Yesterday was a “stay inside the house under blankets and play videogames” kind of day, but only after Tara and I got some respective work done. She cleaned her studio room a bit, set up the Nintendo Wii, and helped with dishes and laundry. I also helped with laundry, straightened up, made some mediocre mac and cheese for dinner, frantically searched for that freakin’ stereo AV cable to hook up the PlayStation 2, drew some characters from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and worked a bit more on my October challenge of drawing 31 horribly bad horror comics. Busy, but getting stuff done is good. And it all meant that we could reward ourselves with some gaming time come nightfall.
I forgot to mention that earlier in the day I put on a Chrono Cross playlist, and Tara exclaimed that she had to play the game again now. Further proof that Yasunori Mitsuda holds all the power. All he needs to do is slip in some brain-washing message about marching against the government, and down goes the United States.
So, browsing our PS1 memory card collection, we found two save files for Chrono Cross: one for like nine hours, and a second one for about nineteen hours or so. The latter was definitely that one we wanted, but I’d missed out on a lot of story bits so I sat back while Tara ran around as Lynx (as Serge); she had some things to do before heading over to the Dead Sea, such as finding the captain, participating in a monster team battle thingy, and learning how to go down ladders. I flipped open my 3DS to make some progress in Chrono Trigger. Yup. We’re totally dorks like that.
Anyways, in Chrono Trigger, I was making my way up through the Denadoro Mountains, fighting off rather tough Ogans. Hint: use Crono’s Lightning tech! At the peak of the mountain, there’s a cave, and in that cave, there’s a sword. It’s protected by two kids, one named Masa and the other Mune, and Crono and gang will have to fight them twice to earn the right to take this sword. After discovering that it’s nothing but a broken blade, we’re off to Melchior to see if he can fix it. Sure, not a prob–he just needs a Dreamstone, a type of rock that hasn’t been seen in many, many years. Okay, got it. 65,000,000 BC, here we come!
I stopped there, and when I looked up, Tara was making her way into the Isle of the Damned in Chrono Cross, a place that sounds a lot scarier than it really is. Though something scary and evil does reside there. Wanna guess? A sword called Masamune. How freaky is that. Crono just got the broken blade in Chrono Trigger, and Lynx just learned a little history about a sword with the same name in Chrono Cross. It’s like a John Cusack movie, like it was all meant to happen like so. I have no idea if the two swords are canonically connected, or if it is merely a nod to the former game. According to GiantBomb.com, Masamune has appeared in just under twenty games so far. Hmm…could just be a coincidence, too.
I wonder what other odd happenings will pop up the next time we sit down to play two games from the same franchise at once. If we plan accordingly, maybe we can get the end credits of each game to scroll harmoniously. Granted, now I want to go back to my nine hour save file and play more Chrono Cross than Chrono Trigger–I just absolutely love the battle system in that game, and nobody else has come close to matching its beauty.
Grinding Down 