Serge has been pulled from his Home World to Another World, an alternate timeline where he drowned as a child. Almost as soon as he arrived he was ambushed by government goons of the Acacia Dragoons sent to arrest him for being a ghost, on the command of a mysterious villain named Lynx. Lacking anything better to do with his weekend, he heads up to to the Acacia Dragoons’ capital city of Termina to break into Viper Manor and confront this Lynx guy to see what he knows about all this wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey bullshit.
He’s also given his talking dog a walk and scritches behind the ears, helped a sapient occult artifact resolve his identity crisis with the power of archaeological digs and fishing, and gone on a date with the alternate timeline version of his girlfriend. He also met a thief named Kid and could hypothetically have recruited her, but also maybe he didn’t, so we’re talking about her now, when he’s more likely to do so, because some criminal expertise seems relevant now. You’ve also got to recruit someone else who’s trying to get in and wouldn’t you know it but there are three options: Help a magician climb up the cliffs in the rear, chase a rock star into a haunted forest to creep up from the sewers below, or help a foppish idiot playing hero charge the front gates directly.
We first meet Kid back in the Another Arni Village episode and it’s possible to recruit her there, but she’s more thematically relevant here and it makes some amount of sense that Serge might put off recruiting her for a while, seeing as how the game opens with a dream premonition where you shank her for no apparent reason and you might reasonably want to avoid that. After Serge arrives in Another World, main villain Lynx sends some of his government allies to kidnap him, and Kid shows up to kick their asses (so hard they’ll kiss the moon) just on the principle that these guys are bullies, laws are for wimps, and she has a personal vendetta with Lynx anyway. This is before you’ve had a chance to recruit Leena or Mojo or (in this version of the game) Poshul, so if you pounce on the chance to have a cute girl in the party, she’s your first party member besides Serge. If, instead, you turn her down, she’ll try to join you again in Termina while you’re plotting to break into Viper Manor. Even if you refuse, she breaks in for her own reasons and gets poisoned, at which point Serge will agree to save her whether the player likes it or not and she’ll join the party after she’s cured even if you’ve resisted recruiting her up to that point.
This is intentionally a break from the original game’s branching story, which locks you out of content and incentivizes you to make dumb story choices but ultimately has no impact on the narrative whatsoever. In the game as it exists, you have the choice to save Kid or abandon her to die from poison, which means you can pursue thwarting your dream vision as far as letting Kid die anyway just to give destiny the finger, and she’ll still end up getting cured anyway by a random stranger and then shows up just in time to get killed on schedule despite never having even been a member of the party. If we’re going to force Kid’s presence in the party (and we have to), then let’s do it when Kid is in life-threatening danger and Serge is compelled by JRPG protagonist instincts to save her. After you cure her, the game gives you an option to try and reject her from your party, in which case Serge explains his dream to her, and Kid scoffs and says she’s going after Lynx no matter what, so unless you plan on giving up your quest completely, you’re headed to the same place at the same time and she’s coming whether you like it or not.
Regardless of exactly when and how you recruit her, she’s a thief and needs a side quest about doing freelance professional crimes. She also has a revenge plot with Lynx that forms part of the main plot, and that could carry a character by itself, but Kid is also a thief and her criminal nature is a major part of both how she is depicted and how other people treat her. She’s even a former member of a gang called the Radical Dreamers, although that’s more of a reference to a spiritual predecessor game than a significant part of her backstory, so we’ll focus on Kid as a solo act for her side quest.
That side quest is going to have basically the same gameplay as Viper Manor from the main plot: Dungeons that emphasize avoiding enemies (Chrono Cross has enemies that are visible on the map and cause random encounters when you touch them), solving puzzle locks, and avoiding traps. They don’t have to be as involved as Viper Manor, but there should be a few of them tied together by being called, like, the Three Treasures of El Nido or something. People can talk about how they’re the most famous treasures in the archipelago and they were going to be brought together for display at the Viper Festival, but they had to cancel because there was a rumor the Radical Dreamers were going to come and steal them, and now Kid feels like she’e been issued a personal challenge. Even in the game as it exists, Kid is trying to steal the Frozen Flame, although she never even gets close to accomplishing this and the only purpose of that plot thread is to introduce the Frozen Flame as a legendary treasure so that when you later on learn that it’s a fragment of Lavos from Chrono Trigger you have some context rather than being like “yeah, I guess that’s a name you could have for a piece of Lavos, sure.”
There are three characters you can recruit to break into Viper Manor. In the game as it exists, these three are mutually exclusive because they really want you to do a New Game+. In this version, recruiting one doesn’t lock you out of recruiting any of the others and you can even come back for them after Viper Manor.
Nikki is the rock star. His dancer sister Miki can’t be recruited until much later in the game, but they’re a diva duo and they can share a side quest. Miki is also recruited in act two when you’re playing as Lynx (after a body swap, but you still have a different party), which means she can hold up that side quest while you’re in Home World. In the game as it is, Nikki is integral to a side quest where you help the demihumans of Home World reclaim their ancestral home on the island of Marbule (they never lost it in Another World) with the power of rock and roll, and we’re going to make that the capstone to a series of rock performances where you play a rhythm game of some sort, with a number of different songs.
There’s one set in Another World played at Termina, which you can play by chasing Nikki into Shadow Forest where he’s trying to find his long lost sister Marcy (he’ll be doing this kind of thing a lot), then completing the Viper Manor episode of the plot (including the part where Nikki confronts Marcy – turns out she’s an elite warrior for the Acacia Dragoons and tries to kill Nikki for breaking in, family, amirite?) and returning with Nikki to his unnamed ship. The other set is in Home World, played at the SS Zelbess by bringing Miki to the ship (docked with the Zelbess) after confronting the exiled Sage of Marbule, who then agrees (without saying it outright) to teach Nikki the song of Marbule. Completing the Another World set isn’t necessary to saving Marbule (Another Nikki plays the Termina sets, but Home Nikki plays the Marbule song), but completing the Home World set is, and the Home World set is amped up versions of the Another World set, so Another World provides good practice.
You still can’t save Marbule until you get Another Fargo back in your party. After completing the Zelbess set, Nikki will say he thinks he’s ready, but Home Fargo says the Zelbess is still unable to sail and never will be. Just like in the game as it exists, if you recruit Another Fargo and bring him to the Zelbess in Home World, he’ll take over and prove Home Fargo wrong.
Pierre is the faux-hero. He sort of has a side quest, in that he’s a weakling who can become quite powerful under the right circumstances, specifically, if you get him the hero’s sword (plus the hero’s medal and hero’s shield, but hero’s medal is trivially acquired while recruiting him and hero’s shield is straightforwardly lootable in Viper Manor, the episode of the game you recruit him for). Thing is, you recruit him in Another World, lose him when you get flung into Home World alone, and regain him when you gain the power to travel between worlds. His hero sword is found in Home World and in a location that gets destroyed behind you, so his side quest must be completed without him and then you give him the results and this apparently completes his arc to grow into the hero that he always pretended to be.
We’re replacing this with a straightforward monster hunt. Pierre seeks to prove his valor by finding and slaying terrifying monsters who plague the land on behalf of a hunter’s guild in the same style as the Final Fantasy XII hunt quests (the minimum number of hunts to serve the side quest is, like, nine, bearing in mind that the first two or three are straightforward and easy and only the last handful are typical JRPG optional content challenge level, but as long as we’re dreaming let’s imagine there’s 70+ just like FF XII). After several of the hunts he complains about how the sun was in his eyes and he’s feeling sick today and so forth, but he grows into a significantly more powerful character over the course of the hunts as well as becoming less of a fop and more dedicated to the hard work needed to become a true hero.
Guile is the magician. Early on the Chrono Cross devs planned to have Guile be Magus from Chrono Trigger, but they abandoned this idea partway through when they remembered that they resent the fact that their game is a Chrono Trigger sequel in the first place and will fulfill their contractual obligation to tie their lore into the events of Trigger exclusively by way of killing beloved characters, then go back to making the standalone game they wanted to be making the whole time.
That leaves us with the first character who isn’t just gimmicky but downright incomplete. Guile is a magician and he wants to break into Viper Manor basically just to prove that no fortress is impregnable, sort of a Houdini type. Perfectly good character, but to the extent any kind of side quest makes sense for him, it’s to break into lots of heavily guarded estates – which is exactly what Kid’s side quest already is, and it’s more fun to break into a place to rob it than it is to break into it just to prove you can.
Now I do plan on doubling some of these characters’ side quests up, but only when they’re closely related themselves. Kid and Guile might have aligned goals, but only by coincidence. They don’t know each other and have no obvious character arc with one another, the way that character sets like Nikki and Miki or Glenn, Karsh, and Riddel do. One option for Guile is to pair him with the game’s other magician (as bizarre as some of these characters get, 45 is enough that their schticks end up with a lot of overlap anyway) and give him some kind of magic show, but Guile seems less like a performer and more like an analogue hacker, plus the other magician (Sneff, we’ll get to him eventually) has a whole character arc about getting out of this kind of performance, and while that’s a specific circumstance, we still potentially want to avoid “doing a magic show” as being a big part of his side content. I’ll decide for sure when I get there.
There are two ways to weasel out of this, both of which could be used together, although neither involve any real side quest, just piggybacking off of other things. The first is to lean into the role he played in Radical Dreamers, a short game produced by some of the Chrono Cross team independently in which Kid, a mysterious benefactor named Gil, and the protagonist (unrelated to Serge but a vaguely defined ageless faceless gender-netural culturally ambiguous adventurer person, so Serge’s backstory makes as much sense for them as any other) breaking into Viper Manor to steal the Frozen Flame. Guile is a master magician who steals things just to prove that no lock is unpickable and nobody is safe, and he has a mentor/benefactor relationship with the talented Kid, who’s so fiercely independent as to resist the idea of anyone else looking after her even to the limited extent of a mentor/pupil relationship, but who’s nevertheless convinced into letting Guile help because his deep reserve of experience is undeniably beneficial. In this way, Guile can piggyback off of Kid’s side content. He can also carry Kid’s side content when Kid isn’t in the party, although he’ll object.
The second way to weasel Guile into having content but not really is to reintroduce the concept of Guile as Magus in disguise. His involvement in Viper Manor is still down purely to taking the idea of an impregnable fortress as an affront and breaking into it just to prove it’s possible, and he can still be impressed by Kid’s talent and take it upon himself to guide her growth – but also Kid bears an uncanny resemblence to his missing sister Schala, because she is a clone made by Chronopolis to intervene whenever history threatens to break the Chronopolis time loop, which is a Good Ending for humanity despite the shady methods employed by Chronopolis in the process.
In act three of the game, the second time you’re playing as Serge (as opposed to act two when you play as Lynx – sort of, you’re bodyswapped), Guile is going to have a side quest that reveals that he is Magus as well as some of the information regarding what happened to his sister Schala in order to take some of the heat off of the endgame exposition dump where the devs ran out of money and throw a bunch of NPCs to literally explain the plot to you. I’m not going to bother to work out the exact plot details until someone pays me to write a complete game script (why won’t you return my phonecalls, Square?!), but the point of the side quest is to establish that Schala has merged with Lavos and to direct the player towards combining the Tear of Hate with the Tear of Love to form the Chrono Cross to reunify the timelines, destroying the Time Devourer while freeing Schala. This is the Good Ending generally, but for Guile/Magus in particular, any other ending is unacceptable. It’s also really unsatisfying how you make the Chrono Cross in the game as it exists.
You get the Tear of Hate and the Tear of Love automatically, then you walk up to the dragon sage Steena and ask what to do with them, and she says to go to a specific place to combine them into the Chrono Cross. That place is a waterfall that otherwise looks unenterable on the world map (no label shows up to indicate it’s an enterable location), but it’s empty of monsters so you can just walk in and combine the Tears into the Chrono Cross. There’s no explanation for why this has to be done here nor does the game even explain what the Chrono Cross is for. On repeat playthroughs you can figure out that the Tear of Love is from Home World and the Tear of Hate is from Another World so combining them allows you to merge the timelines, but it’s not clear on the first playthrough, and Chrono Cross spends the first 90% of its runtime being a JRPG that straightforwardly tells you a story. You can’t swerve from that into being a Dark Souls game where it’s on you to piece the lore of the main plot together from clues and fragments. Players will be completely justified in the expectation that the plot is going to be explained directly to them at some point, because that’s what the game has been doing up until now, and there’s no way for them to guess that this specific part of the game is meant to be a mystery solved before you beat it, rather than a setup to be paid off in a mandatory story scene.
This is all a long walk towards saying that Guile/Magus has an endgame side quest that directly ties into the main plot and straightforwardly explains that combining the Dragon Tears from each timeline creates an artifact that allows the timelines to be merged and which (due to wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff) will also eradicate the Time Devourer’s essence, leaving Schala untouched.
This definitely means that this version of Chrono Cross is unambiguously running out the budget for the game as it exists, which I normally try to avoid, but that’s completely out the window for this thought experiment (the practical answer to “how should Chrono Cross have been made” is “with far, far fewer playable characters,” not “by tripling the size of the game to give its 45 playable characters enough content to justify their includsion”).
Oh, and while we’re making changes, the tear from Home World should be the Tear of Hate, and the tear from Another World should be the Tear of Love, because there’s a (possibly accidental?) plot twist in Chrono Cross where you are from the goatee dimension where everything went wrong, but for some reason they labeled the Dragon Tears from Serge’s perspective instead of the greater world’s perspective, even though he had nothing to do with naming them.
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