Trigger was indicative of the childlike potential to shape the future. Trigger was a game that felt forward-thinking and optimistic it dared to change the future, to rage against the dying of the world and sail triumphantly through a firework-lit night sky. It’s about being an adult and, amidst all those crummy adult problems, wistfully longing for youth.īy re-contextualizing classic Trigger motifs in a story concerned with the consequence and responsibility, Chrono Cross generates nostalgia for its predecessor. With Trigger so hard to ignore in Cross’ visuals and historical context, I ultimately longed for the comfort provided by the former. Players expecting continuity from Trigger are instead left feeling uneasy in a new setting that features foreign combat mechanics and mere of a game past. The result is an utterly surreal experience, resembling a kind of somber, half-remembered fever dream far more than the plucky adventure game of yore. Why is this game in Chrono canon if the ATB system has been replaced by a confusing Xenogears thing? Why couldn’t the main cast of the last game visit any of the areas featured in this one? Nothing was even tropical in 1,000 AD Trigger! Yet the relationship between both games is left obfuscated for much of the story, causing the player to feel disoriented and left wondering how this game relates to its predecessor. Something is not quite right in the world of Chrono Cross.įamiliar Trigger iconography echoes throughout the game’s radically altered setting and art design, from pinnacles overlooking sunsets, to Viper Manor’s curiously Guardian Castle-eque parapet. While a mere call-back on the surface, this small moment sets the game’s alien tone. ![]() Without the natural line’s natural denouement, the reading feels off - like an instrument out of tune. The game starts with the player woken by their mother with Trigger’s emblematic “Wake up…” but the the protagonist is no longer Crono. While many games like MN9 rely solely upon nostalgia to justify their existence, Chrono Cross is a game about nostalgia. 9, I got to thinking about Chrono Cross - the role-playing follow-up to 1995’s Chrono Trigger - a game that wonderfully utilizes its relation to its predecessor for purposeful thematic illustration. ![]() While even my appreciation for sequels has been strained amidst the messy release of Mega Man’s spiritual successor Mighty No. It’s true that both primary and successive games are bound by convention, but they’re left enough creative freedom to subvert, experiment, or even adhere to their given form. ![]() ![]() Original works are typically stories all about establishment and the formation of identity, while sequels are invariably tethered to their predecessor. It’s natural to be skeptical in climate of exploitative, sequel-vomiting publishers, but I find the claim to be rather unrefined. The rhetoric - as best I can surmise from the nebulous internet sentiment - is that, since sequels are iterative of their predecessors, they’re hamstrung by a lack of conceptual creativity. Yet while I agree that it is important to be critical of games that resemble factory-assembled products, this wariness of the sequel has resulted in a trend that conflates sequels with an innate lack of creativity. Annual franchises treading water and industry luminaries getting lambasted for crowdfunded, half-baked nostalgia grabs have become normalized through gamers’ cynical lenses. Gamers have an understandable apprehension towards sequels.
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