The Sequel to the fabled Chrono Trigger, who's plot and sequel relation is wrapped in some serious enigma
One thing that must be said right off the bat, the story is straight forward at first, but once you endeavor to connect it to Chrono Trigger and truly scratch the surface, there's a lot of questions that begin to arise, reminding me of the same type of mind conundrums I went through after watching Donny Darko.
But let's stray from the rather strange and complex brew that was the story for now and focus just on the rest of the game.
The artistic style is a rather different departure from the Toryama influence art from Chrono Trigger, on its own I must say it did its job pretty well, and even aged relatively alright for a title of its generation, but take away one dimension and put Toryama back at the helm and I say that would be preferable. Still to try and abstain from too much bias, I give the graphics high marks, just not tops.
The music was also invariably good across the board, but not nearly as memorable as the previous title either, and that was on an SNES cart. Still, despite not sticking as well in ones memory, the musical track was still satisfying and worth high marks as well.
The game play, like the other elements is sound, and yet a bit different from the previous title. You still have the team up system but it operates a little differently from the previous game. One again, I prefer the previous games system, it felt a little more stable, but Cross is still very well done and deserves high praise.
What really makes the game stick, and what likely got it's rather large bounty of a perfect 10 relates to this mind boggling story. Some people I talk to think it wasn’t that big a deal, but whenever I have this discussion in person with someone and start discussing the big questions, we fall into very large dearths of confusion. What's rather amazing is every time I get into one of these ruts, I always come out the other end with a good explanation, but it was never easy. Suffice it to say they really did go above and beyond to connect this game to Chrono Trigger with some pretty strongly kept enigmas, but unfortunately, minus some very big name dropping and subtle hints at previous characters and places, a lot of the connections take far too much assumption to really enjoy it.
Suffice it to say the most spoiler free way to explain it is that you won’t see much familiar in this game if you're looking for surface relation to Chrono Trigger, you've got to really think about what must have happened to turn this world upside down and cause only vague inferences of the previous title. It took me a while after I beat the game to really understand what the heck happened and a lot of that I really respect, but some of it just went off the deep end.