I don't want Chrono Cross-contamination in my trigger, thanks.
Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).
Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.
Cross has an amazing soundtrack tho. I think this is probably the main area where didn't felt like a downgrade.
But I agree. Chrono trigger it's the closet thing to perfection in a JRPG. Just pure mastering of the craft in all areas, music, art direction, gameplay, pacing, etc.
It's not that cross it's bad, not at all, has a lot of innovation, but Trigger has a big shadow to scape.
I loved trigger, got to play it on release. I loved Cross even more. I played that one about 5 years after its release.
Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible.
Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.
Cross does look very good, I can agree to that, but there are things that bother me severely besides the story, mostly how the gameplay is designed in a way where just smashing circle will win you any battle because Serge is ridiculously strong and mandatory. The element system is very interesting but outside THOSE TWO GUYS (you know who) and the final boss, you are never compelled to use it because the fights are so easy that it's just faster to have Serge cut everything to size. If you choose Glenn over Razzli (and if you choose Razzli you have to get Korcha) the game becomes even easier. And despite the huge roster of characters most of the times it's just more efficient to use Serge, Glenn and Kid/Fargo for stealing (if you want a 100% run).
Even if you go out of your way to use your favorite characters or try to use elements it just becomes slower but not harder. There's almost no reason to use the League of Extraordinary Accents. This game SCREAMS to have something like Lufia II's Ancient Cave where you can get some thrills with those mechanics. The fixed level system really works against it.
There's potential in there, but it feels like most of the mechanics shy away from using it.
Also, despite the music being great, the battles and boss battles reuse the same theme 99% of the time, which gets tiring fast. And the regular boss battle theme happens to be the worst track in all of the game (DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU! pirori pirori pirori~ DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU!)
But the worst part is the freaking dwarfs trying to give you the eco-friendly message about how humans are destroying the environment and whatnot...despite humans not even being industrialized in all of El Nido (except for those guys outside of time) and they say that while committing genocide against the fairies with heavy smog-spewing machinery and tanks. Like give me a break... Every human settlement in El Nido is comfy nature-friendly villages and you are giving me the talk while riding a freaking tank.
The thing I like most about the PS1 era of JRPGs is that a lot of them were highly experimental. Trigger is sort of the most-polished culmination of a style developed across 8-bit and 16-bit jrpgs. Games like Cross, FF8, the SaGa games are where Square really started to experiment, and I'm glad they did.
Cross is mechanically a mess. My least favorite part is how you must equip eleventy billion elements, it's tedious as heck, and it sort of discourages you from trying other characters because even bulk-switching elements doesn't work well due to slot and native element differences.
It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I still think the atmosphere shines brightly enough to surmount these issues. It's not just that the game is beautiful, it's that the vibe is completely unique to this day, imo. FF7 also had that undertone of menace and "something's not quite right here", but there was always at least one obvious threat. In Cross, it's hard to ever put your finger on what has really gone wrong for most of the game, but you can feel in your bones that something creepy is going on. The juxtaposition between that and some of the most beautifully poignant art and music on the PS1 just hit the spot for me.
> I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?
I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good.
Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.
I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat.
I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
I would figure the reason was because calculating it based on your inventory every time it's needed would be expensive, so the developers decided to cache it, but instead of recalculating it from scratch when there's a stat change, they decided to try updating it incrementally, but I guess also imperatively. There's a string of mistakes that has to happen to lead to such a situation but it doesn't seem super unnatural to me.
I think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago.
I feel like this is particularly amusing though because as I understand it this boss is not in the original game. So on a DS which is so powerful you should never have glitches due to such technical limitations, the developers flew insanely close to the sun.
I remember the days of DOS and getting a direct pointer to video memory. And I've enjoyed the long history of video game exploits and even arbitrary code execution. But at the same time, I'm also glad that era is over. The same bugs that help you jailbreak a phone can also be the bugs that help you gain illicit access to one.
Illicit access as defined by Google / Apple? If the three letter agencies are interested in you, they don't need to exploit any bugs, they can just demand access from those two companies, and get it. To the device that you carry in your pocket 24/7, with GPS, microphone and camera.
In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!
Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.
You aren't arguing for jailbreaks, you are arguing for the phone to be in the user's full control.
Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.
Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.
Many safe languages still suffer from integer overflows. For example in Rust and C# you can pick between an exception being thrown, or silent wrapping when an overflow happens.
And in more recent games where there is Nuclear Gandhi it's because of that legend.
If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.
Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...
Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).
Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.
But I agree. Chrono trigger it's the closet thing to perfection in a JRPG. Just pure mastering of the craft in all areas, music, art direction, gameplay, pacing, etc.
It's not that cross it's bad, not at all, has a lot of innovation, but Trigger has a big shadow to scape.
Cross has this underlying sense of menace beneath the idyllic (and wondrous) atmosphere of the archipelago. I think it's incredible.
Personally I don't care much about stories in games. Most of them are awful anyways. I really gravitate towards atmosphere, and Cross has that in spades.
Even if you go out of your way to use your favorite characters or try to use elements it just becomes slower but not harder. There's almost no reason to use the League of Extraordinary Accents. This game SCREAMS to have something like Lufia II's Ancient Cave where you can get some thrills with those mechanics. The fixed level system really works against it.
There's potential in there, but it feels like most of the mechanics shy away from using it.
Also, despite the music being great, the battles and boss battles reuse the same theme 99% of the time, which gets tiring fast. And the regular boss battle theme happens to be the worst track in all of the game (DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU! pirori pirori pirori~ DU-DU! DUDUDUDU-DU-DU!)
But the worst part is the freaking dwarfs trying to give you the eco-friendly message about how humans are destroying the environment and whatnot...despite humans not even being industrialized in all of El Nido (except for those guys outside of time) and they say that while committing genocide against the fairies with heavy smog-spewing machinery and tanks. Like give me a break... Every human settlement in El Nido is comfy nature-friendly villages and you are giving me the talk while riding a freaking tank.
Cross is mechanically a mess. My least favorite part is how you must equip eleventy billion elements, it's tedious as heck, and it sort of discourages you from trying other characters because even bulk-switching elements doesn't work well due to slot and native element differences.
It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.
I still think the atmosphere shines brightly enough to surmount these issues. It's not just that the game is beautiful, it's that the vibe is completely unique to this day, imo. FF7 also had that undertone of menace and "something's not quite right here", but there was always at least one obvious threat. In Cross, it's hard to ever put your finger on what has really gone wrong for most of the game, but you can feel in your bones that something creepy is going on. The juxtaposition between that and some of the most beautifully poignant art and music on the PS1 just hit the spot for me.
> Personally I don't care much about stories in games
I cant relate to this.
Chrono trigger is a game I love because of the great story.
If you’re playing rpgs and you don't care about the story or characters…
I have no idea. Its like reading a book and saying you don't enjoy the story; you're what, just there for the physical motion of turning the pages?
No idea. Chrono cross left no impression on me. I agree with the parent post.
Would it be so wrong for someone to enjoy something in a different way than you do? Or should they be chastised for enjoying it the wrong way?
You’re welcome to ask what brings them enjoyment, to broaden your views, instead of dismissing them.
I think you were intending for novels, but poetry books typically don't really have much in the way of "story", just aesthetics. Even for novels, there are many that I primarily appreciate the prose. I love everything about the Kingkiller Chronicle books, but the prose itself is quite pleasant in isolation, and I could probably appreciate the books even if the story and worldbuilding weren't good.
Plenty of RPGs don't have much in the way of story. The story of the first Final Fantasy is nearly absent. Same with the first Diablo, and most roguelikes. Obviously, you can enjoy an RPG without caring for the story or characters, because the main point the vast majority of games is to play them.
The closest thing would be telling someone they’re reading a choose-your-own-adventure book wrong somehow, and even then it’s a stretch.
I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.
(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)
If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256.
This overflows to zero and you win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCuDk18gGRc
Agreed, there's just something really special about it. You may appreciate these guys, I've had their playlist on repeat for years while working: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p636Rw_L3XU&list=PL1FBFF9D52E7...
Thank you for sharing this - here’s what I’ve had on my playlist recently: https://youtu.be/zWeGxKsPXZ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQxH77NWEQ
OCReMix is quite good for this.
In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!
Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.
Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.
Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.
If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.
Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...