My experience with this was a long time coming; in fact, it was a long time going, as I took more than one long hiatus during my 50-hour playthrough. But it’s done now, and has a special place in my heart. This review is spoiler-light FYI!

Chrono Cross might not be what players expected out of a follow-up to seminal SNES RPG Chrono Trigger, but the overworked development team wanted to do something different, and their dreams were fulfilled with quite a unique product. It’s quite frankly a mess, but a beautiful one overflowing, pooling, congealing, with ideas and style.

CC has all the excesses of PS1-era JRPGs: grainy CG FMV, esoteric pre-rendered backgrounds, a cinematic battle camera over long animations, an incredibly convoluted story. But it’s got high ambitions too; its own innovative battle system which seems daunting at first but refreshing when you get a handle on it (although I still had a fundamental misunderstanding of it almost to the very end of my time with the game, not knowing you could select lower-level Elements than your current tier). A game world that spans two parallel dimensions, which rewards close attention to the differences. And of course, the whopping 45-character roster of available party members.

These ambitions end up becoming handicaps as they’re not realised to the full extent of their intention. There’s no traditional leveling, so fights can be pointless, and unbalanced; most fights can be won by mashing through them, facilitated by an end-of-battle auto-heal system. It’s easy to lose track of which world is which, which feeds into the confusing plot. Having such a gigantic range of characters means that almost all of them have very little development.

Part of the intent with CC was to play the game through multiple times, to experience different branches and find things you missed. In my estimation, these branches don’t seem to change much beyond locking you out of a few characters for that run, and I wasn’t interested in playing through the game again just because there’s a ton of easily missable optional content. It’s long enough as it is, even despite seemingly being truncated somewhat in development as evidenced by the incredible pile-up of plot revelations, twists, and last-second villain rug-pulls in the closing hours (not to mention sacrificed concepts like Guile’s connection to Magus). Also, the appeal of bringing new characters into scenes to see their reactions is undercut by the script, which essentially has different characters saying the same thing with a different accent, necessary for localisation text file size reasons at least but leaving the interactions feeling shallow if you do catch on to this.

A New Game + also unlocks features that absolutely should have been available by default: letting you swap out main character Serge to let another of the huge roster fill the precious third slot in battles, and an in-game fast forward button. Personally, I played this through emulation, as Square/Square-Enix has never been interested in my territory purchasing the game either at the time or through re-release. This let me abuse savestates and my own blessed fast-forward function to get through those long fights. I also closely followed a guide (the excellent RPG Classics shrine) so as not to miss anything or get caught out by a moment of choice. That’s just how I play RPGs these days, shrug.

Now I sound down on CC from all this, but I actually found the game an enchanting experience. As a fan of CT, and with my Radical Dreamers experience in mind, I got a lot out of the connections and retakes respectively. CC has a light touch with calling back to CT, until late in the game with a few of the exposition dumps hammering that legacy down. But to be honest it really didn’t need this, as what it had built for itself up to that point was very compelling.

The El Nido archipelago is a lovely place to visit, with a variety of locations that look fantastic for a PSX game, getting around the limitations of early 3D with neat trickery, pre-rendering, nice textures, and excellent use of colour. The characters that do get enough focus are fun, and uncovering their web of connections and their occasional side-plots can add depth to this microcosm. Of course, the soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda is atmospheric and studded with absolute bangers; long before I played this game I knew some of the more transcendent tracks through the local Eminence Orchestra’s covers in their Passion concert series, to which Mitsuda himself contributed. And the parts of Masato Kato’s plot that I understood were fascinating!

Seriously though, of all the parts of the game that seem to have got away from them, the story may be the biggest barrier to entry. It basically boils down to cliches of a lad from a small village setting out with his female childhood friend, discovering he’s the chosen one, and eventually killing God. But there’s a lot of twists and turns along the way. So many characters have hidden agendas, and there are plot devices and machinations that are never adequately explained, or worse exposited at you later in a text dump. After beating CC I had to consult reams of wiki articles and theory debates to try and understand concepts that remained vague or outright unresolved. But somehow for me this baffling heap of enigmas was attractive, and even though realistically it’s a sloppily told story on one level, by spurring me to research and ponder, and wonder what they were thinking or what might have been if the team had had more time, it had created an exciting level of meta-game engagement.

Chrono Cross is a product of its time, but its ambitions make it (ironically) timeless. There’s imagery here and gameplay concepts too that will stick with me for a long time, and I was left with a powerful sense of longing by the end. I haven’t even talked about the excellent mid-game twist, the self-contained scope of the game world, or the odd touches of humour, all of which I appreciated as well. But more importantly, when I think back on the game I see Lynx turning, or Kid smiling, or the ominous moons, and I know Chrono Cross has touched me deeply.