Chrono Cross-huh? (spoilers)

[Elok]

Yes, yes, I know, Console Games SUCK! Square/Enix SUCKS! Real gamers roll dice and masturbate while staring at suggestively painted metal figurines! Whatever. If you are one of those people, please start a different thread and whine in that. This one's mine.

I am aware of the quasi-controversy surrounding Chrono Cross; it's the sequel to the (arguably) best RPG made for the SNES, but it couldn't be more different in style, and so on. Me, I think it's different but not exactly bad, as long as you don't expect the exact same game in 3D. My beef is with the plot. Chrono Trigger's plot was quite simple and it practically held your hand through the few tricky parts. So far as I can tell, CC's plot is:

Serge was badly injured at around age three by a feline monster, at which point his father took him out to chronopolis, which he had conveniently stumbled upon. For some reason, Robo's lock on the frozen flame decided it liked him, and refused to take orders from anyone else from that point onwards.
At age ten, his life was again endangered, and in one version of CC's alternate reality, a weird fusion of Schala and Lavos from the future felt sorry and sent a clone of itself (Kid) back in time to save him. In the other version he died, hence the discrepancy between the two worlds.
Kid later pulled him into the other world to try and fix the inconsistency of split reality which arose from her error. Somehow Wazuki, Serge's dad, wound up becoming Lynx in one world. God knows how or why.

Couple problems:

Why the heck did Lucca want to set up the El Nido experiment in the first place? She wasn't a control freak in the first game, and there seems to be no scientific purpose in manipulating people like toys. What was the point?

Where did Belthasar come from? He was insane and dead as of the end of CT. Is this some alternate reality version of him, and if so which one, as he supposedly invented the system which caused the alternate-reality problem?

What's the frozen flame? It's powerful, it's magical, it apparently has something to do with Lavos, but where was it discovered and what's it actually good for? Why did Prometheus/Robo like a three-year-old Serge enough to give him and only him unrestricted access to the secret?

And so on. Is there any explanation for this stuff anywhere? The game doesn't seem to mention it anywhere. Any guesses, even?

[ZargonX]

Oh, cripes, it's been such a long time since I played through the game... let me see if I can answer some of your questions:

-Honestly don't remember the answer to the Lucca question. Have to check on that.

-Belthasar was the same Belthasar. Remember, this is time travel we're dealing with, so even if something already happened, it might not have "happened."

-The Frozen Flame was the heart of Lavos. It was discovered after Lavos was destroyed (I think), and had the dimension/time-travel properties, thus making it a must-study.

I recall there being some very excellent essays written analyzing the Chrono continuity; I'll see if I can find the links.

Also, if you like Cross, you might want to consider checking out Baten Kaitos, which comes out next week, which has a lot of the same development team working on it.

[ZargonX]

http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/chrono_cross_story.txt

That's a very in-depth story analysis, albeit with a lot of conjecture.

[Vlad Antlerkov]

GameFAQs doesn't allow direct linking to FAQs. Here's the Chrono Cross site:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/psx/game/24058.html

[ZargonX]

Ah, thanks VA!

[SnowFire]

Oh man. It's been awhile, but my main complaint about CC's plot was its hideous story-telling style, where massive, MASSIVE plot points are casually referenced in one line and much time is wasted on ultimately irrelevant fetch quests. Not to mention that many psychotically important points are completely optional!

Let's not even get to the shabby way they treated the Chrono Trigger characters, killing them off stage. Yeesh. And the big "talk on the beach" where you get tons of plot cheerfully recapped for you without actually playing through it. And how Magus didn't even appear despite the focus of the game being saving Schala. Yeah.

Somehow Wazuki, Serge's dad, wound up becoming Lynx in one world. God knows how or why.

Wazuki got too close to the Frozen Flame, was it? Or Harle? It's been too long. The point is, he somehow came under the control of the forces of the Dragons, which wanted to break into Chronopolis and defeat FATE. They changed his form to look like the monster that scared Serge when young so that he'd be appropriately terrifying to Serge. That's it. Although not that this makes much of an impression on us, since Serge is silent! This kinda worked in Chrono Trigger, since Crono was just an enthusiastic stand-in for you, and not a particularly plot-relevant character aside from wanting to save the future. Having Serge be silent would be like having a murder mystery without a narrator/investigator... bizarre.

Why the heck did Lucca want to set up the El Nido experiment in the first place? She wasn't a control freak in the first game, and there seems to be no scientific purpose in manipulating people like toys. What was the point?

She didn't, I thought. She merely recognized the problem that perhaps some inhabitants of the future they killed would rather a miserable, Lavos-dominated world in which they exist rather than a nice happy future in which they don't. This was expanded upon by scientists in 2500 or so, and THEY created the El Nido project, and FATE, as a weird time-bubble thingy to cage up the Dragons in. They also seem to have taken a lot of Lucca's work and used that as their basis for their projects, meaning Lucca was truly ahead of her time, especially considering her fairly short lifespan.

What's the frozen flame? It's powerful, it's magical, it apparently has something to do with Lavos, but where was it discovered and what's it actually good for?

This is more a hazy impression than a fact, but if the Dragons had captured it, they could have changed history to make that weird Dinotopia alternate future where the Reptites ruled and nature was dominanat blah blah blah instead of the future where humans rule and nature is squashed and FATE exists.

Baten Kaitos

...has a fine soundtrack, which I downloaded and listened to (same guy as who did Star Ocean 3, Valkyrie Profile, etc.- Motoi Sakuraba). However, it looks incredibly cliche for a plotline from what the official website shows- the reverse direction of Chrono Cross.

You might try posting this in the General Role-playing forum of www.ffonline.com , where I generally go to discuss console stuff. Be warned, there are definitely more idiots there than at 'poly, but there are some people who know/like CC more than I who could help more on this.

[Elok]

Eh, I already saw that FAQ, and it didn't really help, but thanks anyway.

I meant that it's implied that Belthasar helped Lucca and Robo set up Chronopolis "after" the events of CT, and you couldn't beat CT the first time through without finding the Nu that inherited Belthasar's marbles. The team never even properly met Belthasar before he got sucked through time into 2000-something AD, at which point he proceeded to work in isolation until he went nuts and died, leaving his will in the Nu. There is no time-stream in which Belthasar is acquainted with Lucca & co. while still in his human form. And yet he is in 1020 AD, or some computer-controlled replicant thereof, in human form, with total knowledge of the past including things that happened after he "died."

And if Lucca didn't set up the experiment but only theorized it somehow, that makes one wonder why exactly Robo/Prometheus got built into the locking process. Didn't they imply that she worked with him to set it all up? It was really hard to sort through the babble in Chronopolis, so maybe I read it wrong. Who knows.

I never remembered them saying what exactly the frozen flame was except that it had something to do with Lavos somehow. Seeing as Lavos was blasted out of time, and supposedly beyond all possibility of influencing anything, I can't imagine them finding a chunk of him. Which is why the talk of the "backup plan" it pulled off with time warps and jerking around Chronopolis was hard to swallow. You'd think Squeenix would get the developers to make a comprehensive statement or something.

Oh well, I guess we were not meant to know.