Chrono Cross

System: Playstation
Release Date: 2000
Published By: Square
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

It could be worse, I guess. There are honestly a few things Chrono Cross does well, but there are too many things it does a half-assed job of and the whole thing comes off a big shallow peat bog of a game.

The real problem is that it's just plain old dull. The designers don't ever create any sense of excitement or adventure to move things along, and it just slogs from area to area never picking up, with the washed-out colours and bland music helping not at all. The plot is a mess, it's true, but games have had worse plots and still made them interesting; hell, the original Chrono Trigger ultimately had about as thin a veneer of plot as it could get away with, but it presented it well, paced it appropriately, and gave you things to do, all of which its malformed sequel fails at. In Chrono Cross, you are lethargically dragged along the plot with no real opportunity to diverge from it. The game perhaps just presents its setting too convincingly; you end up feeling trapped on this tiny little island with its smallminded inhabitants and its petty squabbles and you just want to get out of there.

I'm pretty sure combat was supposed to be interesting. It seems like it was. There are bunches of characters, and bunches of options, and bunches of customisation, and it all amounts to not one bean. You end up with piles of micromanagement that you have to deal with for very little actual gain, since none of the characters play strikingly differently and none of the choices in combat is really terribly different from any other. Complexity is only a virtue if there's a suitably elegant system to support it, which is sorely lacking here; without, it's just confusing.

So, as I said, it could be worse. The game is a major disappointment to those of us who loved the original Chrono Trigger and were seriously enthused about the sequel. But it could be worse.

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