sean
backup dancers named yu and mi for a performer named nikki
love how they tutorialize advanced combat mechanics by having the comic relief henchman duo (solt and peppor) screw up in a fight and then shout at each other about what they should've done instead
what does it mean that they've called the mimics "the boxer boys" when one of them is clearly labelled a girl
i'm starting to think they might have overcorrected for toriyama only ever drawing 3 types of girls by making this one just a series of girls who are some type of way
imo if you're just picking a single random word to communicate "this is a french guy", you should at least pick the correct translation
i really thought they'd have more to say about this situation than "wow that's weird! anyway bye"
this game has a lot of interesting ideas but unfortunately it's also very stupid
mestre ensinador
"it's okay that we killed an endangered beast that is critical to the ecosystem because there were babies in its carcass that might survive 
" oh phew for a second i thought there might be some depth or tension there
" oh phew for a second i thought there might be some depth or tension there
im finding it really hard not to get a sense of fomo while playing this on account of how many party members they expect you to recruit and then immediately ditch bc you only have 3 active slots
more games should let you immediately run from a boss fight and have the boss just be like "oh.. well come talk to me again if you want to fight i guess"
love this guy
resorting to a walkthrough and immediately feeling vindicated bc i was stuck on simply not having spoken to every single npc in the starting town roughly 20 hours in
if i was making a sequel to chrono trigger i would probably not put in a plot point where environmentalists do a little genocide, but that's just me
this game really went out of it's way to make sure you knew that if you died, your gf would NEVER have sex
on one hand, the half-point(?) twist in this game is very stupid, but on the other, it immediately gives you control over a catboy, a goblin, and a sexy clown
australian rikku constantly says "i'll kick your arse to the moon" and the clown just said "i'll kick your derriere to the moon"... the way this game is written i cannot tell if this is foreshadowing or just that they couldn't think of new threats
so many things are happening and so little of them make sense, but im mainly wondering why the nerdy dad next door has no questions about why you are a large cat man
im still not over the fact that the talking clown skull named "Skelly" you picked up is just a guy named Skelly who happened to die and become an undead skeleton coincidentally
love that they try to do an emotional flashback to when you first meet australian rikku, but seemingly forget that you rejected her like three times in a row and she didn't even join the party till later
i swear this game just can't commit to any idea for more than a couple minutes at a time
i posted this and then it immediately dumped four more guys into my party in the span of a single cutscene lmao
fed up with trying to anticipate which party members will be relevant for the story. from now on i am picking party members based on whether they have a cute overworld running animation
this is what peak performance looks like
need someone to do this to me
there's a point in this game where all the npcs in a town go into hiding, and a guard stands outside saying he can only let residents in.
hours later, when you get all your old party members back, you can take the party member who lives in this town, and she will interrupts to say "but i live here!" and.. he refuses to let you in anyway.
there are SO MANY things like this. this is what i mean when i say it can't commit to anything: it's constantly dropping hints for unique alternate world/party member interactions, and then will respond to you for noticing the hint with almost nothing, practically laughing at you for spending the time chasing the hint
i'll admit there are some interesting things happening in disc 2 but mostly there are a lot of even stupider things happening
lol you can even run away from the final boss fight
the 10 minutes of dialogue building up to the end of this game sure feels a lot like "here's five bonus twists we wanted to put in but couldn't really find a place for"
glad they managed to even interrupt the big emotional finale with some random nonsense from whichever of your 40 guys you had with you
oh ok they're mostly just easter eggs
wish i had something more cogent to say at the end of such a long chore but tbh i probably could have just stopped here https://timetheft.social/@sean/109776066919270379
Dana@sean It's been on my radar for a really long time, but low on the list, and I never got around to playing it?
I might've enjoyed the snapshot of it I got here more than I'd enjoy playing the thing myself, so thanks for the thread.
john@sean the all-consuming emptiness of finishing a bad square game and realizing, no, it wasn't actually a Hidden Gem, your friends just played it when they were undiscerning teenagers
@farawaythyer i'll admit i lined up multiple final fantasies to finally try after chrono cross, but it turns out i actually dont want to play any of them immediately after that
@sean A lot of Square games are really great but rpg fans get kinda myopic with them. I feel I've been better served branching out and trying more rpgs by other developers than I was trying to play every single random square game a twitter mutual played when they were 12 and swears up and down is the one of the towering artistic achievements of its century
@sean Just off the dome I think Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter, Undertale, Dragon Quest 1-5, Mother 1-3, Ys VIII, Demon's Souls, Planescape Torment, Trails in the Sky, Phantasy Star IV, Helen's Mysterious Castle are all as magical in their own ways as anything Square ever put out. I wouldn't have played any of those games if I'd stayed in my comfort zone (I got into rpgs with final fantasy iv and chrono trigger so I was an aggressive square devotee for yeeeears)
@sean All that said I still get choked up thinking about the scene after the orphanage, I'm curious how it hit you xD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhBY8BIJURo
星を盗んだ少女
@farawaythyer the music is easily one of the best tracks in the game, but i was mostly caught on thinking "why is kid talking about everyone dying and being alone if you literally just ran around saving all the other children"
@sean HAHHAHAHAHAHA forgot about that
@sean That track was in the VN and it's pretty..... in general I feel like "3 hour fanfic VN epilogue to CT to wrap up schala's story" is a better form factor for a lot of CC's ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pzWipuF8ME
Star-Stealing Girl - Radical Dreamers Music Extended
@sean Do you know the creative team differences here? Chrono Trigger had Yoshinori Kitase, Yuji Horii, Hironobu Sakaguchi on staff, with Masato Kato writing a handful of really good parts in CT like Zeal. Kato wrote and directed Chrono Cross in its entirety, without the massive safety net of three veteran s-tier rpg devs directing and shepherding the project.
@farawaythyer ah i didnt know that but "guy with some good ideas but no filter" does incredibly match the vibe
@sean Yeah, exactly xD
@sean Kato has a huge claim to Chrono Trigger being as special as it is, but it's easy to see Chrono Cross as the junior creative jumping into the director's chair and finding out "wow this is a whole lot harder than they made it look"
@sean Xenogears is the same thing. Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga both created amazing little chunks of final fantasy vi, like edgar and sabin's whole relationship. Then they were in charge of a whole ass rpg without Kitase at the head and suddenly "WOW THIS IS REALLY HARD HUH"
@sean I think in both cases it makes the games and their relative failures a lot more endearing. They're not just arbitrarily worse, 90's Square was actively fostering new talent outside its senior leads and letting them spearhead big projects. While the games aren't as good, they're still full of individually magical parts and are very special to a ton of people. I think that's a lot cooler than how modern squeenix operates.
@farawaythyer yeah, a big part of why im bothering to play chrono cross at all is that i heard it was bad for ages, but a lot of people loved it despite the flaws. i definitely would not say i love it but i can see why people don't just write it off
@sean I think some folks care more about pretty art and music and interesting poetic themes more than anything, and CC's a feast of that. I wish any of the drama landed for me, it's trying to be this super grim dark deconstruction of CT but it always feels like it pulls its punches when it needs to go hard
@sean If you're gonna kill off chars from CT fucking do it onscreen, make me suffer xD
Rose@sean @farawaythyer im absolutely one of the people who love it despite its many flaws