Radical Dreamers
Time for the last card I've designed for the Chrono Trigger Magic set.
The art is by Licawolf, found over at the Chrono Compendium. I liked the designs in this piece.
Might there be more? Sure. If there's anything you'd like to see, I'm happy to try and figure it out. I might also do some more retro border versions of some of the other cards.
But for now, it's the end!
The next step is redoing these in Card Conjurer for images with a much higher resolution, as well as updating the Imgur page.
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2022 Game of the Year
1. Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition
Square Enix
Nintendo Switch, 2022 (orig. 1999, 1996)
The rumors were circulating for a while, and I honestly didn’t believe that there would ever be a remaster of Chrono Cross. So it was a huge shock to me when it finally, truly came to fruition. I got it on day one, and even ordered the physical version from Play-Asia for the collection. The cover for the Switch version beats the socks off the original PS1 release, imho. Not that the PS1 version is bad, I just think they really outdid themselves with the new art.
Chrono Cross is a masterpiece, and the remaster is giving tons of new people the chance to play it, while keeping true to the original. Character art has been updated, with everyone getting a glow up that stays true to their original design.
3D models also got an upgrade, while still keeping all the original animations and movements. They look clean, bright, and vivid. I was thrilled to see that they kept the original PS1 feel, but made everything clearer. It’s a hard thing to do and many developers feel the need to make something that breaks too far from the original, but Chrono Cross stayed true.
One thing I was most worried about was the background art. Chrono Cross went with an impressionist style when drawing many of the backgrounds, which gave each location a timeless feel. I never cared for impressionist art before playing this game, and I have come to really like it because it is meant to be imprecise and left up to interpretation. As such, it has a sort of timelessness that isn’t tied to the inevitable aging of graphics. However, simple upscaling can give harsh lines where perhaps none existed. There are a few backgrounds in the remaster that suffer this fate, but I find them so few and far-between that it did not affect me in the slightest. Probably the only example I can find of one that stood out was how the railings of the exterior of Fort Dragonia look a little jagged in the remaster. Everything else was very satisfying.
Other backgrounds go full-on sci-fi pulp novel and it’s honestly breathtaking. I showed this one to a coworker and he actually gasped. It sounds a bit goofy, and he’s not a video game fan, but he loves old pulp novels and he thought it was perfect.
I can’t say too much about the combat that hasn’t already been said. I like the element system with its levels and single-use spells. I like the customization. I like the tiers of attack strengths. And I love the animations. It’s a great battle system, with really the only downside being that maybe it’s a bit easy, especially in New Game+.
The cast of characters is unwieldy and some suffer because of it, with very little development for them. However, you can mostly overlook adding characters to your party, should you choose to do so. There are a few tied directly to the storyline, and you’ll have to use them, so you’ll never be short on characters. Additionally, you can seek out lots of characters just for fun. My personal favorites are Starky, Razzly, Kid, and Harle.
The soundtrack is possibly the best in video game history. From the heart-racing punch of Time’s Scar in the opening sequence (the one single thing that originally interested me in the game), to the smooth, comforting tunes of Arni Village and the sunny, relaxing bounce of Home World, Chrono Cross sets the tone of the early game very well. Your carefree existence will inevitably change as you begin the story, and each new area has a perfectly matched song to go with it. Ghost Ship. Hydra Marshes. Chronopolis. The songs alone will clue you in to what each world looks like and feels like. Finally, the credits song, sometimes called Radical Dreamers and sometimes called Unstolen Jewel, can still bring a tear to my eye even after years of listening to it on repeat. This is a perfect soundtrack. Only one game even comes close in my mind, and composer Yasunori Mitsuda also worked on that one.
Finally, this special edition of Chrono Cross comes with the Japan only game that eventually became Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers. It’s a text-based adventure game that shares a few characters with its eventual final version, as well as a few locations and songs. I think I prefer the final versions of all of the songs, but it’s great to hear them in their Super Famicom, proto-versions. It’s hard to really rate this game because it was essentially just a DLC game available exclusively on the Satellaview, an Internet-enabled Super Famicom add-on (yes, in the mid-90s), but for what it is, it is filled with charm. Kid is at her snarky, thieving best in this game and it’s definitely a must play if you enjoy Chrono Cross.
Chrono Cross was the game that won me over to JRPGs as a genre; I still remember @boner-taunt in disbelief when I told him I was playing it. Replaying it in glorious HD was the highlight of my video game experience in 2022.
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Chrono Cross Explained
There are something I can talk about for hours because I love talking about them - Majora's Mask, Evangelion, One Piece, and Chrono Cross. I love the needlessly complex story of Chrono Cross, and I get the feeling that most people DON'T get it.
So, he's the MAIN PLOT of Chrono Cross explained. (SPOILERS, obviously)
Despite what some people might tell you, YES, Chrono Cross is a sequel to Chrono Trigger, and and it is intertwined with the original, and there's an explanation why it feels so disconnected. It starts, like all great stories do, at the beginning:
Lavos crashes into the Earth in 65 Million years BC.
Lavos is a unique creature that I theorize exists outside of normal space. What we see in both Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross is just a “shadow” of its real body outside of our dimension.
So, when it arrives, sensing there was a possibility of defeat, Lavos decided to create a back up plan. It used its power over time to drag a copy of itself from the far future into the past. That "Shard of Lavos" was known as the Frozen Flame and was located in a super advanced city known as Chronopolis. Lavos had brought the entire city back in time with the "Shard of Lavos." This way, if the original Lavos was destroyed, the Frozen Flame would be its back up.
Coincidentally, “The Entity” (The spirit of the The Planet) sensed something was wrong, so it was able to open up its own timewarp, and drag another super advanced race to destroy Chronopolis and the "Frozen Flame" and from a timeline where Reptites ruled.
The time displaced people of both cities, didn't get what was going on at first, so they went to war with each other. Ultimately, Chronopolis wins, and they figure out what happened.
The scientist at Chronoplis realize they need to preserve the timeline so they create a plan. They decide to terraform the area, and jut blend in like they were always there. I mean its 12000 BC, no one's gonna know they weren't there before. So, they create a bunch of islands, El Nido Archipelago, and brainwash all of their own citizens to forget about the future.
And they can do that because Chronopolis contains a super advanced computer called FATE, that can run the city by itself, and it constantly mind controls people by using the Save Points scattered. And they hid the city behind a high cliff, strong sea currents, and storms, to keep people away. The Brainwashing keeps the people from wanting to go to the mainland of CT where they could potentially alter the timeline.
Sidenote: When they fought Dinopolis, it had a super weapon called the Dragon God. It was divided into six weaker Dragons by the scientists of Chronopolis and this became part of Lavos's plan, too. If he ever needed an emergency power-up, he could reassemble the Dragon God, and add himself to it, to make a substitute body, because when he was reduced to a "shard" he was relatively vulnerable. That comes into play at the very end.
So, the main idea was the no one is supposed to mess with the timeline of Chrono Trigger, but no one realized Lavos had created his backup plan in El Nido. But, there was another actor that neither Lavos or anyone else considered - Schala.
Schala had disappeared into the time stream during the events of Chrono Trigger and had ended up with the REAL Lavos.
Remember that Lavos is a creature that exists outside of regular space. Both the Lavos from CT and the "Frozen Flame" from CC are just "shadows" of the real creature that exists between dimension / timelines.
Schala was able to do two things... she created a clone of herself which would become "Kid," and she caused a MASSIVE electrical storm that for one night opened up Chronopolis. Coincidentally, on that night, Serge and his father end up inside Chronopolis, and long story short, Serge unknowingly becomes only person able to use the computers at Chronopolis, and FATE doesn't realize this until the next day.
FATE needs to get control back because suddenly the brainwashing is turned off, and who knows how that could affect the timeline. FATE starts its own plan to switch bodies with Serge to regain control, this is why he's acting as Lynx and searching for the Dragon's Tear.
Unknown to them, the Frozen Flame realizes that the body from Chrono Trigger is already destroyed, so it wants to reassemble the Dragon God, to be at full power and destroy these people that tried to destroy it. To do this, during the night of the storm, a secret agent was also born, Harley the "7th Dragon."
Haley is pretending to be an ally of Lynx, hoping to obtain the Frozen Flame, and get it to the dragons to unleash Lavos's revenge.
So, that's what's going on as you play through Chrono Cross. In the end, the only way to really kill Lavos is to destroy the real body in between dimensions. So, in the final battle, you gotta use the Chrono Cross to collapse the dimensions.
Finally, I still don't know why that works.
Also, how exactly did Schala set this up? The only explanation would be that she became able to see the multiple timelines, and realized the best chance to finally end Lavos was her complicated gamble.
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