The Stack

Spoilers follow the break.

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And here’s our first you-are-a-zombie game of the year. Will there be more, like in 2010? Spoilers follow the break.

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Spoilers follow the break.

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It’s that time of year again! In fact, it’s been that time of year for more than a week now, but now I’m ready for it. A manageable 28 games up for judging this year, and the few I’ve already tried have been quite short, so I encourage anyone reading this to give it a go themselves instead of just reading blogs about it. (If you can play four a day, you’ll be done in a week!)

Notably, seven of the entries — fully a quarter of the total — are HTML-based, and five of those are in a new CYOA system called “Twine”. Inform is still the most popular authoring system of the Comp, but Twine is more popular this year than all the other non-web-based systems combined. Whether this is the beginning of a trend or just a band enthusiasts agreeing to enter the Comp together, only the future will show.

It took me a while to complete the side-quests to my satisfaction, and it’s entirely due to one area: a lost city peaceful reptites (humanoid dinosaur-folk, seen elsewhere as enemies) that managed to survive in a hidden valley until medieval times. What happened to them after that, I don’t know. These reptites host a seemingly endless series of fetch-quests in their hidden valley over the course of two eras, but they don’t really have enough land to support it. Consequently, they send you running through the same few areas over and over, running into the same few unavoidable encounters along the way. It seemed very much against the spirit of the game as described in my previous post, and it turns out there’s a good reason for that: this entire section is an after-the-fact addition. It’s extra content put in for the Nintendo DS version, which is apparently what the iOS port was ported from. In other words, it’s there for the True Fans who love the game so much that they just want to keep playing it indefinitely, not for newcomers like myself for whom seeing new stuff is part of the appeal. So I ditched the reptites and got on with the main quest.

I still did things the long way, mind you, going through the final dungeon known as the Black Omen to reach Lavos instead of just time-jumping directly to him. It’s a pretty long dungeon, and it leads into what has got to me some kind of record-breaker for the number of distinct stages in a single boss fight ¹I guess it’s got some competition in Final Fantasy VIII, though, which essentially makes its entire final chapter into one long unbroken string of boss stages. This makes me suspect that later JRPGs which I haven’t played may take things to even greater extremes. (some of which, I understand, are skipped if you take the shortcut in). It starts with a difficult-to-survive fight with Lavos’ chief minion, then repeats every single gimmick boss you’ve fought in the entire game before pulling out a couple of new tricks. Between stages, you get to take a break and apply restorative items, like a boxer going back to his corner at the sound of the bell, but you don’t get to save the game until you’ve reached the end of the recapitulation sequence. I imagine it would be quite frustrating to lose at the final stage of that sequence and have to start it over from the beginning. That may be why the deadliest part is in the very beginning, and also may be the reason the designers let you short-circuit most of the encounter.

After winning the final encounter, there’s a certain amount of ending material, and it’s pretty satisfying stuff. Two of my favorite types of endings are ones where the story comes full circle, putting you into a similar situation as the beginning, and ones where there’s a big party in celebration of your victory. Thanks to the Millennial Fair, Chrono Trigger gets to do both at once! It’s nighttime at the fairground now, time for christmas lights and fireworks, and ultimately time to leave the fair and go to bed. Thematically, playtime is over. Even if Crono and crew deny this with their actions: playtime is never over when you have a time machine! And I suppose this is mirrored in the way that winning the game immediately opens up “New Game +” mode, even conspicuously showing a cutscene of new time rifts opening.

Speaking of bedtime, there’s a loose theme of dreaming around the whole work. The mystics of antiquity have an entire city devoted to the art of dreaming, with people asleep in beds out in public, a juxtaposition that would be dreamlike even if it weren’t specifically about dreams. Conversations in that place contain odd comments about how creatures born of dreams must return to dreams and such, which seemed at the time like it might be leading somewhere. And I didn’t much like where it seemed to be leading. The game starts with Crono waking up at home to the pealing of bells, and this is echoed a couple of times later in the game — in particular, right after defeating Magus, there’s a brief scene of Crono waking up at home in a world where he’s apparently married to Marle and trying to hold down a job instead of having adventures. Was the whole story a dream, and that moment our only glimpse of reality? It would make a certain amount of sense: with time travel, you have the possibility that most of the story will have been wiped from reality by the end, so who’s to say that it was ever more than a dream? Fortunately, the game doesn’t take it that far. The dream stuff is left vague; saving your state at the end for New Game + yields the description “Dream’s End” in the save slot, but to the extent that the story is a dream, it’s all a dream, all equally unreal.

Just one more thing I’d like to note before bidding Crono goodnight: there’s more to the nostalgia factor than I was aware of when I wrote about it previously. One of the side-quests triggers a conversation about the origin of the time gates, in which it’s speculated that they were created by some entity’s desire to see “the days of its past”. It’s a hint of a mystery. What entity? Given all the folding-back of plot elements, it feels like this should be resolvable by attentive consideration of what we’ve seen. But consulting the Internet, that appears to not be the case. There are fan theories, but nothing definite, even after two sequels. I guess it’s just there to let you know that you don’t know everything, no matter how many times you’ve replayed it.

But then, the expectation that you’d replay brings to mind the meta possibilities, such as that the “entity” is the player. This doesn’t fit the first time you play the game, of course. But even I, a person who doesn’t really intend to replay the game at all, have played about half of it twice (not counting micro-restores resulting from TPKs). This fits with the dream stuff, too: if the whole story is a dream, surely it’s the dream of any real person experiencing it.

Having rescued Crono, I’m at the point now where all I have left to do is finish up any side-quests I feel like doing, then jump into the final battle.

I actually polished off a few of the side-quests before rescuing Crono, because I suspected that bringing him back might be the point of no return that leads into the endgame, but that turned out not to be the case. I was also worried about forgetting all the unfinished business I had all over the world in different eras, and was all set to lament the lack of a quest log in the classical JRPGs, but it turns out that Gaspar, the guy at the End of Time who you can go to for guidance about what to do next, keeps a list of what you haven’t done yet.

As for jumping into the final battle, this has actually been an option for most of the game. At the End of Time, where you have access to all the other portals, there’s a portal directly into a fight with Lavos. Apparently the ending you get varies according to what stage of the plot you’re at when you beat him. Now, if you try to fight him the first moment he’s available, obviously you’ll be severely underpowered, lacking the experience and equipment that the rest of the game brings. But I’m told that people have managed it, presumably by doing lots of extra grinding in the areas that are accessible beforehand. You’d really have to love the game to do that. Me, I’ve come to like the game, but one of the reasons I like it is that it’s largely grind-free. Just progressing through the story yields enough experience to keep pace with the difficulty curve without repeating fights. (So at last I have the reason that so many of the fights are avoidable: so you don’t have to repeat them if you don’t want to.) Also, rather unexpectedly for someone trained on Final Fantasy, there are no random encounters. Each dungeon has a fixed set of monsters, that don’t respawn unless you leave, at fixed locations, and the overland map doesn’t have any monsters at all. So, although you can grind if you really want to, the game doesn’t seem to expect it.

Which suits me fine. I intend to finish the game by weekend’s end.

Yesterday yielded good progress. I’ve got to the point where, like in every Final Fantasy, you acquire a flying machine that allows easy access to the entire map. Unlike the typical Final Fantasy airship, this one is a time machine as well, meaning you don’t have to go trudging back to the rifts any more and can easily scan through the same location in different periods like it’s Time Zone or something. You actually get access to the time travel capabilities before the flight, and when the characters learn it can fly too, they’re surprised. The player is not. It looks like it should fly. I was surprised when it didn’t fly right away.

I’m pleased by the way the plot is turning out at this point, and so I’m going to spoil it heavily. (I’m also going to spoil a few Final Fantasy games for comparison purposes.) Like in the best time-travel stories, everything is folding together. Things that seemed arbitrary turn out to have histories. Characters you meet in one era turn out to be older, time-displaced versions of people you’ve met elsewhere. When an amulet that’s been in your inventory since near the beginning of the game can be charged with the same magical energies as one held by a forgotten monarch in ancient times, it’s not a coincidence: it’s the same amulet.

There are two particular twists that I want to describe. One is something that I was anticipating: Magus, the putative mid-game bad guy, joins the party. This is probably the hardest spoiler to avoid in the entire game. Any article or wiki page that even just lists the playable characters is going to give this one away. Anyway, it got me wondering: are villains who join your party a JRPG thing? FF7 and FF8 both had brief sections where you adventure with the enemy, albeit the FF7 one was in a flashback to before he went bad. It also got me wondering if Chrono Trigger was the one that did it first, but apparently the Fire Emblem series had been doing similar things for five years already. Feel free to correct me on this, though.

Magus can’t really be said to “switch sides”, though, any more than the superheroes in the classical mistake-each-other-for-criminals scenario switch sides when they team up afterward. For all his gothness, he’s really just misunderstood. Mind you, he’s mainly misunderstood by his supporters. In Chrono’s home era, in the unaltered timeline, the monsters of Monster City revere Magus as a hero for almost managing to summon Lavos, the apocalyptic monster responsible for destroying the world in the future. They talk about finishing what he started and sending Lavos to destroy humankind for them. But Magus wasn’t summoning Lavos to use it as a weapon. He was summoning it because he wanted to kill it. He understood what Lavos really is: a planetary parasite that fell to earth eons ago, burying itself underground to consume the planet’s energy from within, then controlling people who sought its stolen power.

Also, it’s the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. But apart from that detail, this story reminds me a lot of Jenova in FF7. Or, to be honest, it reminds me of what I read about Jenova after the fact. When I actually played FF7, I didn’t get a very clear idea of Jenova’s backstory, and when I encountered detailed explanations elsewhere, they left me wondering just where all this information came from, whether there was stuff in the game that I had missed or whether it was all out-of-band. Right now, I’m starting to suspect that other people picked up on the story more easily than me because they had already played Chrono Trigger, which tells it much more clearly. Chrono Trigger lets you witness the backstory firsthand, including the bygone-era parts.

The other twist I want to mention is the big one: the death of the main player character. This actually took me somewhat by surprise. Oh, I knew that someone was going to die. I had seen some mentions here and there of how fans were unprepared for the death of — and then I’d turn away sharply before reading any further. Even if I hadn’t seen such things, the imminent death of an unspecified party member is prophesied within the game itself. But I was really expecting it to be Marle.

Why Marle? Largely because Lavos had got me noticing similarities with FF7, and Marle seemed similar in various ways to Aerith, FF7‘s party member who dies. Marle and Aerith are both healers, they both have a significant family background that they’re keeping secret (Marle’s a princess, Aerith is the last living descendant of the Ancients), and they’re both strangers who attach themselves to the party after meeting and flirting with the protagonist while he’s alone (and sprawled on the ground). On top of that, rescuing Marle when she’s in danger is the initial goal that sets the whole story into motion, so it seemed like her death would be the one of greatest dramatic significance. Well, except that of the protagonist, I suppose, but how likely is that?

Losing Crono is an explicitly temporary thing: no sooner is he gone than the other playable characters start trying to figure out how to resurrect him. But in the meantime, you have a sudden shift in the nature of the game. Up to this point, Crono had been a constant presence, the one character who was always available for use while others shift in and out. You come to rely on his abilities, like how he has really useful combo moves with everyone. With Crono and Marle together, I had a cheap and oft-used way to give light healing to the entire party. I kept looking for that in Marle’s combo menu for a while when it wasn’t there any more. Magus essentially replaces him in the party roster, but doesn’t get any two-person combos at all, which says a lot about their differences in character.

I’ve finally broken new ground in Chrono Trigger, passing the point where I left it three years ago, the boss fight against the Magus the Fiendlord. Magus is a fake end boss, kind of like in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: the story sets him up as the big bad rather than a sub-quest like most of the bosses up to that point, but there’s just too much unexplored territory for it to be believable, and indeed beating him just kicks off more story complications. Also like in Castlevania, you have to make your way through a large and spooky castle filled with undead to reach him. That, I think, is part of why I chose to stop playing there. It felt like the game’s premise, its variability of environment, had promised something fresh and interesting, but it was spending an awfully long time at being just another fantasy RPG. And it really does drag it out, making you battle three sub-bosses and multiple repetitive minion sequences before reaching Magus himself. It’s the sort of thing that really makes me appreciate how zippy the rest of the game is.

The other reason had I stopped there is that Magus is simply a really difficult fight. I may well have seen more PC deaths (or KO’s really) in this one fight than in the entire rest of the game, including a couple of boss fights that come afterward.

Boss fights in Chrono Trigger are by and large trickier than what I’m used to from Final Fantasy and the like. Those are generally pretty straightforward: all you have to do is figure out how to do the enemy enough damage to kill them before they kill you. Special resistances and vulnerabilities can affect this, of course. I recall one boss in FF4 or FF5 that kept on changing what sorts of damage it was vulnerable to, which is one of Magus’s tricks as well. But even there, the correct approach was to figure out the cycle and then repeatedly hit with the correct damage type, fast and hard. Chrono Trigger seems determined to make this approach inadvisable.

Mainly it does this with counterattacks: if you just hit the enemy as fast as you can, you just wind up dying faster yourself. And it can take a while to figure out that this is going on, because it isn’t necessarily obvious that an attack is a counterattack. You just have to take it slow and observe what happens to figure it out. Observing the enemy’s actions can be crucial in other ways as well. For example, there’s one fight against a spellcaster where you’re told in advance that you can disrupt his spellcasting with a specific one of Crono’s sword techniques. As a result, Crono spends much of that battle sitting and waiting for a spell to disrupt, even though he’s the team’s best damage-dealer.

The fight against Magus goes through two phases. In the first, he only does major damage in his counterattacks, so once you’ve figure that out, it’s easy to take control of the battle and keep your guys healed. The game plays a bit of a trick on the player there: hitting Magus with the Masamune Sword lowers his defense stat, but I didn’t realize this for a long time, because (a) it only does it on a normal melee hit, rather than the special techniques that do more damage, and (b) the only character who can wield the Masamune is also a healer, and thus often busy dealing with the aftermath of those counterattacks. After you do a certain amount of damage to Magus, he shifts into the second phase, where he drops the magical shields and just casts a very powerful damage spell at you repeatedly. I got through this by making sure my healing kept pace with the damage, but the amount of warning the game gives you whenever he starts to cast the spell makes me wonder if there was a trick that I was missing, something like that disruption effect described above.

I’m guessing that most people who bought Chrono Trigger on iOS are people who have played it before. Heck, I qualify at this point, but I’m really thinking of the people who played it as children, back when it was new. And happily for these people, Chrono Trigger, whether by accident or design, has a certain amount of nostalgia appeal baked in.

The bombastic main theme is first and most commonly heard within the game in a variant played on tinkly piano and pennywhistle, a wistful piece in a minor key suggestive of childhood memories. Which is appropriate, because the core crew consists of children. Crono, Lucca, and Marle, the first three player characters you get, all live with their parents. Crono’s mother in particular treats your adventures as if you were just going out into the yard to play with your friends, and honestly the whole story seems like the sort of thing that children at play would make up — particularly since most of it, taking place in other time periods, is unconfirmable.

Further playable characters, while not necessarily children, still have childish characteristics. Frog, we learn, was just a squire to a great knight before his transformation. Robo, a robot that Lucca repairs, is a new mind in an unfamiliar world. The first adult to join your party is the prehistoric warrior-woman Ayla, who’s still childish in her ways, particularly her emotional directness: she declares that she likes Crono seconds after meeting him. She’s definitely not the grown-up of the group, but I call her an “adult” because she looks like a Playboy model in animal skins, probably inspired by Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.. I’m impressed, by the way, with how much distinct characterization this game manages to put into so few pixels: Crono’s rambunctious forcefulness, Lucca’s awkward grace, and Marle’s cheerleaderish enthusiasm all read very clearly in their posture and movements. With Ayla, its innocent sexiness and an improbably immaculate blonde coiffure.

Which brings us to the essential element of nostalgia: the sense that things are better in the past. Ayla and her people are strong enough to fight dinosaurs, and the equipment you can obtain from them, despite being ostensibly primitive, is far more effective than stuff from the present or future. Even a mere 400 years in the past, when the last great war against the fiends took place, was a time of valiant knights and glorious battles, which the humans ultimately won. Soldiers from the present wouldn’t stand a chance against the monsters back then. We know this because we’ve fought both. The future? The future is broken. The domed cities lie in ruins, where the scattered survivors of the human race lie slowly starving to death. Once you see what lies ahead, your goal is to prevent it. To make the future more like the past.