@hunkulese said:

Not for me.

@slag:

What? Kingdom Hearts is amazing, and I will fight you over that.

I don't really even like the current Square-Enix team even making RPGs, so I'd love for them to stay away from my favorite game of all time. They already failed the first time they tried.

IDK. I thoroughly enjoyed the Bravely Default demo. Impatiently waiting for the full release on Feb 7. It's like they got together and said "Guys let's make a game like those GOOD Final Fantasies from back in the day."

XIII It's ins't that bad, but it's not exactly that good either... VI is still amazing to this day, better than XIII.

Absolutely not. Give me a sequel to Chrono Cross or I don't want it. Enough of this Chrono Trigger 2 bullshit.

That statement? What? How? That would literally be the worst thing to ever happen to video games.

No hyperbole.

@zeik said:

Are you saying you like Chrono Cross better, or are you just saying that you'd prefer they didn't ignore it? Cause I certainly agree with the latter, not that I love Chrono Cross or anything, but to me it's certainly not the travesty some people seem to make it out to be. I only like the idea of a Chrono Trigger 2 in terms of gameplay, because the battle system in that game was miles above the one in CC.

I was going to disagree about it being the "worst", but you're probably right. If Final Fantasy ended up as the last "proper" JRPG series in existence I'd probably quit gaming then and there.

Not that I'm opposed to the question, but I feel like you may as well have said, "in light of Capcom releasing Ace Attorney..."

Both, but more the latter. I accept that most people prefer Trigger, and if they chose to make the next Chrono game more of a spiritual successor to Trigger I would probably be okay with that. But this whole idea of trying to retcon Chrono Cross out of existence so they can make the sequel to Trigger that people think they want is retarded.

Agreed!

@video_game_king:

didn't say it was bad duder (although admittedly I'm not a fan of how off the rails it got off after the first game), just that Chrono series is better.

@slag:

How can Chrono Trigger compete with a duck wizard who gives kids the power of fire? Or a space whale whose ass connects to its mouth?

I'm with you brother I would love a sequel to Chrono Cross, or some kind of Chrono project in general. "Chrono Trigger 2" has been made, or at least an indirect sequel, it's called Chrono Cross baby.

@davidwitten22: Well, I'm not exactly sure how party system Dark Souls would work but you could probably do it, but certainly the best JRPG is very similar to Dark Souls and the 2nd best JRPG controls somewhat similarly to Dark Souls. Everything should be Dark Souls. Or even Demon's Souls if you prefer. Unless you can jam it into an emulator and speed it up to 500% (the Chrono Cross approach if you will, the best NG+ mechanic of all time) the old style of JRPG design needs to change badly, except for FF which consistently puts out good gameplay, other JRPGs do a lot of things well but usually the gameplay is just a little bit slow, like you know molasses. I am open to games like The Last Remnant though, but that game's pretty damn hard too. If it's hard, yet divergent from Dark Souls it is an acceptable compromise.

Hell yeah! I thought I was the only one who loved that.

@video_game_king:

A Frog who is a knight, Robo Roll, Time Travel , 13 endings

And the combat is better.

@fredchuckdave: I don't think I could possibly disagree more with the notion that Final Fantasy is the only JRPG series with good combat. I probably wouldn't even put it in the top 10.

If this thread has devolved into a debate between which is better Chrono Cross or Chrono Trigger, I will side with Chrono Cross. Loved them both to death, but Chrono Cross has my heart.

We only wish that this was the case because the way it ties into Chrono Trigger is so hamfisted and horrible in its execution. The plot points it asks us to accept in that regard are ludicrous.

@zeik: Name 10 other JRPG series with better combat than Final Fantasy, feel free to ask Brad for help.

@zeik: It's the only series with good, fresh combat as a whole, like Suikoden V has a really good secondary battle system and Vagrant Story runs circles around every game ever in terms of sound, challenging design (with VP2 not being overly far behind). There's plenty of really easy enjoyable JRPGs out there like any Level 5 game or the Tales games; but I'm sort of looking for a balance of challenge and something new every time out. If you look at Suikoden I-V across the board the core gameplay changes very little between each game, the Tales games have very similar battle systems, but each Final Fantasy main entry is substantially different from the last. Final Fantasy might not shine on the story front except for Tactics and half of VI but the gameplay is always top of the line. I can go through any random JRPG and die like once or twice, and it takes 40-80 hours so doing, but I'm sure as hell not doing that because of the mind numbing gameplay. Dragon Quest's gameplay is terrible, even VIII the golden goose only good game in the whole series. Even an extremely solid battle system like Star Ocean is still largely identical game to game. Shadow Hearts is enjoyable but too easy and again similar from game to game.

Every tactics game ever is a derivative of Tactics Ogre.

That doesn't mean we need Chrono Trigger 2. I'd be happier if the next Chrono game didn't have any connections to either game than trying to force a sequel out of some misguided notion of fixing a mistake.

@fredchuckdave: For one, Final Fantasy does not actually change that much from game to game. They put in some twists here and there, but most of the series shares pretty fundamental similarities. There's only a handful that truly change things up. Second, I don't see how that automatically makes it superior. Different is not inherently better.

For me, Final Fantasy is the series with consistently average combat, with a few outliers here and there. Generally the combat is good enough to get the job done and not much more. Ironically, the only game that I continued to play specifically for the combat was FF13. Then there are games like 2 and 12 where the combat explicitly turned me off of the game.

Also Tacticts Ogre was not even remotely the first SRPG.

Some of us would just prefer a sequel that followed the first game without shitting on the characters.

@turambar: You forgot:

Chrono Cross is a fine sequel and a fine RPG and if you disagree then you clearly have a different opinion than I.

@ichthy: Definitely didn't, but I'd have well over a dozen tracks if I posted all of the best ones there.

@zeik: First does not mean the most influential, re: Dune 2 vs Warcraft. Other than that an exceptionally poorly formulated argument.

You stated every tactics game is derivative of Tactics Ogre, which is is simply untrue. Fire Emblem has been around much longer than Tactics Ogre and plays very little like it. If you want to argue it has more derivative knock-offs I'd agree with you, but there are plenty of SRPGs out there that have little in common.

If you're call the rest of it "poorly formulated" you need to at least rebut. Simply calling it poorly formulated is not a counter-argument. But I'll go into a bit more detail anyway. The only games in the series that are notable departure from the norm in terms of combat are 1, 2, 11, 12, and 13. (I'm not even sure I'd include 2, as the one big unique twist is not directly relevant to the combat.) You could also include 10-2/13-2,etc if you want.

3 through 10's combat is very similar. Sure, there are a few twists like jobs or limit breaks, but the fundamental battle system changes pretty insignificantly. It's roughly the same amount of change you see throughout games you previously dismissed, like Tales or Dragon Quest. (The Tales games introducing full 3D movement is at least as significant as anything that was introduced in those games.)

This is a pretty ignorant statement to make.

You people sure like to make accusations without bothering to back them up. Prove me wrong then. What is so fundamentally different about each of those games in terms of combat that they are comparable to how a game like FF12 was different, or more fundamentally different than any RPGsequel in existence? I'm not arguing they are all the same, but the combat certainly isn't fundamentally different in every one of those games either.

@zeik: Chrono Cross isn't canon. Schala's hair wasn't blue.

Well, for starters, and for the most obvious, Final Fantasy X doesn't even use the active time battle system in any way. It is entirely turn-based, and every tactic and ability is designed based on that fact.

Final Fantasy III and V both use the job system, with V using a more mechanically enhanced version of it (not counting the DS version of FFIII). The manner in which this system functions allows for a pretty diverse manner of character advancement.

Final Fantasy IV was the first game in the series that features distinct characters in the party based on specific classes and abilities (Dark Knight, White Mage, Bard, Monk, etc.). It also features the largest active party size of any game in the series with up to five battle participants at once.

Final Fantasy VI gives every single party member a unique battle mechanic, whether it be Sabin's Street Fighter-like special attacks, Terra's esper morph power, Edgar's tools, or Umaro just doing whatever the hell he feels like. It also changed the way magic works by giving everyone the ability to learn any spell in the game, which in itself has a profound effect on the flow of combat in the late game.

Final Fantasy VII was the first game that introduced Limit Breaks as a non-random element of combat. It also added the materia system, which like FFVI's magicite imparts magic on the party members, but also grants other traits and abilities. Given that they can only be equipped to weapons with the slots to hold them, and that some pieces of gear allow for linking two materia together, there is an element of customization that also affects the way individual characters perform and act in combat.

Final Fantasy VIII reduces the effectiveness of leveling by introducing level-scaling enemies. The more effective way to power up is through effectively junctioning magic to the character's Guardian Forces. The GFs also effectively make every party member a essentially a summoner class by default.

FFIX? Eh, I didn' play that one.

Do many of these games share the same battle mechanics on a basic level? Yes. Do they all play the same? No.

@hailinel: I'm not arguing they're all the same, just that they're not that different. Not different enough to consider FF as one of the only series to completely change combat every game anyway.

A lot of those things you mentioned only have indirect affects on combat. Jobs for example certainly provide a different way to advance and customize characters than static classes, but in combat they work basically like in any other Final Fantasy. White Mages heal like White Mages. Black Mages use magic like Black Mages. It doesn't introduce any significant differences to how combat actually plays out. Materia is pretty much the same. It's only really changes what goes on outside of combat, because even if you can give Firaga to anyone, it doesn't change how you use it.

I might concede that 6 is a bit more of a departure than what came before, with how the character mechanics work, but limit breaks and the like are basically just a twist on that. Even 10 losing the ATB system doesn't drastically alter the actual combat system. You have more time to think about each move, but those moves aren't all that different than how you would approach them in previous games. (Although I might concede that one as well, given how enemies have more specific resistances that need to be countered, but it still feels very much like a FF combat system.)

@hailinel said:

How do you feel they did that? Also...

FFIX? Eh, I didn' play that one.

!!!

(p.s. Zeik is right except the similar combat systems are 4-9 rather than 3-10. They certainly had a couple combat changes like with the party size and the addition of limit breaks, but most of the changes in between games had to do with the way you learned and equipped your abilities, which until 13 was an out of combat process.)

Not only is the explanation of Kid being a reincarnation of Schala nonsensical, but they kill off Crono, Marle, and Lucca after Guardia is invaded in the game's backstory without any particular narrative reason for it to happen. Chrono Cross feels like a game that was shoehorned into being a sequel to Chrono Trigger in the clumsiest way that they could possibly manage.

@hailinel said:

Yeah, it almost seems like "We're gonna make another one of those angsty, cutscene-heavy JRPGs that have been doing so well for us on the Playstation", and then after the fact they arbitrarily reworked a couple plot details to make it technically a sequel to Chrono Trigger. But the handful of connections are so thin, tangential, and borderline nonsensical that it almost wasn't worth the effort.

It doesn't feel like Trigger and Cross are part of some greater narrative at all, it just feels like when a "showrunner" for a TV show changes between two seasons, and suddenly the entire show does an about-face tonally, introduces a bunch of new characters while tossing away the old ones, and finishes plot threads in a random way compared to how they would've been handled by the original "showrunner".

P.S. I didn't really expect this thread to become a Chrono Cross debate thread. I'm surprised more people aren't discussing the idea of making "reimagined" sequels on the 3DS that control pretty much like an SNES game. People love it when it's Link Between Worlds, and they loved New Super Mario Bros. at first, but now that Nintendo has driven NSMB into the ground by releasing 4 games that are functionally identical, I'm hoping the same won't happen to Zelda. I would love to see Square-Enix do this, even if I don't necessarily trust them, because I'd prefer some kind of weird 3DS sequel to Chrono Trigger, when the alternative is just rereleasing fucking every Square game on smartphones.

I can certainly see why someone might have problems with the connections to Chrono Trigger, though I never felt like it was a shoehorned sequel, to me it actually just came across as a rushed game. I think it's clear from the last third or so that they weren't able to finish it in the way that they wanted. The pace from the first two thirds is way slower and they dwell on things that don't end up being important to the actual plot, and then a lot of the overall plot and connections to Chrono Trigger end up happening in a short period of time through text heavy info dumps. The true ending of the game is literally just a glorified gif with text over it, which just screams "we ran out of budget." I'm admittedly just making assumptions, but the way some of the more solid story parts in that game are handled leads me to believe that if given the time and resources they needed they would've been able to justify the connections.

As for killing off the original cast, I find it a little difficult to be upset about characters dying off 20 years after their adventure, particularly in a world full of time travel and alternate time lines. In fact I thought it was kind of cool. What's more boring then everybody living happily ever after forever? I suppose Hailinel is not wrong to think the whole Kid/Schala daughter/clone thingy was nonsensical, but dumber things have happened in better games and been forgiven more readily.

Personally I found the themes and concepts explored in Chrono Cross to be super ambitious and interesting, but they overreached the scope of what they could make and created sort of a beautiful failure that tried to be something more than it is. I think that's a little cooler then Crono, Marle, and Lucca going off to fight yet another interdimensional threat or whatever, and I'm saying that as a person who considers Chrono Trigger his favorite game of all time. Alas, I've meant to write a blog about this for ages and I may have just blown the whole point in this post. Oh well.

@hunter5024: Yeah, the whole game isn't bad or anything, just all the ways it picks up where Chrono Trigger left off (or doesn't) just seem like they screwed up what could've been the coolest parts. Like, basically no explanation of what ever happened to Magus, even though he was insanely driven to fight Lavos and/or find Schala. They just cut him out of Cross from what I've heard because the story was long enough without adding in this elaborate Magus subplot.

And while not related to Chrono Trigger, man, Chrono Cross has too many characters, for a battle system that only allows you to field 3 people.

Because it is the worst example of telling, rather than showing. These characters I grew to care about over the course of Chrono Trigger? Eh, fuck. They died horribly because we say they did and that's that. It is just terrible writing, simply put. Just as terrible as the whole Schala/Kid thing, which again, is just nonsensical and a sign that the developers were grasping for any straw they could to connect the games together. It's not even a case of them being out of budget. Xenogears had part of its budget taken away during development to give to another project and the development team of that game was left with a second disc that was little more than massive walls of text while the player sits in a chair and then the final boss fight happens. The main difference here is that Xenogears actually has better writing and a more thoroughly conceptualized world than Chrono Cross, which was like terrible Chrono Trigger fanfiction written by a fourteen-year-old that killed the protagonists to make way for his original characters.

Chrono Cross's story would have made for an interesting game had it been made entirely distinct from Chrono Trigger. Instead, they made horrible decisions that made for terrible storytelling.

@bisonhero The Magus thing is kinda weird. In Radical Dreamers (the visual novel type thing that eventually got wrapped into Chrono Cross) the magician character Guile was actually Magus in disguise (in fact he was called Alf originally, short for Alfador, the name of Magus' cat). They originally intended to have this reveal in Chrono Cross as well, but decided to drop it, because he ended up being an optional character, and they thought it complicated the already complicated story too much. Which is probably true, though I believe this is yet another symptom of them not having the time or resources to do what they wanted with the game. And yeah I hate the huge cast as well. I can see how they arrived at the idea, probably because the crazy characters in Trigger were such a hit, but having that many crazy characters really diminished their effectiveness. Also you'll never hear a word of praise from me about Chrono Cross' battle system. Biggest mistake in that game as far as I'm concerned.

@hailinel Well I started a little Chrono Cross research in between replies and actually found out that we're both misremembering. They never said they were killed off, its just a theory based on a few offhanded remarks about Guardia being at war with Porre. It's certainly possible that they're dead, though it's never confirmed or even implied in game, so it's definitely not the off screen travesty of writing that you're describing. Also killing off characters that people care about is not bad writing, that's simply a dumb statement. Maybe those kinds of stories don't appeal to you but just because a story doesn't appeal to you doesn't mean its poorly written. I'm willing to entertain the idea that it does have poor writing, but you're not even giving examples aside from the Schala/Kid thing being dumb, which granted, it is, though in a world full of magic, time travel, dimensional hopping, and intergalactic monstrosities I find the idea that you're unwilling to accept a magic clone pretty ridiculous. Maybe you could explain why that feels out of place to you in such a world? Anyways, as I said, I think this is a matter of the vision outpacing reality, maybe Xenogears had even worse budget problems, but that doesn't change the fact that Chrono Cross gives every appearance of the same. How would you explain the third act otherwise? I doubt they thought it was just a good idea to start telling the story in a totally different way as quickly as possible.

@hunter5024 said:

Yeah, I think I found some similar resources about what Chrono Cross mentions about the fate of the original cast, and it might actually be worse that they don't even address what happened to them. "Like, hey guys, Guardia and Porre are at war, maybe Crono and Marle and everybody are OK? Whatever. Here's what's going on in El Nido."

Also, despite playing Chrono Trigger on the DS somewhat recently, I forgot that that game retconned in a line that implies Dalton goes to Porre and is the one that starts that war. Even though there is no given explanation how Dalton has any ability to time travel, without the Epoch or Gate Key. I guess you can chalk it up to maybe Lavos randomly opened up a time portal and stranded him in the present shortly after Crono beats him, like with the gurus? It is both the only explanation possible, and most contrived, arbitrary explanation possible.

@hunter5024: It's not killing off characters that people care about that's bad writing, it's the manner and depiction of the way that they meet their end that's at issue. (Though whether those specific characters died horribly is a debatable issue, apparently.) As for the creation of the magic clone, what about this clone is in any way a reflection of Schala? Schala, last I checked, was not a tomboy with an Aussie accent. Which actually leans into another issue I have with the writing, which is that for all of the characters they throw at you, most are inconsequential and offer little more than variety in the delivery of certain lines of dialogue with their specific inflections and accents. It's like populating your playable character roster with Animal Crossing characters and falls short of the way large casts of characters have been portrayed in games like Suikoden or later entries of Fire Emblem.

@bisonhero: I don't know, there's something to be said for leaving things ambiguous, I like the idea that there's this conflict happening behind the scenes. This game was never supposed to be about them to begin with, and that's okay. Their story was contained, and there's no reason to make another story about them.

Also while I don't particularly mind the way that Chrono Cross tampered with the chronology, it drives me crazy that they added stuff to Chrono Trigger for it. I'm not about to blame Chrono Cross for that though, I'd blame whoever was in charge of the remake. I'd also like to have a word with them about all those annoying fetch quests and overpowered items they added.

@hailinel Yeah no sense in arguing about their death, since it's kind of moot anyways. They did probably kill Robo though if you want to argue about that, but that part's awesome. As for the Schala Kid thing, nature versus nurture I guess? I find it a little strange that the accent is why you hate the clone, not even sure how to respond to that. Also I think that might have been a localization thing. As I understand it, the japanese version has Kid talking like a pirate, because she really liked pirate stories when she was growing up, or something like that. I'm having trouble finding the article I read about it and it was a long time ago. On the large cast of characters we are in total agreement, though again, I think defining those characters more would have been beyond the scope of the project.

@hunter5024: Yeah, the super shitty sidequest they added where you go to a peaceful Reptite village in two different time periods was a dull slog, and I recall there being some good accessory or something with a really low drop rate. But yeah, it gives you all this really OP gear that is better than the regular endgame stuff, but it's all 65,000,000 BC themed, which is kinda weird for that to be your final gear in the DS version (I remember I gave somebody Saurian Leathers, which are somehow better than all the crazy Zeal shit that would normally be end game gear).

I haven't done any new game plus runs on the DS version, but yeah, I know there's an added ending that involves the whole Time Devourer/Schala thing. Nonetheless, the DS remake is a net positive, because MAN does it fix all of the translation goofs from the SNES version. I guess technically the Playstation version might have been the one that fixed them, technically? Either way, so many items and abilities actually have sensible descriptions. Plus the map is better.

The accent isn't the reason I hate the clone. That's just an element that stems from the nonsensical nature of it.

feel Chrono Trigger is fine where it is in the pantheon of JRPG history.. if they want to remake it with improved sprite graphics then sure i'll buy it again maybe but i'm perfectly fine if they don't go back to make a spinoff/sequel of it.