Ten mimic treasure chests I passionately hate

Treasure chests are difficult to resist. They come in all shapes and sizes, more times than not offering the potential for greatness–gold, armor, weapons, whatever. Most people don’t leave behind rotten vegetables in their fancy treasure boxes, and so you are more or less guaranteed to walk away a richer player. Unless that treasure chest is actually a mimic in disguise, and then you’re thrown for a loop, battling with what once held your dreams of a new item or chunk of change to make a down payment on that fancy, street-side abode back in the hub city.

I passionately hate mimics.

Real quick, some history. Mimics took shape back in the good ol’ days of pen and paper roleplaying, which I enjoy from time to time, but I’m more visual despite having a decent enough imagination, preferring Talisman or Descent. Mimics are a type of fictional monster, initially birthed in Dungeons & Dragons. They are portrayed as being able to change their shape to disguise themselves as an inanimate objects, most commonly as treasure chests. Mimics also have a powerful adhesive that holds fast to whatever touches them, allowing the mimic to beat the creature with its powerful pseudopods. That latter characteristic did not seem to follow over with mimics as they transitioned into videogame enemy fodder.

Over my years of gaming, I’ve crossed paths with a number of mimics, all of which I passionately hate. This is a list of some. Forward, with the disgust!

Here is a mimic treasure chest from Final Fantasy IX that I passionately hate.

Here is a mimic treasure chest from Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, called a cannibox and originally introduced in Dragon Quest III, that I passionately hate.

Here is a mimic treasure chest from Rogue Galaxy that I passionately hate. Look at that nasty blue tongue.

Here are mimic treasure chests from Rogue Legacy that I passionately hate.

Here is a mimic treasure chest from Chrono Cross that wants to punch me. I passionately hate it.

Here is a mimic treasure chest from Wild Arms 3 that I passionately hate.

Here is a mimic treasure chest from Dark Cloud that I passionately hate.

Here is a mimic treasure chest with a lot of teeth from Legend of Grimrock 2 that I passionately hate.

Here is a level 60 killer mimic treasure chest from Borderlands 2 that I passionately hate. Shoot it in the glowing green part.

Lastly, here is a mimic treasure chest from the original Suikoden, affectionately called a slot man, that I passionately hate.

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Have I missed any key mimics from some of your favorite roleplaying games? If so, let me know in the comments below. During my search, I came across a few screenshots of mimics in the Dark Souls series, which I’ve not yet played and am now feeling less inclined to deal with, but maybe they aren’t too tough to battle. Ha, that’s a joke. From what I understand, they are brutal.

Turns out, with videogames, you can go home again

I’m not one hundred percent sure who the “they” is, but they often say you can’t go home again. It’s a phrase I think about a lot, with plans to eventually draw a short little comic involving children, forest monsters, and cranky parents about the notion. At 31, with my life going through unexpectedly grand changes and my head occasionally thinking the worst of worst thoughts (a taste), all I truly desire is to go home. For comfort, for repose. My home now, meaning the one where I eat and sleep and sigh and take pictures of my cats, is characteristically cold and full of empty rooms. No, the home I’m talking about is the one I grew up in, the red-bricked, two-story structure that sat square in the middle of a T-cross section in a small, neighborly town. From my bedroom window there, I saw all kinds of traffic: vehicle, foot, animal, love.

The idea of returning somewhere can be both physical and mental. I physically want to go back into that house and sit on my childhood bedroom’s floor, my back against the wall just under the windowsill, the same way I’d sit for hours either on the phone with my high school girlfriend or killing time by playing the guitar and scribbling down mopey song lyrics. This is something my body is calling out for, a hunger pain. I also mentally want that time back, that feeling of safeness and irresponsibility, even if I rarely acted on it, and those voices, the sounds from below. It can’t really be replicated, at least not when it is constructed entirely around emotions and personal experiences, but going back, if I’m to believe A Separate Peace, can be healing.

Turns out, videogames occasionally make a good effort at bringing the player back “home.” I was recently taken aback by this, and the feeling it gave has been stuck in me, just under my skin, for a couple months now, itching to be scratched. I thought I’d write a bit about it, as well as some other games that have attempted to bring things full circle over the years.

Let it be said, and let it be said in red lettering, there be major spoilers ahead for the majority of the listed games. Read at your own risk.

Assassin’s Creed II

Let’s start with the game that gave me this blog post topic to begin with. Again, I’m coming to Assassin’s Creed II late, having only played the bread parts to this meat sandwich of stabbiness. Anyways, after completing some assassination missions and then training in a current day warehouse with Lucy, something goes wonky, and you find yourself back in Acre, the setting for the first game in Ubisoft’s now long-winded series. Not only have you returned to where it all started, you also are in control of Altair, not Ezio. Your mission is to follow a figure running away from you, and that includes climbing up a tall tower and seeing the city for all it is.

I had a moment of hesitation, believing this to be a dream sequence, the sort that you watch unfold, but take no part in. Eventually, I strode ahead, and it was business as usual, but tingling surfaced as I jogged past people from another game, another time period. I wouldn’t say I recognized anyone or any building in particular, but the feeling remained nonetheless–I’ve been here before. Strangely, if I had popped in the game disc for Assassin’s Creed, I might not have felt the same way, and I guess that says something about sleight of hand, of transportation.

Borderlands 2

The ramshackle town of Fyrestone in the original Borderlands is where it all started for your choice of vault hunter. You return there in Borderlands 2 to find it a changed place. Handsome Jack, everyone’s favorite man to hate, has turned Fyrestone into a slag-soaked junkyard since Hyperion moved into the area. At his orders, the town was renamed to Jackville and preserved to mock the original Vault Hunters, although robots were also sent in to kill any remaining inhabitants. The layout remains very much the same, but it’s darker, drearier, and, most importantly, more dangerous.

You don’t approach Fyrestone the same way you did in the first game, only realizing where you are once you are in the main area where you used to shop for shields and new guns and turn in missions on the job board. It certainly took me by surprise, but I didn’t have much time to stand around in awe as angry robots began to occupy my attention.

Suikoden II

Oops, I already wrote about this moment.

BioShock Infinite

It’s a short, but powerful moment. At the very end of BioShock Infinite, Booker finds himself in Rapture, the underwater utopia-gone-to-Hell from the original game in the series. Having recently replayed the game over the Christmas holidays, the moment did not feel as impactful as it first did, but when you don’t know it’s coming, it packs a doozy. There’s not much to explore or see while in Rapture a second time–it is, after all, just another doorway, and the game is over at this point, so no more combat to be had–but after spending a solid number of hours in the clouds, knowing you are deep underwater, in an oh-so-similar world once more is a thrill.

Chrono Cross

Okay. I’m stretching it here with Chrono Cross, considering it all happens within the same game, but visiting the same location in different, alternate timelines still does give off a nostalgic tingle. Like, it’s both the same and changed, a feeling of being out of place somewhere deeply familiar. There’s Home World, and there’s Another World. I love it. Plus, just before you go off to fight the Time Devourer, you do stumble across the Ghost Children, which are the ghosts of Crono, Marle, and Lucca from Chrono Trigger, so it’s a blast from the past, though a bit somber.

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Got any other examples of returning to locations from previous games? If so, shout ’em out in the comments below. These were all I could think of and have actually experienced thus far, but there’s gotta be more. I can’t be the only one that wants to go home again.

Doki-Doki Universe may be irreverent, but at least it’s imaginative

There exist many great RPGs, like Suikoden II and Chrono Cross, and in these also exist little slivers of additional content lovingly called side quests. They get this name mostly because they are smaller tasks on the side put upon the hero, heroine, or group while they also handle much larger tasks like killing that evil dragon and saving the world. More often than not, a great side quest can outshine the main path; for instance, take a look at the “The Power of the Atom” quest from Fallout 3, which stands out to me more some six years later than all that water-purifying monkey business with your runaway father. Of late, I really loved London Life, a kinda large mini-game bundled with Professor Layton and the Last Specter that is all about fetch side quests and ate up many hours of my life.

Well, good news–Doki-Doki Universe is a game made up almost entirely of side quests. It’s basically them, plus a handful of personality quizzes which are not as mundane as they sound and can be quite enjoyable so long as one spaces them out between helping random planet inhabitants and riding coffee mugs with wings up into space. Y’know, be sensible about your tasks like that. It’s a lot of to- and fro-ing, but I always seem to need these rather straightforward tasks in times of brokenness, so I’m really having my fill. The game is a freebie this month for PlayStation Plus users, and I initially thought it was only for the Vita, but evidently it is a cross-play title. That’s awesome, and something we need to see more with other consoles.

There’s a story here and, just like Le Petit Prince, it is both sweet and sad. Maybe not as crude as that French children’s story though. You’re robot Model QT377665, but let’s go with QT3 for short. Turns out, your human family sucks and abandoned you and your balloon buddy on an asteroid. Flashforward 11,432 days, and Alien Jeff shows up to give you some bad news. Evidently, your model is getting recalled and scrapped because the company that made you apparently doesn’t believe it has enough “humanity.” Alien Jeff is assigned the task of discovering just how much humanity QT3 is capable of before reporting back to head-honchos.

And so off you go to different, humorously named planets to solve the myriad of problems people have–and animals and talking vegetables and sentient snowmen–to learn more about humanity and gain some perspective. Space is an open map of planets, and you can visit them in any order; in fact, you’ll often need to visit other planets for additional presents to help people with some of the trickier requests early on. Most often, QT3 just needs to summon a specific summonable to finish the quest; for example, someone on Yuckers desires a smelly item, and so QT3 just needs to make a pile of poo magically appear next to them. Quest complete. Others have you either performing a greeting with the right analog stick (waving, bowing, blowing a kiss) or throwing someone like a slingshot to a specific part of the endlessly scrolling level, which is actually a bit tricky.

Besides handling simple side quest after side quest, which despite how it sounds really does scratch a specific itch, there’s personality quizzes to take and email to read. Mmm I do love a game with email, and I’ve been tinkering away slowly at a Grinding Down post about why this is so; maybe it’ll make an appearance down the road. Anyways, the personality quizzes are cute multiple choice questions, with a quick summary of you as a person at the end. They don’t always nail my personality, but are surprisingly accurate the majority of the time. These quizzes are perfect to do before you land on a new planet, too. As you grow as a robot, Alien Jeff and friends you’ve made along the way will send you adorable little emails that are animated and colorful and keep those stories going a bit longer after they technically ended.

Not all is green and dandy in Doki-Doki Universe, as I have stumbled across some very annoying hard crashes and lock-ups. These always happened when QT3 would begin to pull up the multitude of bubbles that makes up his inventory. There’s also no great way to sort through all your consumables, a problem the closer you get to collecting 300, as you can really only view a handful at a time on screen, and so if you’re trying to hunt down one specific item, best keep hitting randomize or trying your luck with the similar button. The game will occasionally log me out of PSN, too, though I know not why and how. I might have also run into a glitch where you are supposed to return to the Home planet and speak with the red balloon; alas, for some reason, the balloon is high in the sky, and QT3 can’t reach it to begin a dialogue. Hmm.

Based on how many consumables I have and how many decorations I’ve acquired for QT3’s Home planet, I must be pretty close to the end, to seeing if this little robot that likes dressing like a lumberjack has enough humanity instead to save his steely skin from being turned into scrap. It’s not a long game, but long enough for me, and I’m looking forward to finishing it up and adding it to my never-ending list of games completed in 2014. At least this one should be relatively easy to draw a comic about, since the art is more or less on my level.

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 – Music

The Chrono Cross soundtrack is simply legendary. I’ve been listening to it for years and have certainly spent more time nodding along and tapping my foot to tracks like “Termina – Another World” and “Fragment of a Dream” than actually playing the game, which, for those curious, took me just under 40 hours to see to completion. That’s saying a lot because, to drop some truth bombs here, I dislike a lot of videogame music, especially a lot of 8-bit and 16-bit stuff. It all sounds too–and forgive the phrase here–videogamey for my tastes. When I want music, I want music–strings and soaring climaxes and tempo changes and so on–and composer Yasunori Mitsuda delivers the goods seemingly effortlessly, drawing on old world cultural influences and alternating between bright and dark themes.

I’ve actually touched upon the game’s soundtrack before, back when I did a 30 Days of Gaming meme thingy. Remember that? Of course you do, ya loyal, devoted reader who I haven’t yet scared away with all my Chrono Cross jabbering this week. Anyways, here’s a link for the lazy. I will now try to think of some other things to talk about.

Over the many years of my preponderant existence, I’ve come to appreciation a couple other videogame soundtracks, but not many. Dark Cloud 2 has some solid tracks and ranges from dark, unsettling and nearly off-putting carnival-like songs to slower, prettier pieces like “Starlight Temple” and “Veniccio Coast”. Radiant Historia came with a bonus CD, as did Shin Megami Tensei IV, which I burned onto my computer and listened to a few times. And then there is Fez and Bastion, the two most recent examples of game soundtracks I’ve found myself listening to and enjoying separate from the time I spent finding cubes and shards, respectively. Supposedly Journey has a great one too, but I’ve yet to play it (though I do own it now thanks to a recently stellar sale on PSN). Other than that, a lot of music in games these days is kind of forgettable; certainly it does the job of setting the mood and blocking out background silence, but it only exists for then and there, never meant to be listened to again, unless you play that part over again.

I love that, for every town and place you visit, there are two themes: one for Home World, one for Another World. Some vary quite differently from one another, while others are strikingly similar. Take, for instance, Arni, the first town–well, it’s a fishing village if you want to get specific–that players will experience in Chrono Cross. In the Home World version, you can almost hear the waves crashing against the docks, feel the sea-carrying wind against your face, and be quite content with the day, as the song is both pretty and peaceful, perfect for running around and talking with your neighbors. In the Another World version, a piano riff takes center stage, playing nearly the same guitar part found in the Home World version, but this time it is slower, softer, maybe even a little unsure–which reflects perfectly on Serge because, at this point, he has now traveled to a different realm where he no longer exists and is looked upon as a stranger. The music pairs up like this in a couple other spots, but this is my favorite.

Thankfully, the battle music never really grows old after hearing it a couple of hundred times. I can name some other games where I’m sick of hearing the same battle theme minute after minute after minute: Ni no Kuni, Dragon Fantasy – Book 1, and Kingdom Hearts. Sometimes, a few battles are fought using drastically different songs, but for the most part it’s the adrenaline-pumping, button-pushing beat of a truly epic battle theme. Granted, it pales in comparison to Chrono Trigger‘s battle theme, but that kind of isn’t a fair fight.

It’s difficult to find something to truly dislike about Chrono Cross‘ original soundtrack; the entire compilation isn’t perfect, as some songs are too dreary to handle, but it is brimming with a sense of hopeful continuity, and that reminds me greatly of a large bedroom, once my sister’s, where I’d sit on the floor in my pajamas on a gloriously sunny Saturday afternoon, just a foot away from my television, slotting Elements and listening to this strange, colorful world, feeling somehow right at home. It stirred me then, it stirs me now, and it will continue to be an important part of my life, no matter which realm I end up in.

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.

2013 Game Review Haiku, #30 – Chrono Cross

A boy must travel
Between worlds, fight the Darkness
What a vague ending

–

These little haikus proved to be quite popular in 2012, so I’m gonna keep them going for another year. Or until I get bored with them. Whatever comes first. If you want to read more words about these games that I’m beating, just search around on Grinding Down. I’m sure I’ve talked about them here or there at some point. Anyways, enjoy my videogamey take on Japanese poetry.