Current Events > Reminder: Chrono Cross's storyline is a shitstorm of a mess SPOILERS

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Chrono Cross is probably the only JRPG I've ever played that I legitimately could not figure out what the hell was going on. And I must have replayed it 20 times.

Punished_Blinx posted...

I think there is a bit of a weird charm to both Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy VIII where things just rapidly change and happen with barely any rhyme or reason. The story is nonsense, most characters barely matter outside of a couple of scenes but you're just along for the ride. It's like several plots from different games combined into a 'sort of coherent but not really' mess.

Games that messy, varied and ambitious just don't really exist anymore.

I can get behind this assessment. As a kid and teenager I really appreciated how wildly imaginative and borderline-random these games could be, even though adult-me recognizes that it often came at the cost of a coherent story / tone. I recently said that one of my favorite moments from FF8 was Balamb Garden taking flight - the heroes are desperate and out of options with seconds left until annihilation, Squall gets pissed, pounds on the control panel, and the whole fucking school turns into a hover-fortress. I loved it.

Along similar lines, the Dead Sea from Chrono Cross is still one of my favorite areas in gaming. It didn't make a lick of sense to me plot-wise as a teen and still doesn't to this day, but the severe lurch of tone paired with the oppressively grim aesthetic really stuck with me in a good way.

FF8 and Chrono Cross suffer from what I affectionately call "Tetsuya Nomura Syndrome" (although he wasn't directly involved with CC). In which the story probably made sense to a middle schooler who watched too much anime in the mid-90s.