Some JRPGs demand you grind from the get-go

I finally got around to trying out that free and standalone-like 3DS demo for Bravely Default: Flying Fairy last night, but this post is not going to be explicably about that game. I need more time with it to both figure out my thoughts and overall opinions, as well as to decide on whether or not I’ll pick up the full retail copy, which drops today. I suspect I will, whether I love or loathe the demo to pieces, because these kind of strange JRPGs are far and few between, and my thinking is that by supporting it with a purchase, I’m helping to make strides towards a North American release for Fantasy Life. Wishful thinking, sure…but it’s better than doing nothing.

But Bravely Default got me thinking about the various RPGs and JRPGs that really make you grind for levels and money from the very start, because, at least in the demo, it downright demands you do it. The very first fight outside of town resulted in one character in my party of four dead, two badly hurt and poisoned, and the remaining member okay at half of his HP. I’m on the default–pun intended–level of difficulty, and I’m pretty good at turn-based combat, but I don’t think I have the whole brave and default techniques down just yet. That said…yowzas. The combat is brutally tough, and so for my first hour and change with the demo, I’ve just been going back and forth to the inn to heal up, fight monsters in the desert, and rinse and repeat until my eyelids grow too heavy to keep playing. It’s honestly not terrible, as I’m used to grinding, but I always find it strange when a game makes it impossible to progress without it at the very beginning of the journey. Let me list a few other examples.

One of my fondest gaming memories, just in general, always comes back to Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. See, when I moved out of my parents’ house and up to northern New Jersey for my newly acquired post-college job, I lived off the grid for several months, relying on previously purchased videogames and DVDs for nightly entertainment while I held off on getting cable and Internet. DQVIII filled that space greatly, but it’s a slow game, and you do have to grind for a little bit in the very beginning at the Waterfall Cave section, otherwise the final boss of that area can wipe your party out quite quickly. If I recall, there’s a small section of healing water you can keep drinking from to restore your team’s health, making this place perfect for grinding, and, at the time, it certainly seemed necessary.

Dragon Fantasy (Book 1) is made up of three different storylines and a strange one-off inspired by all things Minecraft. Ignoring the latter and focusing on the former, of the three separate but connected plots, one storyline, by its very design, requires you to grind a whole bunch before you can even get to the first dungeon and safely explore it at a decent clip. In Ogden’s storyline, he is an old, washed-up man out to make a name for himself again, but that means fighting all the battles by himself, which is slower and more grindy than the other two campaigns. It meant fighting battles until Ogden was nearly out of health, run to the nearest inn, spend some gold to heal, and go back out to do it all over again. Not the most exciting time, but I ended up playing a lot of Dragon Fantasy (Book 1) while watching Netflix or Giant Bomb videos.

The first hour or so of Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is both magical and devastating, and not just because something terrible happens to Oliver’s mother. I’m talking about the area just outside the Golden Grove. It still gives me the shivers to this day. The monsters here are so powerful and aggressive that your small team of nobody really doesn’t stand a chance, and so you have two options: run and hope to avoid every fight, or go back into the woods and grind a bit for levels, money, and health-restoring items. Naturally, me being me, I ran for it. Which was not very successful for the first few attempts, though I did eventually get out of the area, only to find myself in an even more dangerous spot, though much more suited for grinding.

Oh boy. Now, truthfully, I only stopped playing Phantasy Star II because the cold weather is here, and the Xbox 360 is in the living room, which gets no heat for the whole horrid season, and so it must wait until the snow melts before I can get back into it. And by it, I naturally mean grinding for levels and much-needed moolah while trying to figure out exactly where to go next. Thankfully, the music is so good that it makes grinding more pleasant than not, but it took me forever just to reach the first Bio-Systems Lab areas.

Hey, remember Eternal Sonata? I sometimes do. Beautiful grass in that game, and it’s not every day you come across an RPG so heavily themed and dedicated to that theme. I mean, really…Polka is a terrible name for a young girl. But whatever. Every now and then, I think about going back and playing it some more. But that would mean starting over because I got to that ghost ship section and found myself severely under-leveled with no hope of gaining enough levels quick enough to defeat…uh, the boss Captain Dolce. From reading up some walkthroughs, it sounds like I messed up and didn’t spend enough time aimlessly grinding when I could. Oh well.

I’m sure if I spent some more time looking through my collection I could come up with another five to ten RPGs that are grind-heavy early on, but I need to end this post somewhere. If you have one I missed talking about, let me know about it in the chat! That is, if you can spare some time away from your efficient, but meticulous level-gaining strategy.

Alundra dreams about one obtuse puzzle at a time

According to an online walkthrough, I’m just about halfway through Alundra. And yes, I’m playing with a guide at my side; if I didn’t, I would have given up on the action-adventure Legend of Zelda wannabe sometime back during the saint puzzles in Lars’ Crypt. Or maybe even in the Coal Mine. No doubt about it. But like a bad dream, I’m jumping around and getting ahead of myself. Let’s take it back to the start, just after the awesomely anime cutscene that reinforces the fact that this was most definitely made in the 1990s by Matrix Software, a Japanese video game development company from Tokyo.

The story, while cliché in places, like collecting a bunch of crystals via one dungeon at a time to stop a big baddie, is actually kind of interesting: Alundra, the silent protagonist you control and name of the game, is an elf from the Elna clan of Dreamwalkers. He comes to Inoa after getting shipwrecked, but also because of a recurring dream where a mysterious figure calls him “Releaser” and says he must save the villagers from the evil wizard Melzas. After a while, the people of Inoa begin blaming Alundra for all of the terrible happenings despite his earnest attempts to save them. It’s a pretty straightforward and rather serious story, with some goofy moments and characters now and then, such as Bonaire, the surfer dude and his dream of winning over Sara, a bodacious babe.

I can’t recall if Alundra was ever called “the Zelda killer” though I do know that phrase was used around Dark Cloud, which was not at all a Zelda killer, but did eventually lead to a fantastic sequel that I still need to beat one day, but only after I restart and get all the vital photos along the way. Sorry, got distracted. To get to the point: Alundra is no Zelda killer. Far from it. If anything, it’s a Landstalker/Zelda clone, but much harsher, with subpar controls, and doesn’t give a lick if you can’t figure out its puzzles. Sure, you are traveling across an open world, slashing grass, tossing bombs and pots, charging your sword up for a more powerful attack, and gaining new powers after specific dungeons that can help you advance in the next one, but that doesn’t mean you can toss away your yellowing copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past now that Alundra is in your life. We all know that Charles Caleb Colton said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” and I’ll leave it at that.

Just kidding. Alundra is not terrible, but it’s probably one of the more frustrating games I’ve played in a long time, and I really don’t know how people played this back in 1997 without a helpful walkthrough at their side. I’ve had to look up just about every puzzle past the first few dreams Alundra jumps into, and it’s not because I’m a mindless idiot; in fact, I’d like to think I’m fairly smart, intelligent enough to figure out many point-and-click game puzzles. For many of Alundra‘s puzzles, it’s not all about figuring out the solution, but also executing the moves to get the job done. There’s a lot of platforming- and timing-based moves you have to do to open the door to the next room, and unfortunately, Alundra does not move very well. You can only walk in four directions, and the jumping never feels good. Run is assigned to the triangle button, but it is useless because you can’t run and jump–only run. Plus, there’s a lot of depth perception going on in hopping from one column to another, and oftentimes, if you miss a landing, it means starting the jumping all over again, usually from much earlier in the process. That’s my biggest hurdle here: identifying what jumps can and cannot be made.

A couple of negative nitpicks include that while you pick up new armor, like boots and chestplates, these are not visible on Alundra. Fine, I can let that slide. Not every game is about that, but unlike The Legend of Zelda, you can’t even see what gear you have collected in your inventory menu. You just have to remember. It is automatically found and applied, which is disappointing, especially since you get a decent jingle when opening treasure chests and defeating dungeon bosses. I like seeing everything I’ve found along the journey, whether it is useable or not. Fighting enemies is tedious due to Alundra’s inadequate ability to move fast, as well as move and attack at the same time, leading me to avoid combat in most cases.

But despite all that, I’m still really curious. About everything. Just to see what happens next, what special tool Alundra will earn, and so on. It’s probably because I’ve been dreaming myself of playing this game for so long, ever since I read about it in some nascent issue of PSM, but by the time I got around to being able to buy videogames at my leisure, stores no longer carried PS1 games. Flash-forward many, many years, and you can now find Alundra on the PSN for a couple of bucks, and dang it, I really need to know if it was worth all the waiting, all the hoping. Given how much frustration I’ve already encountered eight or nine hours in, I’m thinking no, but one never knows, and I’d rather see it to the end and know for sure then spend some more years living in uncertainty.

GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH: Treasures of the Deep

My childhood best friend loved animals, especially reptiles and all kinds of fish. I don’t know if he still does, as our relationship fell apart during the college years, and one day he just vanished from my life. I’d like to imagine he works at a zoo or is a veterinarian, but thanks to the magic of Facebook stalking…I know that’s not true. For most of his birthdays, I’d get him a couple packs of whatever new set of Magic: The Gathering was out (the Invasion block era if you want to pinpoint it), but one year I got him a videogame, one that I thought played directly to his interests–Treasures of the Deep.

I don’t think he liked it or played it very much, as eventually I ended up borrowing it from him–y’know, like people do all the time with the gifts they give loved ones–and then later traded it in with a bunch of my other PlayStation 1 games when it was clear the birthday gift was not missed, not a winner. Hence, it being a game I regret parting with.

In Treasures of the Deep, which kind of sounds like an Indiana Jones subtitle that I’m sure Shia LaBeouf would love to steal without crediting, you play the part of Jack Runyan, an ex-Navy Seal who has become, naturally, a freelance underwater treasure hunter.  Your main objective is to complete 14 varied missions ranging from disasters, such as things going awry on oil rigs or a plane crash, to simple exploration type missions, like scouring the wreckage of a sunken ship for goodies. Along the way, you can pick up as much treasure as you can find; once a mission is complete, Runyan can use this golden booty to buy more weapons, equipment, and upgrades for SDVs (swimmer delivery vehicles) or submarines. By capturing rare sea creatures in nets, you can also earn extra money.

Similar to Colony Wars, another game I regret parting with (post still forthcoming), the game had a real sense of place. You’re underwater, and you felt that constantly. Plus, you’re not just in some ocean; there’s real-life locations to see, like the Bermuda Triangle, the Puerto Rico coast, and the Marina Trench. Dolphins sing, your radar beeps, bubbles escape, and the water swooshes to create a laid-back atmosphere, backed by a moody soundtrack-stirring ambience. I have both a fear and fascination with large bodies of water, able to find it extremely relaxing and also terrifying and full of unseen monsters. I don’t want to dive too deep, though I do want to know what’s down there. That probably explains why I can only remember the very early levels in Treasures of the Deep, as I played it extremely safe, keeping close to the surface. My recent time with Hero in the Ocean reminded me warmly of those early missions.

Unfortunately, the sad truth hidden in this post is that it’s currently a lot easier to get a copy of Treasures of the Deep back in my life, but it’s really the childhood best friend I want. Unfortunately, that priceless treasure sunk to the dark bottom of the ocean years ago, that fateful Thanksgiving break, and is now buried and irrevocable, with no radar map to help.

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GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH is a regular feature here at Grinding Down where I reminisce about videogames I either sold or traded in when I was young and dumb. To read up on other games I parted with, follow the tag.

GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH: Star Gladiator Episode I: Final Crusade

It’s the year 1997, and I’m playing a fighting game set in the far-flung year of 2348 with wide eyes, unable to take in everything it is showing me. The outrageous characters, the stages with the power for ring-out victories, the zany powers, the futuristic and unique weapons, the way that one alien could grow to three times his size, filling up the majority of the screen like some Super Metroid boss. As a teenager with a ripening imagination, it was some pretty cool stuff. Star Gladiator had the honor of being one of a handful of strange fighting games I owned on the PlayStation at that time, rubbing elbows with Bloody Roar 2, Robo Pit, and X-Men: Mutant Academy.

I read somewhere once that Star Gladiator was originally supposed to be a Star Wars fighting game, and you can see the roadmap clearly in Hayato Kanzaki, the rebellious young bounty hunter who wields a Plasma Sword in battle. Or perhaps you can better see the lines blurring with Gamof Gohgry, a brown-furred alien that looks a bit like a certain non-English-speaking Wookie. If you squint, you might be able to find a few other striking similarities between the two franchises. Though Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi did eventually get made.

The plot is surprisingly convoluted and as follows, which I will openly admit to looking up. In 2348, humans have established contact with various alien civilizations, and life is good. Everyone has healthcare, the government hasn’t shut down, old age kills people, not guns, and so on. Humankind is able emigrate from one planet to another. Unfortunately, there are still some problems with several alien races, forcing the Earth Federation to create Plasma weapons to help protect the Earth from possible outside threats. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Edward Bilstein uncovers the secret to humanity’s “sixth sense,” a technique for capturing the energy of the human mind, harnessing it as an energy source called Plasma Power. Eventually, the Earth Federation learns that Bilstein experimented on innocent people, immediately arresting and exiling him from Earth, imprisoning the physicist on a satellite orbiting Planet Zeta. Four years after this, an Earth Federation army base was attacked by a small group of rebels calling themselves the “Fourth Empire”; surprise, surprise–Bilstein, who had built himself a powerful cyborg body and escaped from his satellite prison, is their leader. Panicking, the Earth Federation puts out a call for anyone able to utilize Plasma Power and put an end to Bilstein. This project is codenamed…y’know it, Star Gladiator.

Anyways, it’s a fighting game. You select a character, start on the left side of the screen, and you fight. Every character has two attack buttons for their weapon, a kick, and guard defense. You can do combos and special attacks. Battles take place on a limited 3D plane, with ring-out as possibility for victory, something that I’ve loved every since first playing Virtua Fighter in an arcade. The character’s weapons make each fight unique, and I remember enjoying Saturn’s yo-yos, Franco’s rapier, and June’s rings the most. Interestingly enough, depending on how fast you fly through the arcade mode to the final fight with Bilstein, Star Gladiator either ends with a false ending or it continues on with a special battle against an unplayable computer-controlled Ghost Bilstein. Losing to Ghost Bilstein results in both a bad ending and a game over, but defeating him will open up the character’s true ending.

Everyone remembers the cheat code for extra lives in Contra on the NES, but I also took the time to memorize another: Big Heads in Star Gladiator. After you select your character, immediately press and hold Right, Start, Circle, and Square until the match starts. Simple as that, and hilarious every time. Couple this mode with the character Gore that could grow in size, and well…my PlayStation was pushed to its limit, surely. You could also unlock Small Heads, which were not as effective in the humor department.

It’s a weird fighting game, but one I miss genuinely for its weirdness. Capcom dabbles in weirdness elsewhere, for sure, and not even in just fighting games, but Star Gladiator never took itself seriously and felt like a Saturday morning cartoon brought to digital life. Evidently, a sequel called Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein came out, but I never saw it. According to the Internet, it sounded like merely a minor update to the first game, with additional characters being more or less “mirrors” of the original cast. However, if you can, go with Episode 1, something you’ll never see me write about Star Wars.

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GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH is a regular feature here at Grinding Down where I reminisce about videogames I either sold or traded in when I was young and dumb. To read up on other games I parted with, follow the tag.

Grinding Down’s Chrono Cross week – Miscellaneous

Well, here we are, at the end of Grinding Down‘s Chrono Cross week. Hope you’ve enjoyed my wee analytical posts so far, and I definitely have other videogames I’d love to examine piece by piece like so somewhere down the line. Maybe Suikoden II, perhaps? Super Metroid? Unlimited SaGa?! That last one was a joke, for those scratching their noggins.

Anyways, I’ve now covered what I consider to be the big four topics when talking about this classic Squaresoft RPG: story, characters, the battle system, and music. This final blog post is meant to be a grab-all in terms of smaller topics to cover, as I still–surprise, surprise–have things to talk about when it comes to all the parts that make up the unconventional puzzle that is Chrono Cross. Hopefully I’ll touch upon everything I want to here, as I’d like to move away from the game for a bit, let it quiet down in my skull, and start tackling the next game on my list of “must beat in 2013,” which is probably going to be Silent Hill 2.

That said, on with the further musings.

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Window Frames

I remember fondly changing the color of the window frame in Final Fantasy VII from that default blue to a soft green to a zany gradient-inspired explosion of rainbow colors and loving it for the remainder of Cloud’s journey to take down Sephiroth. I wish more games allowed for fun, optimal customization like this. Now, in Chrono Cross, you can’t change the color of your dialogue box, but you can find special frames to replace the standard one. Personally, most of them are ugly as heck, but I did try out the My Favorite Martian and Shellfish frames for a tiny bit, but eventually switched back to something less eye-busting. It’s more fun finding the frames than using them, but it’s nice to the have option nonetheless.

Money

For the most part, money is useless in Chrono Cross. You acquire it with every battle, but you barely spend any of it, and I suspect that, even if you tried, you’d find difficulty in emptying your pockets completely. I wish I had written down how much I had by the end of the game, but it was probably in the 120,000 to 150,000 range, and when you consider that most Elements cost less than 500, with the highest going for maybe around 3,000, well…you have plenty of money to splurge on other things. If only other things existed or were worth it. Which leads me to our next topic of discussion…

Forging/Disassembling

In certain towns, you can speak to blacksmiths who can help forge weapons, armor, and accessories for Serge and his companions. Later on, you also get an item to allow you to do this out on the overworld map. To forge something, you need some a paltry sum of money (see above) and the correct components, and then boom, you have a new thing. Some components are harder to come by, like mythril and rainbow shell, but for the most part, you can make a lot of stuff just using items won from battle. The long and short of this all though is that these weapons and armor are not worth going the extra mile, and some are actually found in various dungeons. There are a few good accessories to make though. Disassembling breaks down weapons, armor, and accessories you’re not using into components, but you’re better off saving them for when you need to equip a new character you haven’t used yet with gear.

Component trading

Um…I have never even attempted to figure this out. Basically, you trade a certain number of Element levels for things like eyeballs, feathers, and scales. Again, just doesn’t seem worth the effort, and trading in useful Elements for components you can earn in battle which are only used for forging items, which I just mentioned are not needed…well, I…wait. What was I saying again? Um, just skip this.  There are two of these trader types, anyways, so they are easy to miss. The first appears in both Guldove and Termina (Another), and the other is in Zappa’s house in Termina (Home).

New Game+

I don’t do many New Game+, mostly because nowadays I just don’t have the time. Though some games like Borderlands 2 really make it worth the effort, offering more things to see and do and become. Chrono Trigger has New Game+, but I’ve not gone back since I beat it last year, and I doubt I will try the New Game+ in Chrono Cross.

I love this RPG, truly I do–it’s just I don’t see what the point is other than viewing alternate endings. Sure, now is a great time to go back and get all the characters you missed out on during your first run because you picked Kid over Leena or Nikki over Guile, but as I lamented earlier this week, those side characters are pretty thin personality-wise. The game will play out the same way–until the ending, depending on when you fight the TimeDevourer–so that’s not very exciting to see all over, though you can speed up the gameplay to fast-forward cutscenes and so on. Let me take that one step further and fast forward us over to YouTube to watch all the different endings and save us hours upon hours.

I suspect I will return to Chrono Cross some time down the line, but not for a long while. Couple of years, at least. And when I do, I’ll probably just play it again from the beginning on a blank save slot–because that’s how I roll. I’m thrilled to have finally experienced it as fully as I could, but now I need to move on and let this experience reside quietly in my brain until something stirs it from its slumber. When that time comes, someone please remind me to ditch Kid early on and see what world-traveling life with fishing girl-next-door Leena is like. Okay, okay…I’ll give Poshul a fair chance, too.

Grinding Down’s Chrono Cross week – Battle and Elements

It’s a pretty close fight between music and the battle system for my favorite thing about Chrono Cross. It’s like deciding which is my favorite sushi roll, when really I’ll eat and enjoy just about anything rolled in rice. That said, I am partial to asparagus rolls as of late. Anyways, I’m not sure which has the sharper edge in Chrono Cross, but let’s muse about how the fights go for the time being. Tomorrow can be all about the tunes.

Battles are turn-based, unlike the previous Chrono Trigger, which was kind of turn-based, but also depended highly on a time counter to determine who could attack first or next. Think that was called the Active Time Battle. That made those fights tense and a fight for control, but things are much more lax in Chrono Cross. You can totally stay on a single menu screen for as long as you like, planning and plotting your next move until you actually do it. I’ve read this system shares some similarities to Xenogears, but I’ve never played that.

Basically, at the start of battle, every character begins with 7.0 Stamina points, which are used for attacking, defending, and using slotted Elements. There are three types of attacks–hard, medium, and light–and each attack costs 3.0, 2.0 and 1.0 points, respectively. You basically have to make the choice of using up more points for hard-hitting attacks with a smaller chance to hit versus weaker attacks that will definitely land more often than not. Making choices like these also builds up your Element meter, which determines what level spell you can cast. It’s a fantastic balance of strategy and risk/reward.

One of my favorite aspects of the combat system is that, after each battle is over, you can use any or all healing Elements to restore your team’s HP so long as you have enough stamina points left at the end of the fight. This made progressing a faster process as one did not always have to go into the menu after every fight and use a bunch of potions–Tablets, here–to get everyone back up to snuff.

Each Element spell comes with a number, like 1 plus or minus 7. Each vertical bar in a character’s Element grid represents one level of magic, with the column on the far left being Level 1. The number before the plus and minus sign is the preferred level for the spell to be equipped, and the number after the plus and minus sign is the range that spell can be equipped. If you end up equipping a  spell higher than the preferred Level, that spell will be more effective, doing more damage–and vice versa. A character can equip any color Element spell, even though each character focuses on a single Innate color. This only means that spells of the same color as the character will be more effective and others less so. That might have all sounded like crazy-speak, but it is quite easier to grasp once you begin slotting certain Elements on the grid and playing around with what to put where.

However, not every part of Chrono Cross‘ battle system is amazing. Their summon Elements, which brings forth a giant monster to do big damage to your opponent, which was all the rage in other RPGs at that time, like Final Fantasy VII and Legend of Dragoon, are not worth the effort. First, to be able to cast them, you have turn the whole field one single color and then still have enough time and points available to cast the summon Element, which usually is only slot-able in level 7 or 8, before an opponent casts a different color Element to squander your plans. I think I used FrogPrince once, and never bothered with any other summon Elements, as you really are better off just casting normal Elements. Another part of the battle system I could not grok was Traps, which are Elements that capture an enemy’s Element. However, this process was never a guarantee, and again, just like with summons, you are actually fine without them.

Evidently, there are combination attacks in Chrono Cross, but I never had one happen in all my hours battling PortalGheist and ShadowCats. Which is a shame as I enjoyed these greatly in Chrono Trigger. To do a combination attack, both–or maybe even all three–characters must have the required Element level, as well as at least one Stamina point available. After the attack, both techniques which make up the attack will be exhausted, though I don’t know what that actually means. Looking at a list, most of these combo attacks require LV 5 and special  LV 7 Elements, which is often late-game stuff and kind of a waste to even go after. Think this aspect could have been way better televised, but obviously these attacks are not vital in completing the game.

It’s a combat system of choices, most of which don’t matter when fighting the general enemies scattered across the map, but many boss fights require you to be heavily aware of what Elements you have slotted, their color, what types of attacks you should be doing, and when you need to conserve your levels for healing, reviving, or building up for a high-powered GravityBlow. It makes the longer battles more certainly interesting and remains one of my favorite combat systems in an RPG ever. I think Final Fantasy XII‘s is a close second, but that’s about it.

Grinding Down’s Chrono Cross week – Characters

In Chrono Cross, you can recruit up to 45 different characters to Serge’s cause. Next to games like Suikoden and Suikoden II, this is a trifle number, but pretty impressive when you consider that there were only seven playable characters in Chrono Trigger–Crono, Marle, Lucca, Robo, Ayla, Frog, and Magus. It’s like the developers saw how much people enjoyed building a dream-team and took that concept to the max. Unfortunately, more does not always equal better, and while your options for team variety are certainly enhanced, they are not enhanced wildly.

Basically, when it comes to playable characters, you are selecting an Innate color. This is a color that each character has, which dictates what type of special Elements they use, as well as what their strengths and weaknesses are. The colors go as follows: black, white, green, yellow, blue, and red. I found myself trying to keep my party of three all mixed, each their own unique color, and when Lynx was in control, I desperately needed someone with an Innate color of white/green to keep the healing and reviving up. Every character can also equip armor, three accessories, and a weapon tied to their personality, such as Korcha using a fishing pole, a pick for Nikki’s electric guitar, and a magic rod for Razzly.

Clearly, the stand-out stars in Chrono Cross are Serge, Kid, Lynx, and Harle. They are the most recognizable and play vital parts in the main plot, despite how little sense it actually makes. Everyone else is, and I’m sorry to say this, dismissible. They are blank canvasses–kind of just like our leading lad, the voiceless Serge–for you to create a connection with in your own special way. I only grew attached to Fargo and Nikki and Karsh because I made the effort, enhancing the small bits of scene they actually got by doing voices and making jokes and pretending they felt emotions. Otherwise, they speak their one-liners that always added nothing to the conversation and do their part in battle.

Speaking of conversation, let’s talk about talking. It is bonkers, from Home World to Alternate World. Everyone has an accent of some kind, and some are truly zanier than others. A breakdown:

• “Normal”: Plain old English, with correct spelling and grammar.
• “Proper English”: This uses no contractions and tends to use longer words.
• “Casual English”: Plain old English, but more laidback, with words like “ain’t” and “gonna”. Kid fancies this.
• “Pidgin English”: Not very well-spoken English; for example, tends to forget articles like “the” and “a”.
• “Guldovian”: Casual English, but every time someone says “you” (like “I’m gonna get you”) they turn it into a “CHA” (“I’m gonna getCHA!”).
• “French”: Harle speaks with an exaggerated French accent, using “ze” instead of “the” and so on.
• “ALL CAPS”: SOME CHARACTERS LIKE KARSH ENJOYING SHOUTING EVERYTHING AT YOU.
• “Weird”: Starky likes to add extra vowels to words, Poshul, the talking purple dog, has a lisp, Peppor and Solt speak in condiment-themed puns, and…the Beebas.

For extra enjoyment, try reading most of anyone’s dialogue in a bad Scottish accent. You won’t feel out of place at all, I swear.

And now, some more on Solt and Peppor, the tutorial twins. These two bumbling Acacia Dragoons accompany Karsh early on in Chrono Cross, but it’s obvious from the get-go that they have no idea what they’re doing. In the other world,  they have amnesia and joined Sneff’s family show. When you first encounter them (and a few more times thereafter), they basically teach you a bit about the battle system, how to use Elements, and so on. It’s quite fun, especially because they are so hapless and rely a lot on puns. Alas, that’s all they do, and then you never really get to interact with them later on or see what happens to them. As a younger gamer, I always dreamed of a team made up of Serge, Solt, and Peppor–but it could never be.

For the most part, I used Serge, Kid, and Greco, and when the time came to switch to Lynx, I mained Fargo and Harle. Never got into Sprigg’s special ability of turning into monsters. After Serge is born anew, I focused solely on a team made up of him, Fargo, and Riddel until the final boss fell. Captain Fargo has some wicked blue attacks, as well as the ability to steal items from enemies, and Riddel, the Lady of Viper Manor, turned out to be quite the potent healer during the final few boss fights. In truth, I could have used a different Innate blue and white character in their place and would have been just fine, experiencing the last third of the game no differently.

It certainly is a strange bunch of colorful hooligans, with a few memorable standouts, but I think Squaresoft just wanted something to brag about, and 45 playable characters in an upcoming RPG sure fills that slot, but it’s a shame that most of them don’t really matter. I’d have rather seen more development with Serge, Kid, and Harle, or fleshed out a select few from the additional cast members, but we could totally lose the talking turnip, the clown skeleton, and the mushroom man and be a better Chrono Cross for it.

Grinding Down’s Chrono Cross week – Story

At the start of Chrono Cross, the story is quite thin and easy to follow. One day, Serge–place your vote on how to say his name!–slips into an alternate world where he drowned ten years before. From there, he’s determined to find the truth behind the incident. Along the way, he teams up with a spunky, wise-crackin’ thief called Kid searching for something called “the Frozen Flame.” Their goals will align quickly thereafter as they cross paths with a cat-man called Lynx who is up to no good, as cats are wont to do.

However, once you switch from controlling Serge to controlling Serge-stuck-in-Lynx, the plot becomes nigh incomprehensible. By the end, the whole thing has fallen apart, so evident that the game throws info-dump characters at you left and right in hopes that these will help shine some light on the mystery of your reasoning for saving the world. Unfortunately, they don’t–they only muddy the water more. That’s a big problem with time travel stories; eventually, trying to see everything in a straight line takes some explaining. I guess it all comes back to predestination, but I don’t really know. In truth, I sat here typing for ten to fifteen minutes, trying to summarize all of the plot in Chrono Cross, but ended up deleting everything because I can’t make any sense of it. Chronopolis, FATE, Project Kid–you win. All I know is how to slot Elements, fight bosses, gain upgrade stars, and recruit characters.

Also, still not exactly sure what went down with Harle. I mean, one minute, she’s a main player in my battle party of three, and the next she is some Dark Moon dragon I have to kill and then that’s all there is to her story. Boo on that.

And here I am now, telling y’all that Chrono Cross has quite possibly the worst ending ever. Now, understand that there are over ten endings to see in this game, but the majority of them are only watchable during New Game+. I’m talking about the two endings you can get on your first playthrough, both of which suck time-balls: the “fake” and “real” endings, as the community has come to call them. You can defeat the TimeDevourer in two different ways. The first is to just defeat him, which garners you the “fake” ending of credits and a song; the second involves casting Elements in a specific, color-coded pattern, and then using the Chrono Cross special Element to restore time. I only learned of this trick from the Interwebz, though the game gives you some vague clues about this technique, which is harder than it sounds as the boss, at any time, can cast a colored Element of its choice, disrupting the pattern. Do that right, and you free Schala from Lavos (I think?), and then get to sit back and read a bunch of obtuse, archaic white text on a black screen before reuniting with Leena as she finds Serge passed out on the beach, implying it might all have been a (radical) dream. Back to more throwaway text, a pretty song, and a video clip that maybe shows Kid looking for Serge, even in modern times. It felt pretty unspectacular, but that might also stem from my inability to follow the story coherently. For those curious enough, you can watch the whole thing here.

Main plot aside, there are some small additional stories to learn about. Namely, you can gain some heavy insight into S.S. Invincible‘s captain Fargo’s family, the Arni elder Radius has a secret past, and Marcy, a creepy kid that has somehow risen to the top of the Acacia Dragoons. Granted, these side stories are not actually very in-depth, but they help flesh out the characters slightly more than others. Like Janice, the bunny-based girl that just wants to collect monsters, because she’s in a videogame.

Kind of like with Chrono Trigger, I don’t think the story is the strongest part of Chrono Cross. It is there because something has to be there, and it offers the player the power to move between dimensions and see how people and places change, but the how and why is quite convoluted. If only the game had been as simple as finding some komodo dragon scales for a pretty girl’s necklace, as simple as stopping Lynx, the bad guy, from doing the bad thing, and going home to Arni, a peaceful fishing village, to spend the rest of your days listening to the ocean and baking in the warm sun. Instead, it went deep, too deep to surface, and lost me halfway down.

Welcome to Grinding Down’s Chrono Cross week

A few weeks ago, I beat Chrono Cross for the very first time. This was truly a momentous occasion, as I’ve played the first several hours of that game countless times over the last thirteen years since its release, always getting to a specific plot point and then unfortunately losing interest. I would then forget everything plot-wise and gameplay-wise by the time I got back to it and just start over, hopeful that that run would be the one to see me to the end. Alas, it never was, but I made a plea to myself this year that I’d beat five specific videogames, and Chrono Cross was the prime target. Well, mission accomplished.

The truth: I love this game. I know many don’t and consider it a failure of a sequel, and I can agree there that this is no follow-up to Chrono Trigger, but as a separate entity I think it is beyond fantastic, boils and bumps included. Yeah, it has its weird quirks and healthy share of problems, but there’s also a lot of neat stuff happening thanks to being able to travel between parallel dimensions and customizing Element slots for battle and gathering a large cast of characters to fight by your side. Plus, the tunes are so dang good. In fact, I believe there’s enough here to talk about to devote a whole week of Grinding Down blog posts to it. Hope you’re ready. Hope I’m ready, too.

Anyways, here are the Chrono Cross topics I’ll be covering over the next handful of days:

• Story, or the thing the writers desperately want to believe is a cohesive story
• Characters, or the craziest accents ever and look who is severely underdeveloped (spoiler: every character)
• Battle and Elements, or learning how to slot properly
• Music, or sounds made by lofty angels using heavenly instruments infused with the glory that is good
• Miscellaneous, or how money doesn’t matter, or forging for that matter, and how I’m terrified of New Game+

Yeah, think that should cover it. If not, I can always add an extra day, because in my world, I make weeks as long–or as short–as I want. So equip your best armor, slot in a bunch of GravityBlows, and bathe in the beauty that is Chrono Cross as we figure out what I love, like, and hate in one of Squaresoft’s defining RPGs from the PlayStation 1 era.

Grand Theft Auto III, my college days landmark in videogames

Everyone was going crazy for Grand Theft Auto V yesterday, which I guess makes total sense, considering that’s when it released to the foaming-at-the-mouth world. Personally, I’ve not been interested in GTA games for a long while, and my strongest emotions for the series revolve around Grand Theft Auto III, and that’s because I consider that–without a doubt–my college game. No other game save for Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, which came out a year later, reminds me so strongly of my dorm days, of long weekends avoiding papers and drinking the night away. Though the latter title also makes me think of shoulder-high snow walls and a desperate grab for mac and cheese, but I’ll save that tale for another time…

In 2001, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman in college, a hopeful art major at that, and my suite-mates got a copy of GTA III for their PS2 the day it dropped. At that time, I was still clinging to my PS1 and treasured copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, but college is all about sharing, and so we’d huddle together in our tiny, cramped dorm rooms and just lose ourselves in Liberty City, each taking turns never really doing any missions. It was all about stealing cars and running from the cops and watching your vehicle fall to pieces as your getaway plan went from grand to gravel as you smashed into everything in your way. That game encouraged emergent gameplay at every turn and rewarded you with a good time laughing like loons with friends.

Last night, I decided to remind myself of those golden days, popping in Grand Theft Auto III into my still-chugging PlayStation 2. Actually, first I checked my memory cards to see if I had any saved data on them, but alas, no. Not for any of my PS2 GTA games, which is a bummer as I distinctly remember getting pretty far into Vice City. Anyways, story-wise, the game begins with the silent criminal Claude being betrayed by his girl Catalina and getting arrested. After being sentenced to 10 years in prison, Claude  is transported across a bridge in a prison truck, which the Colombian Cartels fortuitously ambush. From there, Claude escapes and makes ties with the Leone mafia crime family as he tries to build himself back up in order to find Catalina and learn why she abandoned him.

I kind of forgot how purposely blurry the cutscenes in Grand Theft Auto III are. They actually really hurt my eyes, enough so that I had to look away during the opening moments, and I have to assume that 2001 Paul saw them as amazing and cinematic. After that, I found the game easy to pick up, and just as easy to go off the rails with, which is my favorite thing to do. I did the first few missions, which all act like tutorials. You drive and pick up a hooker, you drive over to some guy and beat the life out of him with a baseball bat, and you steal a car and get it repainted so the cops won’t know any better. After that, I drove around a bit, listened to some radio chatter, and explored the streets, which are pretty barren by today’s standards. Oh, and I noticed that the cars fall apart super fast. Like, two or three hits/collisions and you’re smoking and stalling in the middle of the road. Also, Liberty City is littered with trash. I think this was Rockstar’s way to try and fill in the empty spots, but it is weird to see the same piece of newspaper flittering by Claude every five seconds. We can also blame the limitation of the PS2 though, I guess. Maybe I’ll dip back into Vice City or San Andreas at some point, too.

Anyways, back to current affairs. Grand Theft Auto V looks like fun. Really, it does. I like the idea of three main protagonists that you can bounce around from to progress the plot and take on different mission types. But there’s a rub. I absolutely hated my time with Grand Theft Auto IV–not bothering to link to any specific articles, but if you search around Grinding Down, you can certainly find some less-than-praising remarks from me about Niko and the difficulty that game throws at you unfairly–and calling back to GTA III, a lot of fun is playing the game with others and being goofy or laughing at all the mistakes. That forthcoming online aspect might be ripe for that. Or maybe not. Until then, I’m more likely to pick up Saints Row IV first, which is more my thing these days: a weird, funny game that embraces its weird and funny bits and doesn’t need a room full of onlookers to be immensely enjoyable.