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Classic Game Corner: Chrono Cross

The second, sadly final installment in the Chrono series remains one of the best and deepest role-playing games from the PlayStation generation of games. The brainchild of Chrono Trigger scribe Masato Kato, Chrono Cross ties up plotlines from the former game, expands on the plots and themes that span the series and plays with the idea of parallel worlds – one of the main elements in the game is that Serge, the silent, blue-haired protagonist, is alive in one of the game's worlds but dead in the other.

At its heart, Chrono Cross is actually a spiritual remake of Kato's Radical Dreamers, the Satellaview-exclusive text-based game that served as the original follow-up to Chrono Trigger. Satellaview is a satellite modem add-on for the Super Famicom that allowed players to download games and receive streaming voice broadcasts that would play only during certain hours, like interactive radio dramas. Satellaview was developed to compete with Sega's Sega Channel. Like so many of Nintendo's innovative hardware ideas, it was short-lived and didn't even come to the United States commercially.

Chrono Cross features a massive cast of characters – 45 in all, requiring multiple plays through the game in order to recruit all of them (recruiting Guile, for instance, prevents the player from Pierre, and choosing to save Kid's life prevents the player from recruiting Razzly or Macha).

Chrono Trigger fans can find plenty of hidden connections between the two games in the series – several characters have direct links to characters from the first game (Chrono Cross's Leah, for instance, is the mother of Ayla) and the first game's Big Bad – Lavos – appears as a major element in Cross's plot. However, creator Masato Kato has revealed that, despite some enticing similarities, Glenn is not the knight Frog from Chrono Trigger, nor is the magician Guile an alter ego of Trigger's Magus, putting years of fan speculation to rest.

Although Kato states there are no plans for another game in the series, Square-Enix still holds the trademark for Chrono Break, the planned third game in the series that was never given the green light. If you need your Chrono fix, you can still find copies of Chrono Cross at GameQuestDirect.com!

If you're gaming hardware won't accommodate the PS1 classic, then check out Chrono Trigger DS and revisit the legend that proved Square could make quality games that didn't have Final Fantasy in the title.