Chrono Cross – Memoirs of an American Asshole

Last month, I was under the impression that Chrono Cross was to be released on the Nintendo Switch. Nostalgic but bitter, I bought a PS1 and Chrono Cross and managed to play one full time, about 60 hours total, before the disc drive failed. No hope of getting a refund, I was understandably miffed. I’d looked forward to revisiting all my original Playstation classics along with a few I had never played but wanted to.

But by then, I had learned to my shock that the game was being released on PS4, PC, and Xbox One as well, and that it was not a mere port; it was remastered!

Nobody had seemed to know about it. As I searched, there were speculative articles: the soundtrack had been modified and distressed the gamers who had played the original, released 22 years ago this August, in the US.

Ah, the month of August, 2000. Living in Sparrows Point, confined to my bedroom which was the only room equipped with an air conditioning window unit: it was fine by me. The kitchen was 98 degrees. I’d cook crab cakes and sweat profusely, take the meal to my room, shut the door and get lost in the tale of two worlds. Parallel Earths, one dying, one salvageable. Which was the one our hero belonged in?

I ended up getting all 11 endings, the whole month and part of September in gaming ecstasy.

Now, having once again played through the original, I have the remastered PS4 version.

The soundtrack has been modified, but so far, it is not something anyone but a hardcore Chrono fan would notice, and then only if you played the original recently. Also, most PS4 users have headphones, which enhance the new dynamic track and those make small changes seem more noticeable. It’s no big deal, but beautiful beyond compare to the original and, I must add, that is some feat.

The visuals include crisp and amazing models of the characters, and that’s unexpected. I imagined sharper images, but nothing like I’ve seen. The one problem is the backgrounds. Some are awesome while some look as if they were painted by brush using oils and watercolors. This is a little thing that hasn’t detracted from an immersive masterpiece.

This, you must understand, was a labor of love. The original game no longer existed as a complete code. The development team had to play it to reconstruct it. I suspect that if any original music does exist, that’s where I’ll find it, but since it’s done by the same composer, he will have kept to the basic areal themes. After all, Chrono Cross has never been forgotten as one of the finest game soundtracks ever made.

Gameplay

The story begins with a scene where three people (Serge, Kid and a random character) are fighting through ruins to activate a central transportation platform. At high levels and HP, we know there’s a catch. All games begin as level one protagonists, right? So there’s something wrong here, but the music lends an urgency to get through the area. We also don’t know that Serge, a teen, has fallen in love with Kid, another teen who’s pretty, but tomboyish and battle-hardened. She’s tough. The transport leads to an airborne structure above the ruins, where Serge hesitates. He’s bothered by something, but Kid urges him on. This leads to a cut scene which is, to understate, disturbing.

Now we find out why the characters were so leveled up: it was a nightmare suffered by Serge, who wakes up in his bed, called to by his mother. He was supposed to meet Leena, his girlfriend to go get some kommodo dragon scales for her to make a necklace. It’s critical that the player wanders the entire village first, finding certain items that will help him get started. The last thing any player should do is have Serge go alone; one character is immediately available to recruit, and it’s a good one: Poshul, Leena’s talking dog. Find a heckran bone hidden in someone’s house, and give it to the dog. She immediately joins your party.

Your party may consist of any three members, and they will have different abilities and resistance to magic and physical attacks. These can be overwhelming once the action gets hairy, so rotating members in and out, developing them and equipping them is challenging. Also, each will have different types of weapons and base element colors. Everyone comes with an element grid and using them effectively depends on who you’re about to fight, although indoors it becomes impossible to switch them.

Serge’s innate color is white, so he’s weaker against black innate characters; Kid’s is red, so you won’t use her in a boss fight when that boss has blue innate color. Zoah is yellow, so against green heavyweights, pull him in favor or a character who’s innate color is green.

That said, enemies of whatever color usually aren’t a problem once you gain about 15 stars. Not the basic enemies anyway; by then you’ll have upgraded armor and weapons along with accessories that can improve accuracy or protect a character. Exploring every region in any territory and winning battles yield cool things like rare Revive elements, hidden technical attacks, even armor.

As you play on, you realize that because it’s a classic turn-based JRPG, it is not a sandbox and therefore there’s no grinding. After a certain point, fighting will cease to yield points or spoils. This version offers a setting to turn off such battles. The classic game did have too much repetition, and it did get tiresome. There’s even an option for computer-controlled battles, but I’m just not able to go that route. Strategy is a big part of this game, and it is in every part, down to what you will do at each turn. Do you have Zoah do a Toss and Spike or cure a weaker member so they don’t need to have a revive used on them before you’ve felled even one of up to four enemies? These decisions are what makes the game great.

The cut scenes were magnificent the first time around; it is no different here. In 2000, I knew about the new PS2, but I was in awe of this game’s graphics and speed. No sweat loading or saving, and it pushed the original Playstation to its very limits. Squaresoft knew its stuff.

Also, in 2000, I had never played an RPG. What sold me was a demo disc that used to come with every Playstation (not PSM) Magazine which, I believe, was a sister publication of EGM. It went defunct a few years later. It should still be around. This, from the demo, is the in-game beginning, and what made me buy it without hesitation.

That’s all it took. Most demos were playable. I didn’t care, I wanted this game. Here’s that same sequence remastered with a look at the incredible precision of the actual game character models!

The Radical Dreamers is a separate game, a playable graphic novel that came between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. I’ll have to wait. Right now I’m living a dream come true, and it is a joy to see and play this unexpected masterpiece! I’m glad that a new generation gets to experience such an extraordinary game.

You can’t possibly sustain the constant barrage of news and breaking news, the latter of which has been glued to cable news screens for months. Weve gone through much, and it isn’t over. We need our downtime.

Among the movies I’ve suggested for staying home and staying safe, there were some good titles, something for everyone. Now I’m going to recommend something very different: videogames. They’ve been around for decades, have an interesting history and evolution, and everyone can play.

I’m not a hardcore gamer. I’m not a purist and I’m not cut out for multiplayer online games. I’m just a casual gamer with a list of favorites and a list of games that weren’t worth their price because they were shitty or too hard.

I also have a wish list, now that I’ve acquired a PS4 that has abilities I never imagined in 1999.

That was the year I discovered the original Playstation and fell in love. I found not only that I loved games but that it was the one way I could reach my son, have fun and bond with him. And that was priceless.

I bought my own Playstation in January of 2000. I started with two games, “Duke Nukem: Time To Kill” and “WCW Mayhem” and spent hours after work being sucked into the gaming world.

While the Duke Nukem game remains one of my favorites, I played other games that I loved every bit as much. Looking back, the graphics were stunning to me, the audio and cut scenes immersive, sucking me into their world of fantasy and adventure. I eschewed puzzles in games but found that platform games always had them. Mostly, I was okay until I got to jumping puzzles. My timing was just not good enough and I’d get hung up. On weekends when my son visited, he would help.

I discovered “Medal of Honor” and, being a WWII buff, loved it. I got hung up a lot as the first-person shooter was new to me and I died a lot. But it was the start of something big, a genre that continued until “Airborne” and “Vanguard” for Playstation 2. Sadly the series has ended, but some of the original creators defected and gave us the first “Call of Duty,” a franchise spanning WW2 games to modern warfare. I thought that with “Medal of Honor: Underground” was the pinnacle of the series because, glitches and all, the ambience gave the player a sense of firefights happening in the distance, especially in the Paris levels. It turned, in later levels, to a freaky, scary thing, as a resistance fighter entered Himmler’s prized Wewelsberg castle. But still, great stuff.

I had my try at “Driver 2” and found it unusual; it was undeniably too hard, all night driving was eerie, and the game was chock-full of glitches that made it more creepy. Never did beat that game.

Then there was Madden football and back then it was more fun than it is now. My son loved the Spyro games and the one I loved the most, my favorite game of all time, came out in the summer of 2000: “Chrono Cross”, a follow-up to Super Nintendo’s “Chrono Trigger.” It was easily a hundred-hour game for anyone’s first RPG game, and it had a score that no video game can ever equal. Players could rove the world with two other characters in their party, but the characters which could be recruited were unusually high; 40 of them. Depending on decisions during play or other members recruited, some would be unavailable for recruitment. Everything I did had an affect on where and with whom I would go next. Some characters were almost useless in the traditional turn-based battles (you took a turn and attacked, healed your party or defended) and the CPU took its turn with enemies). Sometimes boss fights weren’t fair at all. A boss is a major character, and you will meet several in the course of a game, and they’re there to beat the snot out of you. They’re also kinda pissed that you’ve made it so far, and the fights are usually drawn-out affairs that test your patience and your nerves. You may, in some Role Playing Games (RPGs) be forced to retreat, fight smaller enemies to gain hit points (the number which defines how much punishment you can take before you get a “Game Over” screen. Most games also give you MP or magic power, as spell casting is a powerful way to battle. The game had 11 possible endings and you could replay it, making different choices, recruiting different characters, and face new enemies and new places. It was almost depressing when I finally finished it.

“Silent Hill” is a title you know as a movie, but first it was a game, and holy crap! Jump scares, boss fights and the urgency to get your character’s daughter back in a town full of demons and zombies. A definite puzzle game, people needed guides to help them, but one type of monster that looked like shadow children carried knives and would laugh while they attacked Harry Mason, who just wanted his daughter back, drew criticism from fans who found them too intense, so Konami never used them again. Harry and his daughter were supposed to be going to the resort town of Silent Hill for vacation. Harry awakes after a traffic accident to find his daughter missing and the town profoundly changed into a nightmare. A classic, worthy game.

“Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver” was stellar. A cursed Raziel was turned into a vampire, made to serve Kain, who gets jealous when he grows bat wings, a stage of evolution Kain doesn’t have. Kain rips off Raziel’s wings and orders him thrown into a pit to hell. A powerful eldritch creature Raziel can’t see but only hear promises to help him exact his revenge if he can eliminate enough of the vampires and gain powers along the way, powers Kain never had. There are some good puzzles, most of which have to be solved in order to enter new areas, and coolest of all, Raziel can’t die. If he loses enough energy in the physical world, he goes to the spirit realm and can consume the souls of the damned. Once his energy is restored, he can go back to his physical form. Good graphics for a Playstation original and a classic game.

Of course, Playstation had its share of duds. Among the most hated in the console’s library were games such as “Powerboat Racing”, “Escape ODT (or die trying)”, “Spot Goes To Hollywood” Spot being the character that was the red spot from 7-up cans, but I dare you to try to get past the first level without having your controller thrown across the room by some demon you didn’t know lived inside you. And let us not forget “Teletubbies”, a game so devoid of anything to do that even kids hated it. It was so derided that some gamers modified the code and turned it into a first-person shooter, allowing the player to shoot the dumbass fuckers. Or that’s what I read. I certainly didn’t.

On the end of its run, Playstation began accomodating budget games like “Largo Winch.// Commando Sar” which the now-defunct Playstation Magazine reviewed as “www.stupidname. com”. I’d like to move on now.

Along the way, there were stellar games, and you can still buy some of them. Games like “Syphon Filter” and the original “Resident Evil,” the one and only. There were a lot of cart racers, and one even featuring Disney characters. “Bogey Dead Six” was a fighter jet game that was good, but freaking hard, and “Ms. Pac-man was incredible, a masterpiece.

PLAYSTATION 2

There’s no way I can go through all the best titles in the PS2’s massive library. There are so many games worthy of owning, and all have drawbacks and goodies. Yet they’re classics, and it’s a shame they won’t be ported or remade for PS4. As far as the PS5 is concerned, the rumored price will turn out to be prohibitive to most gamers.

Playstation2 had a magical run. At first, designers didn’t grasp its potential and it led to games promised by developers being dropped or defecting to the Xbox. In those cases, production seemed hurried and reviews weren’t that great. When the first Madden game, “Red Faction” and others hit the shelves, suddenly there was a race on. PC games like “Half-Life” were ported from PC, and original updates to WWF/WWE games blew the Xbox version out of the water. Personally, my favorite PS2 games ranged from shooters to platformers to slash-and-hackers like “Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance” to the original “Kingdom Hearts” which was an RPG melding of Square Characters (Final Fantasy) and Disney characters and worlds. The latter was a masterpiece and a true labor of love. With a great score, cutscene ecstasy and reasons to revisit every world several times as different features become available, and so many cool and loveable Disney characters in the game, the original is a classic that can’t be touched. The sequel that I played took a hit in difficulty and failure led to replaying the same levels again and again until my thumbs felt as if they’d fall off. It kept me from going any further and getting into the story. I hated it.

NASCAR and Formula One, Gran Turismo and Need For Speed all had great games on the console.

“Silent Hill 2” made history as one of the most consistently voted “scariest game ever” titles, and it was. The franchise had a good run on PS2 and stories sometimes meld and sometimes not. The second game doesn’t take you to any of the locations of the first game but you end up close to those sections. “Silent Hill 3” sees the death of Harry Mason, the first game’s protagonist, and his daughter gets to go to parts of town from the first game as well as a superbly creepy shopping mall. I’m not afraid of much, but being inside a mall with no other people in it and no power is one of them. Urbex YouTubers do this shit, and they’re crazy. Abandoned malls are the stuff of nightmares. I played SH 2 and 3 and wish I could have played the others, as each developed its own brand of creepiness. I missed so much when I got sick.

Anyway, COVID-19 is spiking. Its because people aren’t staying home enough, they’re taking foolish chances, even protesting the wearing of masks; surely the height of stupidity and recklessness. If you’re bored, order up a PS1, PS2 or PS4, and lose yourself in stories you’ll never forget.

Chrono Cross, Playstation One “Opening”

Chrono Cross Demo