Chrono Double Feature

In doing the Thematics series, it’s important to remember that video games rarely use trained writers.  At times this works out; while the people behind Final Fantasy aren’t writers by trade, they clearly has some idea of the process, and in the end it’s simply easier for a non-professional like myself to sift through the work.  Other times?  If we’re honest, we have to admit that there are no deeper meanings or threads binding the stories together, at least not in the mind of the fellows putting dialogue together.  But of course, humans as an animal are if nothing else pattern seekers, and as such it’s entirely possible to come away from a nominally shallow story with much the same sort of impression as one clearly written with advanced technique in mind.

This brings me to today’s subject, the Chrono Series.  When I considered my next project, people immediately recommended Chrono Cross, because “you can talk about CC at the drop of a hat anyway”.  Which is probably a fair point, but I don’t think the failings of Chrono Cross at the writing level mean much without talking about Chrono Trigger.  But in considering CT as its own article, I was unsure the game was actually written to have strong central themes.  So in what follows, I’m not entirely sure if I’m stretching in order to strengthen my point later or seeing a legitimate aspect of Chrono Trigger’s story, but I think you’ll agree it makes a lot of sense and fits with what’s in the game.

The Chrono series, taken as one game following logically from the other, shares one primary trait; strong environmentalist overtones.  Seriously, look at Chrono Cross; the cast is new, the setting is a tiny subset of the world we later learn didn’t EXIST until after Chrono Trigger’s plot resolved, the storyline until very, very late could be easily mistaken as completely unrelated, the mechanics of magic are entirely different, and the central plot gimmick has shifted from time warps to cross-dimensional rips.  Hell, they entirely changed the gameplay and the artist of Chrono Cross isn’t even trying to put his work in line with Akira Toriyama.  So at this stage in the discussion, you should be ready when I say that even the thing these two games have in common are done very differently.

See, the aforementioned environmentalist overtones directly influence the overall themes of both works, but each has a drastically different message to take away from it.  We start with Chrono Trigger, since we want to establish firmly the mindset Chrono Cross was meant to be a sequel to.  In as much as Chrono Trigger is about anything, it’s really about self-determinism (to use the term colloquially.  There’s some psychology-specific uses that aren’t entirely accurate here).  You get this a lot in time travel stories, but the simple notion that there’s no such thing as Destiny, that the free will of intelligent beings shape the future, is essential to Chrono Trigger.  A freak accident might send them spiraling through time, but from there everything that happens happens because someone chose to do it.  Marle’s uncanny resemblance to Leene erases her from history, Crono saves Leene to put history back on course.  Crono is imprisoned unjustly, he breaks out (or Lucca stages a jailbreak, doesn’t change the basic premise).  And the big one.  The trio find themselves in a grim future.  They press forward, determined to understand where and when they are.  They see the dismal remnants of the human race, and do all in their power to help them.  They seek as much information as they can on the calamity that befell the world.  They find their answer; well beyond their own lifetimes, an evil so ancient and powerful they can hardly understand it rains untold destruction upon all life.  And three teenagers refuse to accept this.  The world doesn’t deserve such a fate, and they know that no doom is written in stone.  History CAN be changed, and they WILL do it.

It’s simple, it’s powerful, it’s perhaps the cornerstone of what makes Chrono Trigger and it’s cast so beloved.  Naturally, the rest of the cast follows a similar arc.  Frog starts the game rather mopey, feeling himself a failure for not saving Leene, letting Cyrus die, and so forth.  The turning point comes when, seeing the reforged Masamune, he decides to grab hold of his destiny and face Magus in his keep.  Robo takes this to levels TV Tropes would call being a Determinator; reprogrammed deep within the Mother Brain’s factory, he rejects his ‘default’ identity entirely to remain loyal to the party.

The remaining party members already show strong traits of the self-determinism theme.  Ayla from the outset acknowledges she’ll have to lead her people to war with the Reptites.  Magus has dedicated YEARS to summoning and defeating Lavos, avenging his sister.  It’s more important to note here that both, while strong and determined, still only find success in their missions once they join the party.  This is where the idea of choosing your own destiny ties back into the overriding environmentalist concepts.  In addition to an overtly environmental set piece, the reforestation of the desert sidquest, at heart the entire plot has a clearly environmental subtext.  Everything in the game ultimately comes back to Lavos.  But what is Lavos?  Well, he’s a space-faring monstrous thing which feeds on life force at a planetary scale, who crashed into the planet some 65 million years ago.  Ultimately, after his landing, Lavos is at the heart of the conflict in every era.  His corruptive influence poisons Queen Zeal, triggering the fall of the magic civilization.  Consumed by vengeance, Magus builds his armies and attempts to defeat him in 600 AD.  1000 AD, as we learn, is basically idyllic.  He personally destroys all civilization in 1999.  By 2300, Lavos’ spawn feast off the pitiful remains of the planet’s energy, while his very presence sends the surviving machines to genocidal heights.

So let’s ask again.  What is Lavos?  Corruption.  It saps the very life of the planet.  It influences all living things, stealing what evolutionary traits aid it, to further its ends.  At the height of human civilization, the Kingdom of Zeal inexplicably decided to switch from the slow, steady power of the Sun to the raw magical might of Lavos.  Soon the entire civilization became devoted to exploiting more and more of Lavos’ power, culminating in the Ocean Palace disaster.  Lavos’ very existence killed off an entire race of intelligent dinosaurs.  In short, Lavos is a sort of shorthand for technology and greed running massively out of control, destroying everything in its wake except the handful so amoral and corrupt they see it as beautiful, such as Queen Zeal in the time we know her.  And before that sounds too preachy, just keep in mind that the party uses magic too, and magic as it exists in Chrono Trigger descends from the post-Lavos Zeal Kingdom.  Nevermind the presence of Lucca and her inventions which enabled the adventure to go anywhere at nearly every turn.  It’s not technology unto itself which they fight, but the cancerous, out of control greed of it.  And going back to Ayla and Magus, it’s something they have to accomplish together.  Each individual, their mind firmly set on their goals, has to choose to work together to defeat the embodiment of technology gone wrong.  We choose to make the world a better place, and we can only succeed when we work together.  Not deep, but powerful, and fitting for the crown jewel of 16-bit gaming.

Chrono Cross meanwhile is complex.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate.  Chrono Cross is written with many branching plots and shifts in tone and direction, as well as containing some of the twistiest plotting in RPGs.  I mean, this is the game where the primary antagonist steals your body midway through the game and you’re stuck as a cat-man for roughly half the game’s running time because of it.  But in taking everything I know about the plot and trying to boil it down to the central theme… well, I kept coming back to this.

And that’s not entirely fair, but neither is is inaccurate.  While a few key set pieces in Chrono Cross really do cross into MAN! territory, in particular every single permutation of the Hydra Swamp and the Dwarf migration that results from it, a good chunk of the game really has nothing to do with nature or the fundamental failure to respect it embodied in human-kind.  But that majority portion of the plot deals, and this is actually mind-blowing if you were playing the game and didn’t know how it ended, with being the sequel to Chrono Trigger.  Yet somehow, even that really ends up being a diatribe on the failures of humans.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Skipping some parts here and there, because Chrono Cross has an absurd plot when you start trying to analyze it and I want to retain some semblance of focus, let’s walk through the basic plot arc.  We’ll make some slight detours along the way for MAN!, of course.  We’ll start after the opening Dream Sequence.  Serge wakes up and is more or less immediately harassed into getting a necklace for his girlfriend.  Naturally this involves hunting down and slaughtering young lizards until their mother shows up when the genocide finally make her pick up and notice.  On the beach, Serge’s girlfriend shows up, and has an extended monologue to the effect that everyone makes decisions each day that determine their fate, and looking back on the past, and the decisions they made to reach where they are now, is how everyone will spend their futures.  So… once you decide something, or do something, the consequences of it stay with you forever. It’s pretty early in the game, yet we’ve established a massively different mindset from Chrono Trigger.

At this point Serge is sucked into another world.  In this world, he is dead, drowned as a child.  We’ll come back to this later.  Ultimately Serge is railroaded, one way or another, into helping a perky stranger named Kid into invading Viper’s Manor, base of the local lord.  It ends badly, Kid is horribly poisoned by her nemesis, Lynx.  This leads to the first branching point, whether or not to save her.  If you save her, you go to the Hydra Swamp, kill everything within, and destroy the environment.  If you don’t, you skip ahead to the next plot arc, Kid lucks out massively and someone with the cure wanders by, and hunters do all the killing for you off screen.  In either case, there’s multiple detours here, many of them optional.  The one that isn’t is… fighting a ship full of ghost pirates.  Aside from setting up Fargo’s character arc, which will be more important later, I really don’t get this.  Actually, I do, but that’s really something to save for a review of Chrono Cross.  An optional quest worth mentioning here is the Water Dragon Isle.  You have to walk through a volcano to progress the plot, and figure the Water Dragon might have something for the whole air temperature over 1000 degrees issue.  Sorry, I meant the walking on lava issue.  Silly me.  Anyway, when you arrive, the Dwarves of the Hydra Swamp have invaded the native Fairies in search of a new homeland.  And by invaded, I mean genocide.  After fighting off their mobile siege tank, and by all evidence killing off the Dwarven race, you get the blessing of the Water Dragon.  Hurray!  Also the sole surviving Fairy (unless you saved Kid and recruited another one) screeches at you to get off the island, you horrible murderous MAN!  Not, y’know, person who saved my life from the dwarves, but “I totally believe everything the people who wiped out my race said and DEATH TO ALL HUMANS”.

Detour and trek through lavaly lavanous lava later, we advance the plot in Ft. Dragonia.  Now, this is the point in the game at which you switch from Serge to Lynx but ultimately?  Nothing about that is actually relevant at this stage.  Sure, there’s a reason Lynx needed Serge’s body, and obviously the fact that you’re a furry supervillain affects how the plot progresses, but we’re going to let that sit for now and jump ahead.  Apparently, gaining Serge’s body gives Lynx the power of Dread Lord Cthulhu, and Serge is banished to a dark dimension.  Here, since he already has no idea what’s going on, Harle gives him an extended monologue on his situation.  She explains that, because he is now in Lynx’s body, Serge is in fact Lynx.  Perception is reality, and to reject reality is beyond a meager spirit like Serge.  Following his rather fatalistic conclusion that was probably also a proposition, Serge and Harle make their way back to the real world via an Escher painting populated by Paper Mario rejects.  Now, for the next bit of the game, we’re on Serge’s Home World, where the vast majority of the previous section was in Another World.  The Home World is rather dystopian in its way, with most places under control of the Porre military, complete with guards on every street corner, the demihumans of Marbule live under borderline slave labor conditions aboard Fargo’s pirate ship, and so forth.  Serge discovers that, because he’s not Serge anymore, he can no longer cross between dimensions, so he’ll need to figure out how to fix that in order to chase down Lynx.  Just roll with it.

After recruiting his village elder using his pure, innocent Serge eyes which clearly don’t belong to feline supervillains (though I suppose travelling around with a Harley Quinn expy would make anyone look like more of a supervillain), our crew discovers they should totally seek help from the elder of Marbule.  Now, the Elder basically mops the floors on Fargo’s ship, and he’s rather bitter about the whole human race.  Though at least this is less MAN! and more “Fargo is a dillhole and it’s made me angry about my lot in life”.  They fight a bit, afterwards Serge’s incorruptible pure pureness convinces him to send them towards the Dead Sea which somehow will weaken the barriers between dimensions… um, sure, let’s move on.  In the entrance to this fabled place, we see… the Masamune!  Holy crap, an unambiguous connection between this game and Chrono Trigger!  Or was that confused?  the Masamune radiated pure evil that could kill people with its sheer evilness in Chrono Trigger, right?  Maybe someone slipped some of these plot points in as a metaphor for Chrono Cross in general.  Anyway, Elder Radius claims we’ll need the Einlanzer, some sort of draconic holy blades, to counter the Masamune’s deadly radioactive evil.  Thus we go to the Isle of the Damned, and seek out the grave of Garai, Radius’ badass partner and father of several characters I haven’t mentioned yet.  Turns out, Radius actually kinda straight up stabbed Garai in the back under the influence of Masamune’s emo rays, so Garai has become an angry holy spirit of vengeance who will murder anyone in Radius’ general vicinity.  You win, presumably condemning him to eternal damnation due to being a supervillain, and use the Einlanzer to banish the Masamune.  Woo hoo!  Let’s go to the Dead Sea!

Now, the Dead Sea is where Chrono Cross actually takes the time and establishes itself as a sequel to Chrono Trigger.  The way it does this, while explained in the game, isn’t done in a very coherent way.  The essence of it is that, the way the series uses time travel, there are a relatively limited number of ‘true’ timelines.  In fact, a large part of Chrono Cross’ endgame involves the idea that you need to merge the various dimensions seen throughout the game into a harmonious timeline.  Now, in the natural order of things, when an existing timeline is averted due to time travel altering the future, it is not merely erased, but displaced by the emerging timeline.  The timeline which no longer exists (to use a relevant example, the Lavos-devestated 2300 AD seen in Chrono Trigger), it’s displaced to a sort of temporal graveyard referred to as “The Darkness Beyond Time”.  It would similarly be where Marle was sent when she negated her own lineage in Chrono Trigger.  So while it’s still ‘there’ in some sense, the displaced time no longer has real substance or definition.

The Dead Sea is basically a case where aspects of that un-existence crossed over with a legitimate timeline and left bits and pieces of deleted history in the material world.  As such, lots of different areas, mashed together rather nightmarishly, comprise this very large dungeon.  While bits of it actually are the aforementioned 2300 AD from Chrono Trigger, allowing us to see the deserted highways of that timeline, as well as an unambiguous connection to Chrono Trigger in the form of the computer terminal which originally told Crono, Lucca, and Marle about Lavos’ rise and his destruction of the world, other bits are mixed in as well.  A relatively modern mall makes up a large piece of it, and in the end we see Nadia’s Bell, christened during Chrono Triggers best endings.  The implication, and later outright statement as we’ll see in a moment, is that somehow the future arising from Lavos’ defeat in Chrono Trigger was also erased.  How?  Apparently Serge did it.  How?  He caused the Time Crash!  What’s that?  I have no fucking idea.  It’s a dropped plot point.  It never makes any goddamned sense.  Apparently, the fall of Guardia was triggered by time travel, but nothing in Chrono Cross explains that this happened or how the supposed Time Crash did it.  In fact, it makes so little sense that the DS release of Chrono Trigger just implied that Dalton, our favorite comic relief villain, did it.  Maybe the Time Crash let him out of the Darkness Beyond Time?  Fuck if I know.  Anyway, let’s watch, and we’ll get our lead-in to more logical parts of the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x-M1xaFYSU&feature=related

If you watched the whole thing, you also saw Miguel’s big speech, in all its fatalistic glory.  This of course is partly to set up the next phase of the game, FATE the evil computer, but it also has some similarities to Leena’s speech way back at the start of the game.  Probably not coincidental that Leena is Miguel’s daughter.  Able to cross dimensions once again, you make a brief detour to help out the Dragoons, then settle into tracking down and enlisting the aid of the six dragon gods.  This basically boils down to a series of non-linear side quest that you happen to have to complete.  The only one really worthy of note is awakening the Black Dragon, which actually involves completing (unless you fucked it up earlier) the Marbule quest discussed back when you had to track down the Sage thereof.  Basically, you blast the shoreline with the power of rock to materialize monsters, then kick ass.  So wait.  We’re actually averting natural disasters now?  We’re doing the direct opposite of MAN!?  Holy hell.

But more interesting than any of this, about this time is when the Masamune sidequest opens.  I haven’t been talking about them, but the Acacia Dragoons are pretty much the only cast members with dedicated plot outside the nonsense passing as the main narrative.  The gist is that the greatest among them, Dario, was lost at sea.  As it turns out, he and Karsh, the most active among them, discovered the Masamune on the Isle of the Damned.  Dario became possessed by it’s evilly evil evilness, and Karsh was forced to strike him down.  But thanks to one of those Schrodinger’s plot devices, in the less FATE-controlled Home World, Dario actually survived this trip, washing up on a tiny island.  When you work all this out and try to restore his memory, however, the Masamune shows up and boss fight!  Serge’s awesomeness, however, purges the blade of its evil once you win, causing Masa and Mune to start talking.  They’re joined by their sister Doreen and join up with Serge’s weapon, forming the Mastermune.  Here’s the thing, though.  The implication is that, for whatever reason, the spritely dream spirits which gave the Masamune it’s power were completely dormant for a long period of time, quite possibly since the conclusion of Chrono Trigger some 20 years prior in in-universe time.  So… because the sword was just a weapon… why was it pure evil again?  It was just made of a rare rock, Dreamstone.  That certainly wasn’t inherently evil.  Meaning… because the good dream spirits weren’t active, the blade took on some other emotions?  I mean, it’s a bit of a leap but the only reasoning I can think of here is that, without Masa and Mune, the sword took on the spirits of its wielders.  In turn meaning that… humans are pure evil.  Ha!  Thought you could sneak a MAN! past me did you game!?  A pox on that.

With all the dragons awake, apparently it’s time for Serge to get his body back.  This basically involves going to Ft. Dragonia and using the shattered remains of two different magical crystals to do the job.  Seeing as just one of them did the body swap in the first place, this makes at least slightly more sense than several other plot twists.  But rather than stealing his body back or something, Serge is actually treated to a brief history of the world.  Keep in mind, this is a fort built by dragon-folk, who are basically to CT’s Reptites what modern man is to cave men, so there’s a different perspective at work.  Anyway, they essentially exposit about Lavos’ landing 65 million years ago, and how his presense, and that of the Frozen Flame, directly accelerated human evolution, leading them towards being dangerous tool users who wiped out the dinosaurs and are a grave threat to the planet itself.  And then Serge is sucked into the reformed crystal, reduced to a fetus, and rapid aged back into his 17 year old body.  Naked.  Faaaannnservice~

At this point it’s time to fight FATE.  We’re given rather a large info dump here.  FATE is the sentient computer governing things at Chronopolis, a human city from the year 2400 AD.  In essence, it represents the culmination of the future written in Chrono Trigger, human civilization advanced without the catastrophic rise of Lavos in 1999.  Because this future was not a desolate wasteland, when the Zeal Guru Balthazar arrived in 2300 AD, he found a functioning society and as such his experiments were greatly enhanced… right up until the point an experiment sent the entire city thousands of years into the past.  This, apparently, is that whole Time Crash thing.  I’m not sure what that has to do with Serge.  Being so far into the past, FATE used its extensive history archives to try and ensure its own future came to pass, sealing off the El Nido islands to keep itself hidden and manipulating people into making the ‘right’ decision.  Anyway, Chronopolis was apparently deemed a deadly threat to the very planet, so it retaliated by dragging a similarly advanced dragonian city back through time to do battle with the humans.  The humans, who had control of the Frozen Flame, won anyway, and separated the dragonian super advanced computer into constituent parts, the… dragons we awakened earlier.  Well, that won’t come back to bite us.  Anyway, when Serge was injured as a toddler, his father stumbled onto Chronopolis and Serge became registered as the Arbiter of Time, and gained sole access to the Frozen Flame.  Sooo FATE really needed that back to do the whole governing humanity, plus of course Serge existing was causing a major dimensional rift which negated FATE’s ability to control events in the Home world.  Which means… that the world where the egomaniacal computer controls people is pretty well off, while the one it’s mostly locked out of became a bit of a dystopian hellhole.  I’ll come back to that.  Anyway, FATE’s a bit loopy at this point, so we fight to the death and win.  At which point the dragons attack and steal the Frozen Flame.  Damn.

At this stage in the game, Kid has gone catatonic.  Since we need to kill some time before going off to the final dungeon, we decide to help!  Apparently, her catatonic state is actually caused by a temporal paradox masquerading as trauma, because we have to time travel back to when her orphanage was burned down and save her to wake her up.  Yay, honest to god time travel in a Chrono game!  We could wait a bit and use the Mastermune and a portable black hole to do this, but we’re actually supposed to use the game’s central plot device, the Chrono Cross.  It apparently has the power to mind meld you and break rules of temporal fixation.  Neat.  Anyway, it’s behind a waterfall the game admits exists exactly once prior to this.  Because Chrono Cross really wanted you to get a non-ending and not know a fucking thing that happened, as though trying to hide how sloppy the writing was.  Anyway, time travel, save Kid, good stuff.  The important thing for this article is what happens after.  Once Kid’s woken up, you can retrieve a letter left for her by Lucca, as in Lucca the Great, mistress of space and time and an actual, non-stupid Chrono Trigger reference… or so we think.  Actually, her letter basically talks about the implications of displaced timelines, and how Lucca was convinced that eventually someone from deleted time, or perhaps someone from a more depressing part of the timeline she created, would travel back and take revenge on her.  I hate this game sometimes.  Yes, surely some point in the future would be worse than “The entire planet was eaten by a lovecraftian nightmare and the burned out husk was ruled by insane robots who systematically wipe out everything left”.

Final dungeon.  It flies.  You beat up an amalgamated dragon god.  That’s not the interesting part, although there’s more than a little MAN! content scattered around.  No, the stuff we want is in a room right before then, when we meet up with Balthazar.  Turns out, he was the wizard who did it!  Seriously, the game makes this claim.  Everything, from Lynx stealing your body, your near-drowning splitting the dimensions, Porre’s invasion, the struggle between FATE and the Dragons thousands of years ago, all of that?  Balthazar.  How?  Oh god don’t ask that.  Why?  Well he tells you that!  He needs you, Serge, to be able to get the Chrono Cross.  Because Serge, and only Serge, can use it, and he needs it to defeat the real villain… Schala!  Okay, so technically, Schala partially merged with either Lavos or a spawn, and the actual goal is to use the Chrono Cross’ mind meld powers to harmonize the universe and shatter the connection between her and Lavos-ish influence, saving her and getting rid of a being that apparently can destroy all space and time simultaneously.  So moving forward again, we defeat the dragon god, then go back to the beach where everything started.  We see the Chrono Trigger ghosts again, where they make stupid revelations for the sake of it.  I chose to ignore that for now and go to the final boss fight, wherein you have to use every element in a specific order to play the game’s theme song and thusly defeat the villain.  And then Schala monologues for a bit on the value of individual life and impregnating planets, and announced that we got the Ocarina of Time ending!  Yep, the dimensions remerge, nothing in the game except freeing Schala ‘actually’ happens, and Serge gets to live his live as a normal person.  I’m so tired suddenly.

So, know what the theme is?  I don’t blame you.  But the running constant here is consequences.  Humans take action, and the repercussions ripple out forever and a day.  All the MAN! stuff is, obviously, humans.  The convoluted plot with FATE and the Dragons?  Balthazar.  The semi-dystopian Home world?  Without FATE controlling people, human actions lead one into another until it was a military dictatorship.  The entire plot of Chrono Trigger?  Consequences so dire that it threatened TIME ITSELF.  More than one character espouses outright fatalism, yet always it is emphasized that you take action, and the consequences go on forever.  I know it seems kinda weak, but the plot is so muddled that there’s really little more to take away from it.  A big production that goes on for hours and says next to nothing.

But let’s go way back.  This is the sequel to Chrono Trigger, a game about self-determinism, cutting a path through history to write your own fate.  Chrono Cross, we come away with the idea that… everything people do have consequences, and because humans themselves are evil, those consequences are similarly always evil.  I just… don’t even know how you get between those two ideas.  I know that, in the very end, Chrono Cross tried to show human action having positive effects, and Schala espouses the idea that all life can have a positive impact on the world, but so much time is spent showing how evil people are… it rings wholly false.  In the end, we have two thoughts.

Chrono Trigger tells us that we have to make the world a better place.

Chrono Cross tells us that everything we ever do will ruin something, and nothing we can do will ever make up for it.

You tell me which one will be fondly remembered in 20 years.