Chrono Cross is a 1999 role-playing game developed and published by Square for the PlayStation. Masato Kato directed and wrote it, with help from Chrono Trigger veterans Yasuyuki Honne on art and Yasunori Mitsuda on music. Nobuteru Yūki designed the characters.
Serge and the Drowned Boy
The setup is the best thing in Chrono Cross. Serge, 17, lives in the fishing village of Arni on the archipelago El Nido. He slips into an alternate world where he drowned ten years earlier. The story follows his effort to learn the truth of the two worlds’ divergence.
Kid, a skilled thief, helps him. She wants the mythical Frozen Flame and vows to defeat Lynx, an anthropomorphic panther who burned down her adopted mother’s orphanage. Lynx is a cruel agent of the supercomputer FATE.
A Cast of 45
Chrono Cross fields 45 party members, each with an innate Element affinity and three unique abilities learned over time. You cannot recruit them all in one playthrough. New Game+ exists for that.
| Detail | Chrono Cross | Chrono Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Release year | 1999 | 1995 |
| Platform | PlayStation | Super Nintendo |
| Random encounters | None | None |
| Shared world | Yes | Yes |
Combat is turn-based with unlimited time to pick actions. Enemies are visible on field maps, never random. You can flee any fight, including bosses and the final battle.
Harle and the Frozen Flame
Harle shadows Lynx for the Dragon God, sent to steal the Frozen Flame from Chronopolis. She is smitten with Serge and fulfills the task anyway.
| Milestone | Year |
|---|---|
| Japan release | 1999 |
| North America release | 2000 |
| 1.5 million shipped | 2003 |
| PlayStation Network re-release (Japan) | July 2011 |
| PlayStation Network re-release (North America) | November 2011 |
What the Record Shows
Chrono Cross earned a perfect 10.0 from GameSpot and shipped 1.5 million copies by 2003, leading to a Greatest Hits re-release. A remaster, Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, followed with HD models, refined illustrations, higher-quality music, an auto-battle function and a switch to turn enemy encounters on or off.
The parallel-world structure and the no-random-encounter design are the parts worth naming. The roster is the cost: 45 characters, and the game makes you replay to see them all.
Score: 8.1 out of 10, the critic aggregate score from 4 outlets.
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