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Crimson Echoes
Made it around 11-12 hours in, and I can already say that while I wan't offended as I should've been, I don't really like this game all that much. While I do commend the game for trying to be harder than Chrono Trigger, it has a series of problems like:
1. A sudden spike of Enemy HP starting your first trip to 605 A.D.
2. Bosses and Enemies taking forever to kill unless you grind, and usually follow a pattern that can be programmed from C. (Vision Serpent, Dalton, all battles from the two Marle-only segments, especially Heckran, etc.)
3. The game pulling an Ayn Rand on me. (I PRAY that I'm not reading the dialogue right, but before I spoil much, please tell me how to hide spoilers!)
1 and 2 are probably because Chrono Trigger's battle system is not compatible with true challenge from a certain point.
Another example of my dislike is some of the creators siding with moron King Zeal. (I hope this isn't much of a spoiler.)
Comments
But anyway, for spoilers, just color the text white or something. Or give it a black background. If you can't use the WYSIWYG editor for whatever reason, then it's White text goes here for white text. And, obviously, you know... indicate that there's text for people to highlight... like, put brackets around it or something.
More things I dislike:
Kong and the frogs, goshdarn you all to Heck! Same with the Ceremonial Dance that lies to you, and the tree and Gnasher that requires you to know that L will make you stab them to get their frogs, even though there're no way to know ahead of time.
Spoiler alert!
King Zeal is an idiot. Anybody that says otherwise, I don't really know what to say. No, killing Lavos in prehistory will not save your precious kingdom that wouldn't have existed without him and his Frozen Flame. Instead, it created billions of Reptites that got unmade, making you worse than Crono and pals overall, when Crono and Sorin stopped your unnecessary anti-Lavos spell and kept you from transferring the Dragon Tooth to make said Reptite era in the first place! Also, you/Lavos complained that Crono unmade many people, yet the people in 2300 A.D pre-"before Lavos's destruction" would rather stumble to better places in the Darkness Before Time or otherwise end up in "And I Must Scream" mode if it meant stopping the hunger and the pain in their bodies, and that's the only main change as far as I can tell if it weren't for you. Stop being Ayn Rand and a hypocrite and, I don't know, help those in the Darkness Beyond Time? It's not like Lavos is controlling you or anything according to what I've seen. If I got anything wrong, and I PRAY that I do, please tell me.
Finished the game yesterday, and I still think poorly of this game.
The game actually starts getting easier after the fall of Guardia. The Ocean Palace enemies in the storage room of said area are jacked up to take forever to beat, yet aren't as ridiculous as the Dalton fight, while the few Black Omen enemies that made it into the final dungeons are either exactly the same (Goons, Cybots) or barely jacked up at all (Ruminators).
King Zeal's second phase fights like a weaker version of the Lavos Core, and about as tedious. I simply used a party of Marle, Ayla, and Lucca. Marle used Haste at times. Lucca and Marle used Antipode 3 at all enemies except the hands of the second form, which was left to Ayla's Triple Kick. Ayla basically healed when necessary. I did game over once, but I simply outfitted Ayla with equipment to max out her Magic Defense and everything's a-okay the second time.
In fact, much of the game is like that. Kasmir's fort is a lamer version of Magus's castle. Picture Magus's castle except much shorter, with dumb minigames, and you don't even fight Magus! The final dungeon is like the Black Omen, except with no minibosses, most of the enemies are skippable, and the rest are escapable. Dinopolis is Azala's castle except shorter, no minibosses like Nizbel II, you go through it three times with little changes, and an actual difficult/tedious boss for only one of those times! Chronopolis is like The End of Time, except there's no auto-heal spot nearby without taking a slow elevator to the inn and shop areas and back.
Did Belthasar ever call against the Mammon Machine in the original game? If he did, then it's OOC that he proceeds to use the Frozen Flame, a piece of Lavos itself also used in the Mammon Machine, as the original power source of Chronopolis, when it worked oh so well the time Queen Zeal did it.
Is King Zeal really controlled by Lavos? If he is, than at least you can disregard that huge rant on him last post. I'm willing to diss him out as "typical bad guy with stupid way of "fixing" things" if the some of the CREATORS weren't supporting HIM. But in that case, it basically turned Lavos into Jaws, specifically, the one in the later sequels that came out of the grave, aiming for the family that killed him. The game implied that King Zeal's attitude toward the party is the only thing affected by the Frozen Flame. Trying to kill Lavos in prehistory is not something that Lavos itself would like to do.
For those who didn't like Cross, this whole game is basically trying to explain the differences and changes made for Cross. For example, FATE is actually the good future's Mother Brain, (made obvious in a late portion of the game by calling her FATE) the Frozen Flame itself, Guardia's fall, etc.
Chrono Trigger doesn't need a sequel, as the only thing it doesn't tie up at the end is Schala, and making a whole game for explaining her, as I've heard and seen of Cross, isn't a wonderful idea.
I never liked what I've heard of the story of Chrono Cross, and I never particularly cared about Schala as a character (nor did I like her theme tune). Nevertheless, I wanted to see what they did with the story, and how they managed to make a sequel to it. Perhaps I would be more interested in playing CC after watching this, even.
No. On the contrary, it actually made me less likely. In fact, I don't want to play Crimson Echoees either.
I do really appreciate a lot of the things they did with the game, from little things like making Frog not talk in Ye Olde Englishe to big things like actually trying to make sense of the storyline changes and thinking through the implications of things, especially all the timey wimey balls.
However, it's not a story I enjoyed. I didn't like how it was basically Chrono Trigger but darker and edgier. The story was a sad story. Like as with CC, it would have been nice to make it a separate game, but I cherish the happy ending of CT too much to like this. It was just "nice job breaking it, hero", over and over again, and almost to the point of despair for the characters.
I did really enjoy its final dungeon, though.
Not to mention the music that they put to it. You won't get that in-game--only available straight from the developers, on youtube!
The biggest problem with Chrono Cross from what I remember is that it seemed to make it so that the whole game is a waste of time and that you shouldn't have done anything to a certain point... if at all!
Unfortunately, I don't really like the music choice of the youtube/98% version. For example, I know the Vision Serpent is supposed to be a beta Dragon God, but is it really important to use the epic Dragon God music for an early game boss? I know the Vision Serpent is supposed to be difficult and all, but a battle with Gigasaurs later on is more challenging and tense, and they're your average normal badass mooks!
Also, I disagree with all/most of those theories from the Compendium used for Crimson Echoes. There's not much that needs explaining, like with the Ocean Palace deal and how it can simply be explained with Janus not noticing that the Prophet is really his future self, and also not noticing/caring until he tried and failed anyway. The destruction of Lavos and how it can happen and/or not affect the characters in any way could be explained by the characters simply warping into another mirror timeline by Lavos right before he dies to keep things in order. I could be wrong, but whatever.
The final dungeon sucks, BTW. Scrambled screens are not a good way of creating "distortion," and the only enemies you need to fight are Kasmir and King Zeal; The mooks are completely avoidable!
EDIT: The Vision Serpent looks ugly. Why does it need to be ugly-rainbow?
More problems with CE:
The Black Omen = Ocean Palace. Your characters call the Black Omen the risen Ocean Palace when it appears! Yet there's Ocean Palace ruins in CE.
If we take the existence of the Darkness Beyond Time to account, then Marle should've known about the place, since she's been "unmade" there before! At the beginning of CT!
The game has cases of minute-length music playing for seconds at many places.
The sidequests are quite poor. Really, Nu!Spekkio?! That you must beat to get the best ending?! What's with the bartering sidequest where you must look in an obscure place in the internet to even know that a little dome with no doors is even visitable in order to finish said sidequest? Most others are really short or really tedious.
Same as for the optional endings that I can't seem to access. Just watch this and this (Spoiler alert!) to find the problems with most of them. The first one is very ironic and unintentionally funny. But the one with Glenn and Kasmir fighting and dying in a draw says that they died in 427 AD, but the Mystic War ended in 440 AD in the Vanguard timeline according to people in that timeline and Melchior!
If we really needed a CT sequel, then it shouldn't try to connect itself to Cross. Cross even implies that, as being in an "alternate-reality," it can be safely taken out of canon.
Now I'm thinking of King Zeal and Magus having wacky adventures and/or lessons in Magus's quest to learn how to open Gates... involving Spekkio. Is that a bad thing?
Also, this topic wins the world record for having the most black in a white screen in a topic.
Fridge Brilliance...holy shit you're right.
^ Well, it was safe to take it out of canon officially, but Square-Enix liked being a dick there. Same with the ending FMV in the PSX port, as if there's any more reason not to buy that. There's always fanon discontinuity.
^^ I'm pretty sure it's not Squenix execs but rather someone (or some number of people) in the production team that has/have been stalling new Chrono games as well as stamping out Crimson Echoes.
Sequels and hacks have been made of FF games. Squenix also knew of Crimson Echoes for quite a while. They had easy justification to stamp out Chrono Resurrection (the 3D fan remake of CT) and they did so quickly.
C&D'ing fan-made sequels is generally not something that these companies care enough to do. If they prefer making up their own canon, they can easily push aside whatever fanon stands in the way, and companies have done that before.
The plausible business-related exceptions are if Squenix actually had in mind a fanon sequel, specifically one that they either (1) thought was worse in quality than Crimson Echoes, or (2) was very similar in plot to Crimson Echoes. Neither of these seems to be the case, though I can't say if they have been scrapping or changing plans due to CE's production.
I'm thought of a remix of Chrono Trigger where the dialogue and the current events are the same, but the dungeons are re-vamped and made much harder, and the enemies even more so. I could also try to include Schala as a playable character, like this hack, to diss Chrono Cross, but that'll require more knowledge of the ROM than apparantly most people do. Also, overpowered techs like Luminaire, Dark Matter, Cube Toss, and Flare would be removed in this hack.
The problem is that Temporal Flux's specialties are only areas and events, and due to that C&D, progress for other features is going to be really slow, if moving at all. The C&D also makes the hack itself risky.
I think the reason Crimson Echoes was C&D'd was because they actually asked Square-Enix for permission, thus attracting attention to themselves.
Your conspiracy mind tricks don't work on us, boy.
Isn't the point of a Chrono sequel is that it involved the Dream Team? But then again, does Cross even have the whole Dream Team as part of the staff? I don't really want to play a Chrono sequel from a developing team that barely has any, if at all, Dream Team members.
Not only that, my problem with the C&D of Crimson Echoes is not that it banned the game. It's that it practically halted all development of editors for people like us who like to make a challenging Chrono Trigger sequel/redesign. If you look at the C&D, it also banned all work and design on editors and other rom hacks.
If they wait too long before making it, all the fans of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross won't be interested anymore...
Chrono fans, or even fans in general, never stop waiting. Especially since they can't even make their own fan games anymore without any risk (yet fanfiction can still exist).
Cleaned up my rant today.