I say the pen is the greatest human invention which allowed science to flourish but who cares?
Not that long ago I replayed the classic super famicom/snes game “Chrono Trigger” and found that it had held up pretty well over the years. Yes the game is 13 years old now and it’s still a good RPG. It might be my favorite game of all time. Might be. I’m not going to say it’s the best game of all time, that’s bullshit. But it is one of the better rpgs of all time, and possibly the best game available on the system it was on.
So going through some things the other day I came across my copy of “Chrono Cross” which is more or less the sequel to Chrono Trigger. For those not familiar with either game, the basic premise of Chrono Trigger (hereby CT) was saving the by traveling through time. The basic premise of Chrono Cross (hereby CC) on the other hand is saving the world by traveling between two parallel worlds. I think they said “dimensions” in the game but you know…
Anyway, of all things even though it came out almost 5 years after the first game (a third game is nowhere in sight) I don’t think that CC has aged as well. I attribute this mostly to how horrid the original Playstation is. The game looks awful. CT won’t wow you with its graphics now but it looks OK. The load times suck, there’s slowdown, all that kind of crap.
Now the interesting thing about CC compared to CT is that it’s a lot more dynamic and there are a lot more characters (43 compared to 7). Character development is questionable but to be fair it was in CT as well. The thing that CC does, keeping in with its two world dynamic, is that for the most part there are two ways to go about anything. Early in the game you have 3 choices of how to get into viper manor but most of the other times just give you two choices. Ultimately you’re in the same places doing the same things, but with different characters and for different reasons.
Now that’s a game. In fact those kinds of options are what I was talking about in my last post about games. You feel more like you’re playing a game when you’re actually making meaningful decisions about what’s going on, when the outcome can actually change. On the other hand in a really straight forward role playing game like oh… Final Fantasy X, the experience is closer to watching a movie than playing a game.
So about the gameplay, CC uses kind of an interesting battle system which combines various concepts from various games and introduces a few new ones. Some of them have not been re-used or emulated to this point that I’m aware of. I was going to say that the “field element” system, in which you use an ability and that element builds up in the battle, hasn’t been used since but I realized that’s not true. It hasn’t been used exactly in that form, and it’s not necessarily always paired with a concept of “elemental properties”, but it has been used. Only being able to use a particular ability/spell once per battle unless you equip multiple instances of it is sort of interesting too. It doesn’t necessarily make any sense, but at least it introduces an element of strategy that isn’t too oppressive (as compared to like Shin Megami Tensei Digital Devil Saga Avatar Tuner (1+2) where you are constantly shuffling around your equipped abilities and have to do things just so to succeed at times). I’m not sure that I’m a big fan of the attack system, it’s kind of time consuming. I’m also torn as to whether or not I like the necessity of connecting with attacks to charge up energy to use abilities. I’d much rather just level the enemy with one move. But again it adds an extra dimension of strategy to the game’s battles.
The other thing it has you doing that I like, which is actually the oldest of old-school, is actually using items to interact with other characters. Most of the time you’ll select things and nothing will happen, or there will be little point to the responses you get, but it shows good attention to detail. Which is really the hallmark of a great game, and which a lot of games these days are lacking as they’ve slowly become less like games and more like movies where you are moving the main character. I’m especially talking about RPGs here since that’s mostly what I play but it applies somewhat to other games as well.
fuu so anyway, aside from technical limitations which are really glaring 8 years later I would say that the plot of CC is the weak link. Or maybe the plot execution anyway. The game is somewhat confusing, and a lot of the things that go on are questionable at best. Character development is also rather limited, for the most part the various characters that join up and stay with you do so with no true motivation after you give them something or go look for something with them. And at that rate the characters are pretty much interchangeable which has been a continuous knock against Square (now Square Enix) games. Of course the flip-side of interchangeability is customization. Almost any character can use almost any elemental ability as opposed to the traditional fire hero or water mage archetypes. Exceptions are, if I remember correctly, some of the more powerful spells being only equipable by characters of the same element. There are variations in character stats that make you more inclined to focus on attacking as opposed to casting elements or vice versa with some characters. But for the most part those end out being pretty trivial in the end too. Ah speaking of stats, I am not a big fan of the… well lack of a level up system. Sometimes some of your stats rise after some battles and you’re never given an indication as to whether fighting will or won’t increase your stats. After every “boss” fight you will get a star and your stats will increase, after that point you can count on at least getting some more HP if you battle. But it’s debatable how worth it is to “level”. Again the flip side of this is that you can pretty much go straight through the game without leveling, which is annoying but at the same time that’s what makes an RPG rather than an action or adventure game. I suppose there’s no real reason why that must be the case.
Perhaps I should muse on the validity of the experience system in rpgs some other time though and finish this. Well CC is a game that’s generally well regarded, but I’ve never known anyone to say it’s better than CT or that they prefer it to CT. When top 10 games or rpgs come up, I never see CC on the list. To this date CT characters will pop up in popularity polls, but I’ve never seen that with CC. I could go on, probably, but I think you get my point. CC is a good game, it’s probably close to being a great game, but it just doesn’t quite have the same character as CT did.
One last note: CC has a “new game+” system like CT did. I am an advocate of this kind of system in games with multiple endings by the way, CT was the first game I can think of that made use of it and it’s arguably the most emulated characteristic of that game. For the most part it’s the endings you can see in new game+ that develop the plot of various characters, or frankly give any kind of ending to these characters. But considering how many characters there were, I think there should have been more endings, or at least all of the characters should have been represented in an ending. Probably getting them all wouldn’t have been worth it if there was actually an ending per character, which is how I felt about the ridiculous amount of variations on the ending present in Star Ocean 2 (there was a trick to doing it in star ocean 3 that meant you only really had to play through the game twice though so I did it in that game), but the difference is that the characters in SO2 were developed in the course of the game. Most games don’t have that many characters for a reason. Hell most fiction doesn’t. I think that games give you the best medium for fully representing characters but most productions don’t take advantage of that.
Well anyway, it’s debatable how much point there is to writing about an 8 year old game. I think that games are in a uniquely bad position as far as the passage of time goes. Game systems will keep working for a really long time, all of mine still do as far as I know, the media that games are on will hold up for a long time if properly taken care of (I think that disc games are pretty fragile and most people get them all scratched up but if you don’t they’re fine) as well. However games are only available for a relatively limited amount of time, produced in comparatively small runs. The works of Shakespeare have been around over 400 years, you could go out and get them in almost any country of the world at your whim. Conversely Persona 3 was available for a matter of months. There was a fairly wide window (game wise) for Chrono Cross since it had a large enough initial release and was later re-released at a reduced price. I want to say that you had a matter of years to get a copy new if you wanted one. Of course the other problem is that as technology advances it becomes harder and harder to justify playing old games. This has more to do with overall presentation than visuals. The era of CD games stands out the weakest to me, even more so than the first generation of video games back in the 70s. Those games just suck compared to what’s available now, cd games and systems actually perform really poorly. Perhaps by the time the PS4 comes out I’ll think the same thing about PS2 games and the dvd era but I am not as sure about that. I’m still waiting for them to be able to make computers that don’t require ridiculously loud fans. Which of course will translate to game systems that don’t make noise, again. Or failing them not making noise, (which is impossible as long as you have moving parts, which comparing storage capacity of flash memory to optical media is somewhat unlikely) making them with some kind of noise insulation. I mean really. Shit.
The Sky Before Dawn 