’s hero.  As awesome as the scene is for its own merits, it’s also meant to show an emotional culmination of Frog’s will, and his accepting, demanding the Masamune is a necessary part of it.  And of course, it’s also cool (if admittedly inexplicable) that Crono does not simply hand him the sword, but plunges it into the ground so that Frog can claim it for his own--very reminiscent to King Arthur drawing the sword in the stone.  Which in turn allows for Frog to gaze on it for a moment, and then make a vow to the world and to fate that he shall use the blade to slay his foe and restore honor.  Honestly, that moment of monologue by itself elevates this version above its anime counterpart; you really just can’t have the scene without it.  Finally, I actually think that the skyward explosion of power from Frog’s drawing the sword is in fact a lot cooler in-game, even with the SNES’s limited graphics.  While the anime version is neat, seeing an exploding dome of pure power radiate outward from him as he draws it, so massive that it’s seen from the world map as it expands, then converges into a beam blasting to the sky and higher, really just sells the epic nature of the moment and the Masamune’s incredible power so much better.  The mountainside being blasted in 2 with a fanfare of explosions and debris is cooler, and the whole scene having Frog’s theme playing louder than in the cutscene is also beneficial.

The anime version does it well!  But it’s completely out of its league on this one.  Point goes hard to the original!

In-Game: 1
Anime: 3


APPROACHING MAGUS

This one is a really tight race.  The anime version does not do much to mess with perfection--the blue flame path lights as Frog gradually approaches Magus, then leaps forward and forms a circle around the summoning chamber in which Magus stands, and the big man himself appears, seen ominously from the back.  It’s pretty much an exact interpretation of the original scene--although I do like that Frog hesitates at the first flames, waiting to see whether this is a danger before proceeding.  A nice detail.

Nonetheless, I’m calling this for the in-game version.  Although virtually identical in theory, the reality of the matter is that the main purpose of this scene is to culminate the unnerving atmosphere of Magus’s castle into a final, overwhelmingly tense approach to the sorcerer, and the simple fact is...it works better when the player has to be a participant in it.  It’s an unusual statement coming from a guy who usually sees the gameplay of an RPG as little more than a hindrance to its narrative, I know.  But it can’t be denied: forcing the player him/herself to be the one taking the steps forward along the sorcery-lighted path in a room of otherwise complete darkness raises the tension better than watching Frog do it in a cinematic, so the original iteration’s gotta take the win here.  I also think that its sound effects and the chanting background, in spite of being cruder, are more effective here, and the exact timing and reverse-fading dark silhouette of Magus coming into focus is also superior.  Those are tiny details--but when atmosphere is the highest priority, it’s the tiny details that count the most.  In-game wins the round.

In-Game: 2
Anime: 3


MOUNTING THE DACTYLS

Like finding Robo, this is essentially a default win for the anime version.  In the original game, upon finding Ayla at the dactyl nest about to embark on a solo mission to save her village and stop the reptites once and for all, Crono and company pledge to help her, she gratefully accepts, some dactyls are called down for them to join her, and the scene fades to black, resuming on the world map with the party flying on the dinosaurs’ backs.  This cutscene is basically showing the actual process of Ayla and company getting on the dactyls and flying off, so I guess its gameplay equivalent is the aforementioned black that was faded to?  Not very hard to determine which is the better contender.  I mean, honestly, it’s really only an okay cutscene (I do like the last moment in which it focuses on the ominous red star, though), and I have to wonder why this particular moment was selected for animation over so many other, more significant moments in the game, but...eh, it’s fine enough, and it’d have to be pretty bad not to be better than its competition of nothing at all.  Point to the anime.

In-Game: 2
Anime: 4


THE EPOCH TAKES OFF

This one’s surprisingly easy for me.  The Epoch isn’t able to fly at this point in the game (remember, it only gains flight because Dalton was an avid watcher of Pimp My Ride), so seeing it hover in the air and take off annoys me.  That may be nitpicky, but it’s not like there’s all that much in the anime cutscene that I’m unfairly disregarding.  Crono eagerly gets into the pilot seat, flips some switches (I guess it must be the exact same design as the car he races against Johnny, because otherwise I don’t know how exactly a kid from the 1000 AD suburbs knows this much about driving a time machine), and takes off.  Functional, but unremarkable, so the lore inconsistency is enough to put me off.  Also, with the anime version, the scene’s music and movement are clearly intended to get you excited for this moment, which...I mean, it’s not a bad thing, because the Epoch is very cool, but at the same time, having you already be hyped up is going to make the impact of the next moment in-game, seeing the inferno of the time-scape as the Epoch crosses through it, less impressive.  The quieter, almost reverent atmosphere of boarding the Epoch in-game creates a greater contrast to what’s to come, allowing the latter to be all the more impressive for it.  Point to the original.

In-Game: 3
Anime: 4


CRONO’s DEATH

Original version wins.  Not even a question.  Look, the anime cutscene is fine enough, but it completely lacks the power of seeing Crono’s death play out in-game.  There’s too many distractions, first of all--as great as it is to get to see something of Magus besides his back, doing a close-up of him watching Crono standing against Lavos is dumb, interrupting our view of the kid’s last stand.  Toriyama has a terrible habit of being utterly incapable of showing any important scene of conflict without constantly interrupting it to check in with the spectators...I should probably just be thankful that it didn’t go full Dragon Ball and have Magus and Vegeta start up a 10-minute play-by-play conversation to explain why what we’re ostensibly watching is so amazing.  The sudden flashback to Janus’s prediction that 1 of the party would perish is likewise an unnecessary distraction, and too damn heavy-handed to boot.  We don’t need to be reminded of it, guys, we’re watching it happen.

Maybe most importantly, though, the timing and act of Crono’s undoing is just far, far more moving and impactful in the original.  The anime only has a close-up of his face just kinda bwoosh outward, suddenly and with sound.  The original version, though...okay, the whole thing of Crono raising his arms up to the heavens might be more than was needed, but you see him disintegrate.  The screen is white and void of all but him and those he’s dying to protect, and after the keening windup sound effect of Lavos’s beam, the game goes utterly silent, allowing nothing, nothing, to distract us from the fact that we are watching him reduced to ash, a particle silhouette of Crono that dissolves before our eyes with cruel simplicity.  The silence, the intensity, the weight...this is a moment that is Chrono Trigger’s and Chrono Trigger’s alone, singular and uniquely powerful.  By contrast, the cutscene just shows an anime guy dying in an anime way.  Easy victory for the original version here.

In-Game: 4
Anime: 4


ENDING

So, this is a bit tricky to judge, because much like the opening, this isn’t so much 2 versions of the same scene as 2 different things accomplishing the same purpose.  Also, tough to really say what we should count as the in-game version.  I think it’s fairest that for the purposes of our comparison, the in-game version will be the ending starting with the fireworks being set off by Taban, since that’s the point at which the final sequence is fully out of the player’s hands.  Also, we are absolutely not gonna count the stupid bullshit crappy thing in the anime cutscenes where Guardia falls because even that far back Square was conducting experiments on how to cheapen and destroy the things their audience love.  It’s not part of the ending, it’s not a thing in Chrono Trigger, it doesn’t exist in the narrative or timeline, I will not be accepting questions at this time.

Alright, so, first of all, let’s talk about the anime cutscene.  We start with Crono and Marle’s marriage, which is...I mean, it’s nice, but while I am and always have been a Crono x Marle shipper, and the game itself certainly does imply that Marle romantically likes Crono, it seems a bit weird to just jump to showing them outright getting married.  Implications or not, CT simply doesn’t contain a love story for Crono and Marle, so this really would’ve been a lot better as, I dunno, them on a picnic date, or doing a holding-hands-and-looking-affectionately-at-each-other thing while they hung out with Lucca, or something.

Better than that is the next scene of Ayla and her tribe having a feast, in which Ayla casually shows what a fucking queen she is by out of nowhere jamming a ring on Kino’s finger, then tossing him a second ring (a substantially better one, I can’t help but notice, but then, it should be), and expectantly holding her hand to him with the disaffected expectance of a mob boss who’s also royalty.  Kino gets the idea and secures his status as Number 1 Bottom in Ayla’s inevitable harem as he slips the ring on, and everyone cheers.  

Following this, we get a scene of Glenn, curse-free, getting knighted by the King of Guardia, who looks...really, really old.  Is he supposed to be that old in the game?  I thought this guy had yet to father Leene’s daughter; the whole thing about Marle disappearing was that Leene dying at that time would erase her bloodline because a successor hadn’t been born yet.  Then again, let’s face it, there’s...pretty good odds that Glenn is Marle’s ancestor, not this guy.  Anyway, it’s a nice celebration of Frog’s chivalrous honor as he exits to a salute by the kingdom’s knights.  Then we’re back at Crono and Marle’s wedding in time to see King Kai Melchior, for...some reason, and they finish the aisle walk, and there’s balloons and a thrown bouquet, and it’s all nice and happy.

And then Lucca has to walk up with Mini Proto-Robo and find baby Kid and ruin everything by reminding us that Square erroneously believes that Chrono Cross is canon.

Yeah, uh, look, this is overall nice and all, and Ayla and Frog’s parts are really good, but...it’s not an impressive ending.  First of all, it doesn’t show Robo at all, and while there was a concern during their final goodbyes of whether Robo would still exist in the future, the game’s original ending (see below) confirms this to be the case, so I really don’t know why the anime ending stiffs him.  Second, Magus is likewise completely absent--yes, he COULD be dead in this ending if the player decided to off him in 1200 BC, but surely it wouldn’t be impossible to have a separate ending cutscene bit for Magus that could play or not play determined by that decision?

Third, even if you discount the sin of forcing Chrono Cross lore upon this defenseless game, Lucca’s part of the ending is kinda just bad--the scene clearly just isn’t meant to be about her, Lucca the character.  The damn baby she finds is the star of the scene, Lucca merely a vehicle for its introduction.  More is said about Lucca’s future life by the stumbling little proto-Robo than anything she herself is doing.  And fourth, I’m sorry, but even if you inexplicably DO like Chrono Cross, there’s still no reason to clumsily scotch-tape it onto Chrono Trigger like this.  The original game never contained any such hints of its (shitty, shouldn’t-be-considered-canon) sequel, and that sequel unfortunately tied itself to CT without any such help.  If you’re gonna end this game, end THIS game, let it stand as a testament to itself; don’t just exploit it as an advertisement for the later product.  And if you’re gonna make a “where are they now” ending about the characters, actually DO it for ALL the characters in the main cast!

The anime ending is serviceable to be sure, but it’s definitely and substantially flawed nonetheless.  The original, on the other hand...well, it’s basically perfection.  Whether it’s Crono and friends in the Epoch or Crono and Marle floating along with a bunch of balloons, you see the heroes carried across the world they’ve saved, the night-darkened ground illuminated by the lights of people’s homes, to a gentle, joyful tune.  In the case of the Epoch, eventually you get to see a simple scene for each of the rest of the party--Robo and Atropos sitting peacefully on the side of a notably non-ruined mountain in the future (happily confirming that Robo does, indeed, live in the saved future), Ayla and Kino riding dactyls through the sky, Frog leading a royal procession along Zenan Bridge with the king and queen behind him, and Magus, well, doing his grumpy solo act.**  In the case of the balloons, we transition to watching Crono and Marle from below as they climb higher into the heavens.  In each version, we finally begin to zoom out, to view this precious planet that we’ve put so much work into preserving, as a beautiful whole.  The credits finish rolling, and a shooting star tells us that all is done.  The Epoch version of this is quite simply the greatest RPG ending I’ve seen, and the balloon version is not significantly lesser.  Even discounting the shortcomings of the anime version, it’s hard to conceive how it could compete with this.  The tiebreaker goes to the original.

In-Game: 5
Anime: 4



Huh!  I wasn’t expecting it to be such a close score, but it looks like the final tally has the original, in-game scenes edging out the later anime additions 5 to 4.  While there’s a lot of merits to the cinematics and plenty of times that they’re a valuable addition to Chrono Trigger, the game in its pure, untouched form is still the better experience more often than not.  Neat.  I have no idea what that proves or why I felt the need to make the comparison to begin with, but I had fun and it’s always a joy to talk about Chrono Trigger.  Hopefully you enjoyed it to some degree, too.  Until next time!


















* Weirdly, the fight against Zombor is shown in both openings, and each time it’s portrayed incorrectly, with the original misrepresenting the beginning of the fight with him, and the anime implying that Frog can be involved in the battle.  Why Zombor was so important as to warrant representation in both openings, yet not important enough to show him correctly either time, is a mystery to me.


** Admittedly, you aren’t seeing the “ending” for Crono, Marle, and Lucca, so you COULD say that this is incomplete as the anime version is, in terms of displaying the game’s characters.  But I would argue that this ending is more definitively about the game and adventure as a whole, whereas the cinematic was clearly focused specifically on the cast, and also, Crono and Marle and Lucca’s ending IS that they’re out there, seeing the times they’ve saved and the people they’ve befriended, on a new quest.

Chrono Cross's Use of a Silent Protagonist

The incompetence of Chrono Cross at every level of its writing and conception is well-documented, particularly by myself.  And yet, even though its greatest flaws are easily listed and discussed, and have been many a time by many a person, the minor mistakes it makes through the course of its story are not given all that much attention, even though they cumulatively drag the game’s quality down just as much as its infamous blunders.  In fact, even after over 20 years of hating this game, 1 of the regular-sized but nonetheless substantial mistakes of Chrono Cross only just now occurred to me: the decision to make Serge a silent protagonist.

Now I’ve criticized the concept of the RPG silent protagonist many times before, and to be sure, inflicting Serge with a permanent Mute status ailment did the storytelling of Chrono Cross no more favors than it did with Vahn in Legend of Legaia, or any given protagonist in the Etrian Odyssey series--or Chrono Trigger’s Crono himself, for that matter.  But the problems created by forcing a strict non-personality onto Serge actually go beyond that which afflict most games as a result of their mute heroes.  The thing is, you see, is that Chrono Cross is way too personal a story to Serge to be able to work without his verbal and emotional participation.

Consider the relationship between the main plot and the main character in, say, Wild Arms 1, a fairly standard example of an RPG with a silent protagonist.  Protagonist Rudy Roughknight comes from humble yet not fully understood beginnings, and, through a series of escalating circumstances, finds himself becoming gradually but inextricably involved in a sprawling quest to save the world from a great villainous threat.  There are reasons revealed to us along the way for why Rudy is especially suited for defending the world from those that threaten it, reasons involving his true origins which tie him in certain ways to the story as a whole...but though he is adequately personally involved, his participation in Wild Arms 1 is still largely a case of his having happened to get caught up in a series of major events, and his choosing to step up and do his part for the greater good.  This is the most typical case of RPG stories, particularly involving a silent protagonist--the main character has some ties to the unfolding events of the story, because being a random bystander from start to finish isn’t as compelling, but by and large, the machinations of the game’s villains and the story events set in motion do not revolve around the protagonist’s existence.

Plenty of other games, however, tell far more personal stories which are completely and totally derived from the protagonist’s existence, actions, and beliefs.  Absolutely no part of Planescape: Torment would have occurred sans The Nameless One, for example; it’s a game entirely about him, his legacy, and his personal journey to accept mortality.  Tales of Berseria, meanwhile, possesses a plot whose every fiber of emotional character and themes are iconized by protagonist Velvet Crowe, and its sequence of events are entirely her personal quest for vengeance.  Sometimes it’s more of a half-and-half situation--Dragon Age 2, for example, is a story of the social conflict and turmoil of the city of Kirkwall over a few years, as a representative sample of the simmering cultural conflicts of the land of Thedas as a whole.  But just as much as it is that overarching plot, it’s also the story of how the hero Hawke confronted and overcame these conflicts and more to become the city’s champion, and what it cost her/him to do so.  Final Fantasy 7’s another example of this mix, wherein a lot of shit goes down in its plot that amounts to larger forces at work that protagonist Cloud heroically reacts to, but also a ton of the game’s story is inextricably tied to who Cloud is and his personal psychological issues, and only moves forward through his action and presence in events specifically designed for him and him alone.

And unfortunately, this more personal story is the approach that Chrono Cross’s plot takes.  I mean, think about it.  The vast majority of the game’s events revolve around Serge in some significant capacity, as does at least half of the lore events that occur as preamble to the game’s story.  Serge isn’t just some random hero-to-be kid who finds himself transported into another reality early into Chrono Cross--once he’s in Another World, he’s almost immediately attacked by the minions of antagonist Lynx, who is specifically targeting Serge and will continue to do so for the first third of the game.  And why is that?  Because Serge’s DNA is the key to opening a door in Chronopolis, which is a fluke chance that resulted from a sequence of events in Serge’s childhood that made him a living plot mcguffin.  These events also had the result of separating Serge from his father for the rest of his childhood, and (supposedly) giving him a phobia of cats--both facts being relevant in that his father’s body is used by overarching villain FATE to create Lynx, who is only someone’s Inkbunny OC because FATE wants to take advantage of Serge’s fear of felines.

Eventually Serge finds the Frozen Flame, it swaps bodies between him and Lynx, and he winds up, eventually, back in his own home dimension (Home World) whilst in the body of a villain.  For the next 60% of the game, his task is to save his companion Kid and stop the real Lynx in his old body (since Kid is too dumb to know the difference), which, upon success, eventually leads into a bunch of poorly conceived, poorly explained, utterly pointless, and at times self-contradicting nonsense regarding multi-timeline-spanning Skynets being tricked by dinosaurs whose reality got aborted and also Schala and Baltahasar and Lavos are superfluously tacked on in the clumsiest possible way.

But aside from all the jumbled idiocy that is the core of Chrono Cross, that’s a largely personal plot to Serge.  As a house key given human form, he’s the essential crux of nearly every major plot movement for 90% of the game.  As a result of this, the kid is lost in an alternate universe that is just similar but different enough that it must surely be maddeningly frustrating, is hunted by an enemy he had no idea existed, loses his body AND is trapped within the body of an evildoer (one which ain’t exactly easy to disguise, either), loses his friends in the process, is finally able to return to his Home World but now in the body of a monster which makes him more alien here than he was in Another World, and when Miguel finally has an opportunity to dump some exposition on him by the truckload, Serge finds out that his father’s disappearance was due to his dad being transformed into Lynx, the villain that had been out to get him all along, meaning that Serge is currently hanging out in his own dad’s body.

Not only that, but the majority of the most important figures in the game have a very strong connection to him.  Lynx is, of course, a strong contender for poster child of Unnecessary Paternal Ties Syndrome, but even if Chrono Cross doesn’t seem to really actually care all that much that the villain is technically the same matter that was the protagonist’s dad, Lynx is still fixated on Serge as the necessary component of his plan.  Kid turns out to have some nebulous and weird tie to him across time and space.  Plot-vomiter Miguel was his dad’s buddy and also has been hanging out in the middle of nowhere and notime for like 15 years specifically so he could spill his lore guts to Serge and almost forget that he had his own kid.  Harle is the only significant person who isn’t stapled onto Serge by destiny, but (for some truly inexplicable reason) she becomes emotionally attached to him as she guides him to Chronopolis.

So yeah, Chrono Cross is a story where nearly every important thing that happens is centered around Serge, and he’s exposed to and undergoes events and situations which have strong personal, emotional relevance to and impact upon him, AND the most important people pushing events forward are all extremely connected to him.  And he isn’t saying a thing about any of it.

Fear from being hunted by an unknown villain?  Confusion and wonder at being in an alternate world?  Existential grappling with interacting with a world in which he died?  Homesick yearning to return to the world he knows and the people he cares about?  Deepening friendship and/or love for his ally Kid?  Personal torment at being trapped within a body not his own, one so radically different and also reviled by most who know it?  Anguish at losing his new friends as they see him only for what’s on the surface, including Kid herself?  Frustration and loss at returning home only to, thanks to his new body, be a greater stranger here than in the other world?  Forming an emotionally meaningful connection with his new ally Harle?  Amazement at discovering that there’s life on other planets, and that it’s goddamn cute as the dickens?  Learning the truth of his father’s disappearance and the reasons for all that has happened to him?  Sorrow at the fate of Miguel?  Squicky weird unsettled feeling at realizing that it’s his own dad’s scratching post and yarn balls he’s been swingin’ around for over half the game now?  Elation at finally retrieving his own form?

Not a word about any of it.  Square created 1 of the most personally-relevant-to-the-protagonist stories in its entire history, and then made that protagonist UNABLE TO ENGAGE WITH IT.

It’s bad enough when Silent Protagonist Link communicates nothing more complicated than a grunt of exertion in any given The Legend of Zelda title, but at least with those, he’s only involved inasmuch as he’s stuck in a vaguely recurring destiny, and the ways in which the plot involves his personal life (such as following his uncle in A Link to the Past, or his lifelong friend Zelda’s being taken in Skyward Sword) are usually surface-level, straightforward “Gotta Go Do Hero Stuff Now” ways.  And it’s bad enough when Silent Protagonist Ryu 2 has nothing more than a few sweat drop sprites to display as a reaction to any part of his personal obligations which move the plot forward for 35% of Breath of Fire 2, but at least the game’s story eventually dissolves into a standard “I’m Just Hero-ing For The Hell Of It Now” situation afterward.  But this?

Imagine if Velvet wasn’t able to voice the rage and pain behind her quest for vengeance, or help Laphicet form his identity as a being through hundreds of conversations.  Imagine if The Nameless One had no lines of complex, brilliant dialogue through which to refine his journey for identity and mortality.  Imagine if Cloud had no more tools through which to communicate his confusion, turmoil, and realizations of his own weaknesses than a few stiff pantomimes.  Imagine if Hawke never showed a reaction to her/his family’s and city’s ever tumultuous fortunes, if Fei could do no more than nod dumbly at the fact that he’s the centerpiece of 6 different absurdly complex world-stakes plots all going on simultaneously in Xenogears, if a story so reliant upon the strong and affectionate bonds between the protagonist and her siblings as Fire Emblem 14’s was restricted by being unable to actually show the interactions between Corrin and said family.

It doesn’t even make sense by Silent Protagonists’ own poor logic, for Nalinivati’s sake.  While a few notably excellent exceptions exist, the whole point of burdening an RPG with a silent protagonist is, traditionally, out of some misguided, functionally pointless, and usually outright wrong idea that it makes the protagonist more relatable to the player.  In spite of the evidence of literal thousands of years of human storytelling,* RPG writers cling to this absurd notion that a blank slate is easier to relate to for a human audience than a protagonist who displays, y’know, actual humanity.  But as we’ve established, Serge’s existence and role in the events of Chrono Cross is anything but a blank slate.  This ain’t some monotonous Dragon Quest hero stumbling through a tofu-only sandwich on processed white bread in narrative form, where conjuring a personality and backstory out of one’s own imagination for him is a desperate act of self-defense by the audience’s mind as it fights to stay conscious.  Serge’s circumstances and history are aggressively unique, stupidly over-complicated, and rely heavily on irrationality.  It doesn’t matter if he’s as speechless as a game industry executive asked to specifically detail how NFTs are going to improve the player’s experience; Serge is not the kind of main character that invites this imaginary scenario of the player relating to the Silent Protagonist.

While far from the game’s worst qualities, the decision to make Serge a gagged spectator to his own story is insane.**  Yeah, it’s possible to pull off a Silent Protagonist who doesn’t lower the quality of an RPG based around their personal story--Severed accomplishes this, as does Transistor, and if my old theory about Frisk is true, you could make an argument that Undertale sort of manages it, too.  But it takes a distinct level of narrative skill and knowledge of exactly what you’re doing to pull something like that off.  Chrono Cross, on the other hand, can’t even handle normal, foundational writing conventions adequately--it sure as hell didn’t need to handicap itself further.

















* Yes I stole this from a Robot Chicken Halo sketch, no I’m not ashamed.


** Insane, but not unexpected.  This IS the game whose writers outsourced 90% of their job to an accent version of Babelfish in terms of the cast.

A fact which, by the way, only worsens the situation with Serge.  Under normal circumstances, the rest of the cast may be able to pick up a bit of a silent protagonist’s slack by interpreting him to the player.  For example, in Wild Arms 1, when Rudy’s true nature is revealed, there’s a moment in which Cecilia admonishes Jack for being too harsh with Rudy, pointing out how scared Rudy looks as evidence that the kid himself didn’t know.  With sprites that were somehow less sophisticated than those of the previous console generation, there was certainly no way we as the audience could have discerned that fact otherwise, but that’s the benefit of an involved and functional surrounding cast--they fill in some of the blanks that the stupid decision to go with a Silent Protagonist create.  Hell, almost the entirety of Transistor’s storytelling is based around this kind of thing.  Transistor aside, it’s not usually a great narrative device, of course--it feels a bit like that stupid thing that shows and cartoons and movies do where someone on the phone just repeats everything they’re being told so the audience can get the necessary information, even though no human in history has ever had a conversation like that.  But it’s better than nothing.

But unfortunately, even that crutch is unavailable to Serge, because the party of Chrono Cross is impersonally distant, have effectively no interactions with the plot as it goes on around them since their reactionary dialogue has to be substance-less enough for the accent system’s purposes, and each member gets essentially 2 very tiny scenes of character development to themselves, most of which don’t have any relevance to the main story.  As a result, we rarely see anyone around Serge engage with him to the point that we could glean any insight whatsoever into his feelings or mental state.

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.

Chrono Cross's Time Shifter

I have not been especially ambiguous regarding my feelings on Chrono Cross. Whether you look at it as an RPG in its own right or as a sequel to Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross is crap, through and through. There is just nothing good I can say about this game, no single characteristic or feature that can be praised.

Well, almost.

In the approaching 10 year history of this rant blog, this is a momentous occasion, because today’s rant is the first time, and unless I’m very much mistaken also the last time, you will hear me say something positive about this game. Yet there is, in fact, 1 feature to Chrono Cross that is laudable. Can you guess which it is?

...If you guessed “the accent system,” I will find you and I will murder you in your sleep.

The answer is the Time Shifter, an oft-forgotten little doohickey that Chrono Cross awards to you after you’ve hated yourself long and hard enough to actually finish the game and start a New Game+. The premise of this key item is simple: with the Time Shifter, you can slow down the game (don’t bother; much like an obnoxious American speaking to a non-English speaker, going slower will not make the garbled mess that is Chrono Cross any more comprehensible) by holding the L2 button, and speed up the game by holding the R2 button.

This is a goddamn fantastic idea.

Let’s get the obligatory joke out of the way up front: blah blah great idea because the faster you can get through this shitty game the better. With that out of the way, though, I have to say, this would be a terrific feature for ANY RPG, if implemented the exact same way.

Look, you know my feelings on RPGs. I’m there for the story, the dialogue, the themes, the emotions, the characters, the humanity, the humor, the drama...you know, all the art of storytelling. To me, the battles, the stat and item management, the puzzles, the exploration, those are almost always just necessary evils I put up with to get to the good stuff.* I’ll tolerate all the time-wasting filler that stretches a 7 - 10 hour story into a 40 - 50 hour game to see a story and its characters through to the end, but the biggest reason I rarely replay an RPG, even a great one, is because it’s too much of a damn time sink to justify seeing the same story a second time, even considering how great that story may be. It’s part of why I so greatly appreciate the idea of your standard New Game+ feature--being able to replay a game with my endgame-leveled characters means cutting a hell of a lot of hours out of the process just for the fact that the fights are that much faster and there’s no need for level-grinding.

So just look at how great a Time Shifter would be as a feature in any other RPG! Any RPG with multiple endings, at the very least, should have such a thing, a device that can let the player fast-forward every battle and go zooming from 1 area to the next as they revisit the game to get its full experience. But even entirely linear RPGs with a single plot path and ending would still benefit to have a device like this for subsequent playthroughs, because it would still up the replay value considerably. If you’ve created an especially excellent story, people WILL want to experience it more than once, so it makes sense to make the process smoother for them.

There’s not much about Chrono Cross that wasn’t awful or intensely uninteresting, but the Time Shifter, at least, was a really good idea in game design, particularly for this story-driven genre, and I really wish it were a standard for the genre, or at least a common element like New Game+ is. Being able to speed up all the game’s filler would make it much more convenient to see an RPG’s multiple paths, it’d make it a lot easier for me to show great games to others, and it’d give the deranged developers of Chrono Cross something they could point to and say, “We actually did contribute something positive to the industry, see?”












* Almost, but not always. Sometimes the exploration of dungeons and other locations can be a subtle part of the storytelling process. A lot of the exploration in the Fallout series, for example, heightens the detail and lore of the game’s setting, which ties to the series’s signature examination of Americana, and I eat that shit up. Likewise, there are some occasions where the battles are tied strongly to the plot’s events and/or characters’ development (like, say, Zidane’s walk of angry existential crisis on Terra in Final Fantasy 9, or most final boss battles), and so are a worthwhile part of the storytelling process. And then there’s Undertale, where the whole battle system is a significant factor in the story and messages of the game.

But, y’know, the other 99.3% of the time, it’s just pointless filler.

Chrono Trigger Theory: Lavos's Emergence in 1999 A.D.

Note: I refer to Lavos as a “he” in this rant. I do this out of habit, and the fact that it’s a lot clearer when writing about “him” than speaking of Lavos as an “it” would be. Also, Lavos is automatically referred to as a “he” by a lot of people and even official sources, including the game itself, to my recollection. Still, I recognize that Lavos is much more accurately an “it” unless actually proven otherwise,* so cut me a break on the nomenclature, alright?



I’ve discussed more than once my love for Chrono Trigger and the many reasons why it’s an excellent specimen of the RPG genre: its story, its creativity, its quirks, its characters, its themes, and so on. 1 thing I’ve never mentioned before, though, is that it’s also a game that allows for its fans to theorize quite a bit, striking that difficult balance of being open and subtle enough for theory, yet never seeming vague or lacking appropriate detail and background in its storytelling. I daresay, in fact, that it was perhaps the first RPG which garnered a significant amount of fan theory attention. Nowadays, it’s nothing unusual to see a lot of fans debate the possibilities and lore of an RPG in forums dedicated to, say, Dragon Age, Fallout, Kingdom Hearts, Pillars of Eternity, Shin Megami Tensei, or even something as light as Borderlands...but back in the day, that sort of heavy intellectual response in the fan community didn’t really happen to a great degree, at least not that I saw. It was Chrono Trigger, in my observations, that got players to really think about an RPG’s lore potential for the first time in such a way as is commonplace now. I remember Icy Brian’s RPG page, which you might say was my internet place of birth, as a hub for all kinds of theories and ideas on Chrono Trigger (and other games, but CT was the sun around which the other games seemed to orbit), pursued in forum discussions, fanart, and, of course, especially fanfiction. Icy’s has sadly been defunct for quite some time now, but The Chrono Compendium is still a pretty fun place for Chrono Trigger nerds like myself to occasionally waste a couple hours reading up on theories, so the old game’s still got a community out there posing questions to itself and coming up with answers, and that’s kind of fun.

One of the many questions apparently still somewhat debated at the Chrono Compendium is just why Lavos was so damn ornery when he busted out of the ground in 1999 A.D.** Well, they have their theories, and I’ve got mine, and theirs and mine don’t reconcile too well, so hell, why not make a rant about my thoughts on the matter, right?

Oh, stop complaining. At least it’s not another DLC rant that’s over 10 years past its expiration date.

So, the answer given at Chrono Compendium about why Lavos destroyed the world in 1999 A.D. is, primarily, that the level of technology was probably approaching the point where it could be a threat to him, and he sensed this and decided to eliminate the problem of humanity before it could become dangerous to him.

The problem I have with this theory is that it assumes a few things that don’t stand up so well, at least not in my eyes. The first is that the level of technology really was getting anywhere near the point where it was dangerous to Lavos. It’s not impossible that this is true, but one has to look objectively at just how unimaginably advanced that technology would have to be to become a clear threat to him. Lavos is a creature that survived a global-extinction-level event, who in fact was at its ground zero: namely, his own arrival on the planet. He lands on the CT world with enough force to create an impact explosion of such magnitude that it leads to an ice age, much like the theoretical extinction event of our own world that wiped out the dinosaurs. The majority of Lavos’s outer shell is, therefore, able to tank an explosion that makes nuclear warheads look like those little toy bang pouches that kids throw on the ground to make a loud snap. Offensively, Lavos is capable of raining nuclear-level devastation across the globe in a matter of seconds with his spines, and the force and structural integrity of those spines is such that they can actually tear through...how thick was the landmass of Zeal? It certainly looks like the kingdom’s floating foundation is several miles deep. Lavos’s spines sliced straight through that solid rock. To say nothing of the sheer magical and dimensional power Lavos wields--his very presence is so powerful that it warps space and time. So tell me, exactly what insane level of technological sophistication would human society have to be close to reaching in order to threaten a creature with this level of invulnerability and widespread lethality, who exists in a form of radiating power so beyond comprehension that it disrupts the fabric of reality itself?

Yes, you can argue that the head of Lavos seems to be a weak spot, which Crono and company exploit, but even that weak spot is certainly insanely dangerous, and Crono and his gang are only able to actually reach Lavos to exploit this weakness because they have a time portal that leads to the exact place and moment in time in which Lavos emerges. The window of time to reach Lavos before he can fire off his world-ending spine salvo is less than a minute--without instantaneous time and space travel, how could the people of the world possibly create an offense that would reach Lavos’s head in time? It’s not even like Lavos’s movements can be anticipated if you could somehow track him in the earth--from all evidence, he moves fast enough when he’s emerging that it only takes a minute or so for him to surface. You could have an army stationed exactly where he’s coming out and still not have enough time for them to react to stop him once he’s ready to do his thing.

You can also argue that the Epoch is able to penetrate Lavos’s shell somehow (probably through the head area, but we can’t say for sure), so clearly it IS possible to construct something that can do so. Well, I would point out that the Epoch is an implement fashioned from more than just 1999 A.D.’s technology. Belthasaur, its creator, is one of the former gurus of Zeal. He doesn’t just have access to all the records of science left from 1999 A.D. He also possesses the incredibly vast knowledge of magic and reality-altering powers of the Kingdom of Zeal, and the Epoch is a combination of these two heights of knowledge, plus his own considerable intellect (he’s the Guru of Reason, after all). The knowledge of Zeal is completely lost to the world after its fall, to the point that by 600 A.D. (and probably considerably earlier than that), it’s not even known to the world that it ever existed. And by 1000 A.D., magic itself seems practically unknown, certainly not possessed by humans. The Epoch may be able to penetrate Lavos’s shell, but it is an amalgamation of technology with arcane arts that the people of the future would never be able to duplicate. Whatever technology the future people of the world were going to create, it wasn’t going to be the Epoch, so we’re left once again with a daunting question of what level of technology they could have been headed for which would threaten Lavos.

Another problem with this idea is that it depends on Lavos even caring whether human technology is powerful enough to threaten him, assuming that it ever could be. Even if the world could pose a threat, Lavos is a secret buried within the planet. How would the people of the world even known to focus their aggression on him to start with? By 1999 A.D., Lavos hasn’t done anything for almost 1,400 years. The last time he did anything was in 600 A.D., when Magus summoned him in a failed attempt to destroy him. And even then, pretty much no one in the world even knew about that, just Ozzie and maybe his cohorts. I suppose somehow there must be SOME record of Lavos’s existence in 1999 A.D., since that director guy speaks his name during the game over sequence, but that doesn’t tell us enough to safely extrapolate anything. Is Lavos a known entity by the governments of the world? Does the director just have some ancient knowledge passed down to him from his ancestors? Is he naming his destroyer and coincidentally giving it the same title that Ayla did billions of years before? Who knows? Whatever the case, even assuming that the people of the world do somehow know about Lavos’s existence, they hadn’t attacked him and we’re given no indication that they meant to, and frankly I don’t know exactly what kind of attack they could have mounted anyway, had he stayed buried where he was.

One more thing about this theory I don’t like is Lavos’s being able to determine an upcoming threat to begin with. Now, I actually don’t have a problem with Lavos’s being able to monitor technology. We see in the battle between his head and Crono’s team that Lavos can incorporate technology into himself just as much as he can organic creatures: of the many bosses he mimics, the Dragon Tank and the robotic guardians of the future are actually the first. Lavos seems as able to adopt technological blueprints as he is biological ones, so he must be able to somehow sense technology. But being able to sense it and incorporate it is different from being able to make judgment calls on when it’s too close to being dangerous to him. That requires a level of intelligence that we just don’t have any reason to think Lavos possesses. From all the clues that Chrono Trigger gives us, even including the lore from the remake and from that shitty sequel, Lavos could be sentient, but he could also be acting on nothing more than animal instinct. The most we have to go on is the newer game’s information that indicates that Lavos has felt rage and a desire for revenge...but animals are quite capable of feeling the emotion of anger, and frankly, we think of revenge as a concept born of intelligent understanding of emotion, but when you get right down to it, it can and often is just an instinct born of anger, so that’s really no proof, either. So in order for the theory that Lavos can anticipate levels of technology dangerous to himself to be true, you have to assume that an entirely different theory that is equally debatable is also true.

Last problem with this theory: it’s saying that Lavos was judging a potential threat from human technology in the future, and attacking in advance...yet the Kingdom of Zeal was actively using his power for their own purposes, AND were able to directly interact with him in the Ocean Palace, with the intent of controlling him. Yet Lavos only punished them for this once they had actually made their move on him! Where was this foresight then? He can anticipate a problem from a populace that’s doing absolutely nothing to him, yet a populace that’s actively feeding off him decides it wants to control him and he doesn’t lift a spiny finger until they actually go and do it? Assuming Lavos even was the one calling the shots at that point--for all we know, Queen Zeal the power-hungry psychopath was controlling Lavos at that point, and it was her idea to blast her kingdom to rubble, and he didn’t even make that decision. She clearly didn’t care for it whatsoever, so it’s not at all unlikely.

...This rant is becoming a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. Oh well, on we go.

The Chrono Compendium has one more theory to share on Lavos’s actions in 1999 A.D. under this first one that I’ve been attacking. The gist of this one is that Lavos emerges in 1999 A.D. as per a standard part of its life cycle: he’s ready to create his spawn, and he’s had 65 billion years’ worth of eating evolution so he’s probably full and doesn’t need the creatures on the surface any more, so he bursts forth to clear the planet of any potential threats to his kids (who are far less invulnerable and deadly than he is), and competitors for resources they might need.

This is a much better theory. First of all, it bases itself in known facts instead of “probably” and other unproven theories. It’s a fact that Lavos eats evolution (how he does this is, of course, considerably less clear). It’s a fact that Lavos did create spawn, as they are seen at Death Mountain in 2300 A.D., and the only reasonable recourse is to assume that he spawned after his emergence in 1999 A.D., since we don’t see Lavos Spawn any time prior to the future*** and it doesn’t seem feasible that they’d be kicking around on the surface without humanity wigging the fuck out about it. This theory does not require Lavos to be sentient, nor does it require him not to be, so it does not have to stand on top of another unproven theory. The theory is also considerably more sensible as a whole: it’s a lot more believable that Lavos would eliminate humanity because it was a threat to his children than because it was a threat to him.

In fact, I don’t really have any argument to make against this theory. It’s solid. I will, however, provide an alternate idea that I think is roughly as reasonable.

Part A: My theory begins with a question: what is the defining knowledge we have about the being known as Lavos? We know several things about what he does--the fact that he comes from space, the fact that he is so powerful that he tears holes in space-time, the fact that he can and does destroy continents and even the entire world, the fact that he creates spawn, and so on. But there is only a single, vital knowledge we have of Lavos that strikes at the core of what he is. The whats, we have lots of those, but the why, that is what matters most in understanding everything else. And that knowledge is this: we know that Lavos devours evolution. How, we do not know. What specific aspect of evolution, we do not know. All we know for sure is that Lavos’s overall behavior is significantly tied to a thirst for the mutation of life. All beyond that is a mystery. That is all we have on Lavos’s motivations, and so that is what I work with.

The theory of a natural life cycle including worldwide devastation to create a suitable playpen is a good one, as I say. It’s sensible and it fits with physical evidence. But it does still suppose a motivation that we do not have official confirmation of: an instinct (or conscious choice) of parental obligation. That theory makes the (reasonable) request that we suppose a theoretical motivation.

But mine does not. Here is my theory: Lavos erupts in 1999 A.D. and destroys the world because the world no longer provides him enough evolution for his purposes.

Part B: In 1999 A.D., human civilization is at the strongest it has ever been, save for the Kingdom of Zeal (and I’ll cover that in a second). Further, its strength lies in civilization and technology, as does our own. The Chrono Trigger world intentionally mirrors our own in several respects (dinosaurs in prehistoric times being wiped out by an extinction event, an ice age that followed, a medieval-styled era, etc), and so it’s reasonable to expect that their civilization advances in a roughly similar fashion as our own does. We conquer and expand in our own world using the power of community and knowledge, and from what we can see, this seems to occur with the civilization of CT.

Well, here’s the thing about our own world: our reckless expansion and complete disregard for nature has devastated the life diversity of the planet. It is a scientific fact that we are in the early stages of a major extinction event in our world, with entire species dying out on a daily basis. Our pollution, our wastefulness, they have doomed our civilization, and we’re pulling down every other species with us. While evolution still works to keep some species kicking--gotta love those super bacteria we’ve been creating with antibiotic overuse--there’s nonetheless an increasingly smaller pool of diverse organisms for evolution to work with.

Even assuming that the people of Chrono Trigger’s 1999 A.D. were not so incomprehensibly stupid as to send their own climate into utter chaos, an expanding, technological civilization that in any way resembles our own is still actively altering the life diversity of its planet. By changing more and more environments into ones suited for human beings, fewer and fewer creatures and plants can exist which do not have the physical and behavioral adaptations that can survive in human-manipulated environments. As human civilization in CT advances, it is reasonable to expect less species diversity as fewer diverse, non-human-manipulated environments exist, and with fewer species to play with and fewer diverse environments to be adapted to, there is less evolution.

We can even see this, sort of, in CT’s world. In 600 A.D., there are many areas through which Crono and his friends travel, and in these places there are often many monsters taking many different forms. 400 years later, however, with civilization having advanced considerably further, we see very few areas with monsters in them, and a more limited diversity of monsters within those areas. Already diversity is lessening.****

Now, you can say that the civilization of Zeal was as successful, if not more so, as the folks of 1999 A.D., and the planet had even less diversity going on at that point, being all covered in ice. Good point. The difference there, though, is that Zeal wasn’t messing with the surface of the planet to any great extent, so for the most part, what few opportunities for evolution were there wouldn’t be hindered by Zeal. Also, the ice age is, we can assume, beyond Lavos’s ability to influence. His arrival is what initiated it, but he's not Takeshi Kitano; it’s not like he can just torpedo the wind patterns of the world. It’s not a situation which he could change to suit his hunger, unlike the situation of 1999 A.D. which I have described.

You can also point out that this theory might need to imply a level of intelligence that I’ve mentioned we have no idea whether or not Lavos possesses. I would counter, however, that estimating the direction of technology is a much, much different thing for Lavos than estimating a current level of evolution. It takes much more intelligence to anticipate an impending situation than it does to assess a current one. We know for a fact that Lavos feeds on evolution, while his relationship with technology is nebulous--clearly he cannot be entirely unaware of it, as he incorporates it into his defensive behaviors, but beyond that we cannot say what his relationship to it is. It would be well within the behavior patterns of a non-self-aware creature to recognize a dwindling food source, and Lavos’s solution to this problem (blow everything the fuck up) is, for him at least, a pretty simple behavior algorithm: surface, shoot spines everywhere, dig back down. Ants have more complex instincts than that. Recognizing a current situation regarding its one food source and taking a simple action can be the act of a sentient or non sentient organism--anticipating the development of a form of intelligent culture is another story.

Alternate Part B: Lavos’s decision to emerge and rustle up some grub could tie back to that second theory on the Chrono Compendium page. Maybe the evolution of the world wasn’t slowing, as I’ve theorized, but Lavos was getting ready to spawn, and as such he needed to intake a lot more evolution than before, and/or needed to create an evolution-rich environment for his newborn children to feed well within. As I’ve stated, we know that Lavos has children in 2300 A.D., we can only reasonably assume they weren’t present before 1999 A.D., and an educated guess would say they eat evolution, too (it ain’t like it’s a solid food or something). What’s enough evolution for one Lavos throughout history may not be enough for a Lavos close to giving birth, and is even less likely to be enough for a Lavos AND its litter of hellspawn. And the side benefit, of course, is that raining spiky nukes on the world also makes for a lot fewer threats to his kids. In fact, in this possible scenario, my theory isn’t different from the better one on the Chrono Compendium so much as it is an expansion of it. Well, that works for me, so onward to the next part.

Part C: But why would he rain destruction on the world of 1999 A.D. over a case of the evolutionary munchies? Surely destroying the majority of the world’s life in a single go isn’t going to help the situation? Ahhh, but it does. Observe the evidence of 2300 A.D. What do you see? Destroyed cities, robots running amok, humans dying out, grotesque and bizarre mutants everywhere, debris everywhere, Artificial Intelligences seeking to--

Oh wait, hang on. Back up a couple of examples. Did somebody say mutants?

Yeah, 2300 A.D. is lousy with weird, freakish monstrosities. Even the occasional “normal” creatures, like rats and frog monsters, may have evolved the ability to speak and reason. And you know how mutants come about? Evolution. And by the looks of these freaks, evolution must’ve been going at it like there was no tomorrow (which there sort of wasn’t). Lavos’s purge may have wiped out a hell of a lot of life, but what was there was left with a twisted, dire, extreme environment that required a hell of a lot of changes to adapt to. As evidenced by the state of life forms in 2300 A.D., Lavos’s eruption in 1999 A.D. led directly to an enormous, not to mention extremely rapid, explosion of evolution. 300 years of evolution is usually, what, a slightly longer beak? A different fur pattern? A new toe, if you’re super lucky? Lavos’s armageddon gave him a BUFFET of evolution to devour.

So that’s my theory. You can decide which of the middle scenarios I’ve envisioned you like the better. Or maybe you can come up with one yourself. But you do have the beginning fact that Lavos eats evolution, and you do have the ending fact that 2300 A.D. is inhabited by grotesque mutants that evolved because of an environment Lavos created, and that their evolution happened in extremes of magnitude and speed. Fill in the middle how you like, but when a creature feeds on evolution, and creates a scenario resulting in a relatively immediate explosion of evolution, chances are pretty good that those 2 facts are related.

...Man, look at the size of this rant. You know, when I started this, I set out to make something simple in an efficient amount of time...you’d never guess I’m from Massachusetts, huh?














* This is not an invitation for Lavos Rule 34 links.


** And in 1200 B.C., too, but I should think that’s a lot simpler to answer: his awakening in 1200 B.C. was caused by a kingdom trying to directly control his power, and upon that awakening he was immediately attacked (remember, even in the pre-game timeline without Crono and company’s interference, it’s relatively safe to say that Magus was still present to make his own attack on Lavos). Seems pretty likely that Lavos’s attack on the Kingdom of Zeal was a retaliation against that aggression.


*** The Lavos Spawn seen in the Black Omen really can’t count. It’s clear that the Black Omen exists as an anomaly in time, and pretty much everything within it is separated from the regular dimension and time of CT’s reality.


**** I’m aware that it is highly unlikely that this was intentional by the creators of the game. From their perspective, there’s just fewer monsters because there aren’t many quest areas in 1000 A.D. Doesn’t change what’s there, though, intentional or not.