Month: July 2023

Serge has been pulled from his Home World to Another World, an alternate timeline where he drowned as a child. A mysterious villain named Lynx has government goons waiting to arrest him when he arrives. After escaping their clutches, Serge tries to track down Lynx at Viper Manor where he’s gotten in with the local government, the Acacia Dragoons, but the raid ends in disaster, with one of Serge’s greatest allies poisoned. Harle, Lynx’s sidekick, shows Serge how to travel between timelines for unknown reasons, which allows Serge to retrieve the cure for his poisoned friend as well as visit the Water Dragon in Water Dragon Isle in his Home World (Water Dragon Isle is dried up in Another World), gaining from the Water Dragon the power to freeze lava. This allows Serge to cross the deadly Mount Pyre to reach Fort Dragonia where Lynx and the Acacia Dragoons have retreated and confront him again.

But this time Lynx is able to hold Serge’s attention on the dragon tear long enough to use its powers to swap bodies. He tries to play it like he’s the real Serge, but Kid’s getting suspicious, so he stabs Kid in the back, uses the dragon tear to throw cat!Serge into a dimensional vortex, and then absconds before the rest of Serge’s former allies can regroup. He assigns Harle to follow cat!Serge into the dimensional vortex and finish him off, then breaks the dragon tear behind her when she leaves.

The good news is that Harle is fully defecting to cat!Serge’s team at this point, and she uses dimensional vortexes to get around timelines, so she can get cat!Serge out of here. The bad news is that Harle is able to use dimensional vortexes because she’s on Team Dragon, which allows her to travel through these vortexes to any timeline that has a dragon tear. Dark!Serge just smashed the dragon tear in Another World, cutting off Harle’s access to that timeline. She can get cat!Serge to Home World, but she can’t get him to Another World to save his friends from dark!Serge. Worse, the fact that dark!Serge has done this suggests he knows Harle is working against him. Lynx has basically won. All he has to do is bring Serge’s body to Chronopolis to shut down the Prometheus Circuit and FATE is back in full control of Another World. At that point Home World doesn’t even matter to him – the plan was always to sacrifice it to Lavos to preserve the time loop in Another World.

But giving up doesn’t feel like a very JRPG protagonist-y thing to do, so let’s have a crack at finding some way back to Another World.

Lynx is not actually playable. Serge gets bodyswapped into him, because Serge’s DNA is needed to access certain parts of hyper-tech future city Chronopolis for convoluted plot reasons, so Lynx switches bodies with him to get inside. But although Lynx is not really a different character from Serge, he does have a different premise from Serge’s premise. Serge is a kid from a fishing village who gets swept up in greater events. Lynx is that kid but swapped into the body of a well-connected conspirator, and one thing that did always disappoint me about Chrono Cross is that you go around admitting to not being the real Lynx as soon as you meet everyone. Serge seems to consider it a disadvantage to have people think he’s a villain, but Lynx’s main power is that a ton of people owe him favors and he has access to lots of places the public isn’t allowed and Serge fervently divests himself of that power for no reason. So far as evoking that concept goes, though, mostly you just need to rewrite some of the other party members like Norris so that Serge recruits them as Lynx under the pretense of being the real Lynx and then eventually win them over to their cause so they don’t defect when it comes out that he’s actually Serge.

Harle goes out of her way to frame herself as Lynx’s equivalent to Kid when she joins your party, and she has a very thin backstory outside of that. She’s clown-themed, but it would be weird if she did a circus. She’s an infiltrator for the dragons, but since she’s infiltrating she’s not gonna be like “yo, Lynx, let’s do dragon stuff together.” She just wants to help Serge swap back into his own body so that she can follow him into Chronopolis. So Harle’s side quest is assassination. It’s like Kid’s side quest, except more evil, because you’re killing people in their homes and stuff. They’re jerks, though, so it’s still not out of character for Serge to be doing it, and somehow enemies of Lynx who would be a nuisance to Serge while he’s in Lynx’s body.

Sprigg is a weird hag creature of some kind who’s trapped in the Dimensional Vortex for unknown reasons and joins up with you to get back to reality. It’s not clear if she’s from some very different timeline or if she’s just a demihuman from either Home World or Another World (but she definitely doesn’t have a time clone that you can find in the game).

Sprigg actually already has a good side quest in the game as it is, with the only problem being she shares it with another character. Sprigg is a blue mage, capable of stealing powers from monsters, and the monster forms Sprigg steals can then be used in a beast battling arena, where you assemble a party from the monster forms you’ve unlocked with Sprigg and use that monster party to defeat an enemy monster party. The monster arena is run by another character named Janice (we’ll get to her), and you recruit her by completing it, but it’s definitely Sprigg’s quest, not Janice’s, because you go out using Sprigg’s blue mage monster-copying powers to assemble your monster party for it.

Upon arriving back in Home World, cat!Serge is confronted by Radius, the chief of the village who completely kicked Serge’s ass in the combat tutorial way back at the beginning of the game. The tables are turned now, however, and only partly because Lynx has Radius outnumbered three to one. After defeating Radius, Lynx is able to explain that he is in fact cat!Serge, and Radius buys it because of some Force sense mumbo jumbo. I complained earlier about cat!Serge giving away his identity at every opportunity, but this one makes sense since Radius likes Serge and hates Lynx.

Radius then sets up the goal of the next plot arc: To get into the Dead Sea in hopes of using it to cross back across the dimensional boundaries. In the original game, you have to do this because Serge’s body is necessary to crossing dimensional boundaries, but going to the Dead Sea can…fix this…somehow? This feels like there was originally going to be a thing where Serge’s body was important because it lets you cross between timelines and Dark Serge would be using that to advance his nefarious scheme while cat!Serge was stuck in just one timeline, but Dark Serge never travels to Home World. Everything he wants is in Another World, and the purpose of stealing Serge’s body turns out to be that some important gizmos got locked to Serge’s DNA in Chronopolis for some convoluted reasons.

I’m overhauling this (and also some of the events at Fort Dragonia): Cat!Serge can’t dimension hop because the Astral Amulet was on either Serge or Kid’s person so cat!Serge doesn’t have it because his inventory got wiped (this may also add the need to reacquire certain other key items, but we’re already drastically extending the budget of this game, so sure, why not – the only ones I can really think of are the ice breath that you can reget from the Water Dragon in Home World as soon as you get a boat and the Skelly parts, which can be left on the ground in Fort Dragonia where Dark Serge first got his new body and discarded them).

Radius says the Acacia Dragoons took this dimension’s Astral Amulet into the Dead Sea with them when they all disappeared, so getting the Astral Amulet means getting in there, which means getting a boat, and also getting the old Sage of Marbule to tell you how to get into that place, because the Dead Sea is kind of famous for being somewhere you can’t get into.

Radius already has a section of the main plot that focuses on him and his story. It doesn’t have any unique gameplay, but Radius’ thing is that he was one of the four Dragoon Devas, the most elite warriors of the Acacia Dragoons, who retired and became the village chief of Serge’s hometown. For the most part, his schtick is that he used to be El Nido’s premier badass and now he’s coming out of retirement for one last job, so an episode that focuses on his character arc instead of introducing new gameplay is fine – the game already has a combat system.

That episode is skipping ahead a bit, but the Dead Sea turns out to be sealed by the evil power of the cursed sword Masamune (Home World Masamune, that is – Another World Masamune is still with Dario waiting for the Glenn/Riddel/Karsh side quest to catch up to it). Masamune’s counterpart Einlanzer is on the Isle of the Damned where Radius and his fellow Dragoon Deva Garai left it. Radius was always second best to Garai, probably because Garai is fifteen feet tall for some reason, so Garai got Einlanzer. During an expedition to the Isle of the Damned, Radius discovered Masamune, and the cursed sword corrupted him into attacking Garai, using its power to kill Garai and become the greatest of the Dragoon Devas by default. Seeing Garai die snapped Radius out of it long enough to abandon both Masamune and Einlanzer. Evidently someone else got their hands on Masamune in the meantime (probably Lynx – it seems like the same Lynx is active across both timelines, and he has incentive to keep people out of the Dead Sea, since it’s a potential access point to his home base in Chronopolis), but Einlanzer is still in the Isle of the Damned, guarded by the ghost of Garai.

Zappa is a blacksmith who mostly sells to the Acacia Dragoons. In Home World, he’s going out of business because the Porre Military doesn’t buy from him and the Dragoons all went and died in the Dead Sea. He decides to join your party to find out what happened to them, which allows you to forge new weapons and armor wherever instead of having to go to a blacksmith’s shop for it. In the game as it is, Zappa’s final technique doesn’t require any forging and his final weapon requires forging only in the same way everyone else’s does. In this one, we’re very slightly tweaking it so that his final technique is unlocked after you forge a bunch of max-level weapons for other characters.

Van is a bored rich kid who’s taken up painting to the frustration of his wealthy businessman father Gogh in Another World, but here in Home World he’s a practical penny-pincher who’s trying to escape the poverty that Gogh’s obsession with art has brought about.

Van actually already has a side quest, but it’s just to pour a bunch of money into him. The obvious place to go with Van is a tycoon game. You can move into the empty space left behind by Zappa closing up his forge and turn it into a shop, then manage inventory and advertising and so on to make money with it. Because the game has other means of making money via adventuring (indeed, the opportunity to make money by looting monster corpses for valuable parts is why Van joins your party in the first place), you can never fully go bust. The worst that can happen is that you have to pour a bunch more money from combat loot into getting yourself back in the game.

The shop could sell elements or weapons or armor or some other thing sold by actual shops in the game, but I like the idea that it’s an art shop, which also allows you to go around collecting art from artists which Van copies stroke-for-stroke for inventory (and probably you can eventually hire some generic painter guy to do it for you for increased efficiency). You can have a half-dozen art sellers across both dimensions and one of them can be Another Van, which can further his character arc.

You first meet Home Van in the same scene as the existing game, where a rich guy offers to buy one of Home Gogh’s paintings and he refuses because the rich guy doesn’t really appreciate it. Home Van joins up with your party to make money. Home Gogh pops in to see Home Van’s shop when you first open up and then again when you’ve acquired some fraction of the available paintings, mainly just to give two beats to this bit that establish that Home Gogh keeps coming to Home Van’s art store to window shop and Home Van is rude and bitter about shooing him out because floorspace is for paying customers and working artists only. The scene is here to set up both that Gogh visits regularly despite his strained relationship with Van, and also implies that Van still wants the validation of his father’s support and to buy his father’s paintings for his store, which is why he keeps bringing it up, even if it’s with a “this is my store so if you’re not here to sell me paintings, get out!” attitude.

Another Van speaking to Home Van gets an appreciation for his father when he realizes that if his Another Gogh hadn’t dedicated himself to business and made a ton of money, Another Van would be too poor to focus on his art. Seeing that Another Van, free from financial worry, instead spends all his time painting, Home Van realizes that if he didn’t have to worry about money all the time (an all-consuming pressure for him) he would want to be a painter like his father. Home Van mentions that Another Van is lucky to have a father who gave up his own dreams of painting for the sake of his son, and Another Van complains that his father doesn’t have any dreams of painting, he only ever cares about money. The maid is more invested in Another Van’s paintings than his father is.

Upon returning and putting copies of Another Van’s painting in the store, Home Van paints his first original work: Two Fathers, a contrast between Another Gogh, opulent but distant, and Home Gogh, warm and close but irresponsible. Home Gogh comes in the next day, sees it for sale, and between the subject matter and father-son psychic bullshit, can tell Home Van painted this one himself. He offers to trade the painting he wouldn’t sell to the rich guy at the beginning for a copy of Two Fathers, and Home Van scolds him for his poor business sense to trade an original painting for a store copy, and trades the original Two Fathers for Gogh’s painting instead. Gogh’s painting doesn’t show up in the store inventory, just hanging on a wall, and the next time you open up shop, a customer comes in and asks if there’s copies of that one for sale anywhere, and Home Van explains that it’s not for sale because the original artist is an irresponsible snob who hates having his work copied. This is where you get his ultimate technique, but you also get the option to pour money into buying a nicer house for Gogh at this point.

Also, in the original game, Van’s level second-tier technique is painting themed while his level thier-tier ultimate technique is money themed (his first-tier technique is boomerang themed because that is his weapon), and I am reversing that because that is the opposite of how Home Van’s character arc works.

You can find Funguy in Home Shadow Forest where he gorges himself on mysterious mushrooms and turns into a myconid. I don’t super like how much I’m leaning on the crafty-survival tech tree for so many characters (Razzly and Doc both use it already and another character is coming), but using survival-y mechanics to scavenge for something to counteract the mushrooms is the obvious way to go with this guy and I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this gimmick character. You’ve already got so many party members at this point that I struggle to imagine anyone ever used Funguy unless they’ve already beaten this game multiple times and are doing an obscure-characters playthrough. Since Funguy got transformed in black-aligned Shadow Forest, his cure is going to come from a combination of finding the poison mushrooms there and some kind of counterbalancing material from white-aligned El Nido Triangle.

Norris is a part of the Black Wind espionaige wing of the Porre Military. In the game as it is, he’s just kind of hanging around the ruins of Viper Manor and joins Lynx for funsies. In this version, he’s seeking command of all Porre forces in El Nido, due to a combination of two factors: First, that this version of the Porre Military is much more ascendant so there are fewer enemies to spy on and less opportunity for advancement in espionaige as opposed to military governance, and second, since El Nido Archipelago is already subdued it’s a less critical position and seeking command over the entire thing is more reasonable.

Norris is concerned about the Acacia Dragoons, who ventured into the Dead Sea and never returned. Even a small fragment of survivors could cause trouble for the understaffed occupation forces in El Nido. He has a plan to keep the locals pacified in the event of a Dragoon return by giving them something to lose – if living under the Porre Military is kind of nice actually, that not only helps dull people’s anger at being conquered but also gives Porre something to take away if the locals get on their nerves. He’s seeking Lynx’s recommendation for the position of commander to implement this plan, stresses that he would still be available to help Lynx in his mission to track down the Dragoons in the Dead Sea, and is generally ready to pitch this case hard at what he expects to be a hostile audience, and is kind of taken aback when Lynx (actually cat!Serge) is like “yeah, totally do that, do you need me to sign something, or…?” With Lynx’s recommendation, Norris gets the job, and Lynx gets a boat to go track down the former Sage of Marbule on the SS Zelbess to figure out how to get into the Dead Sea.

Norris’ minigame, then, is a little civic management sim. Radius reprises his role as tutorial-giver in Arni before Norris is installed as governor of Termina, then there’s additional maps that focus on cramped building conditions in the smaller village of Guldove and on Sky Dragon Isle (empty land here in Home World because the Sky Dragon hangs out in Another World), plus Marbule once you finish Nikki’s side quest and get it repopulated. In Marbule, the gameplay gimmick is that Norris has committed to following the Sage of Marbule’s directives so in addition to limited space you also have some pretty specific objectives to satisfy.

Serge is flung into another dimension where a mysterious villain named Lynx sends some government enforcers to arrest him. After being saved by Kid, a thief with a vendetta against Lynx, Serge resolves to confront Lynx and get some answers. Lynx knew to send enforcers to capture Serge almost as soon as he arrived, so he must have some idea of what’s going on. Lynx is from the Zenan mainland, far away from El Nido Archipelago where the game takes place, but somehow he’s become a confidant of General Viper, the lord of Viper Manor and ruler of the archipelago. Serge and his allies resolve to break into Viper Manor to confront Lynx, but the raid ends in disaster and the party are chased off a balcony overlooking the sea. Serge blacks out on contact.

Luckily, video game blackouts aren’t all that dangerous and he wakes up hours later to no long term damage, having been rescued and brought to the village of Guldove by a fisher and ferryman named Korcha. Unfortunately, Kid was poisoned by Lynx during the escape, and her condition is becoming critical. The village doctor, named Doc (nominative determinism wins again), determines that Kid can only be healed by hydra humour. Serge resolves to kill a hydra in Hydra Marsh to save her, and Doc asks what rock he’s been living under: Hydras have been extinct in Hydra Marsh for nearly a decade. Serge mumbles something about how this timeline is bullshit.

Harle, Lynx’s sidekick who Serge and his party had confronted along with Lynx back in Viper Manor, appears with her little ghost-y shadow teleportation trick to steal some special pendant from Kid, and tells Serge to come and catch her at Opassa Beach. At the beach, she uses the pendant to pull Serge and his party back into Home World, tosses the pendant back to him, and then peaces out into a temporal rift. Serge and his party are concerned that Harle has clearly lined them up for this, but there’s a hydra here, and they’re not just gonna let Kid die because Harle is shady.

It’s going to be a while before any of this paragraph gets revealed in the hypothetical game’s narrative (and in the real game it’s mostly reserved for an exposition dump at the end when the devs ran out of money and had a couple of NPCs explain all the missing story pieces straight to camera before dropping you into the final boss and asking you to pretend this confrontation had received proper buildup), but Harle isn’t tricking the party, she’s tricking Lynx. While her ultimate goal is to use the Chrono Cross to merge both Home World and Another World to bring back the dragon god and wipe out humanity and that would be bad, it’s in opposition with Lynx, who wants to prevent the Chrono Cross from being created at all, sacrificing Home World to be wiped out completely by Lavos in order to preserve a time loop in Another World where Lavos is defeated and the utopian future of 2400 comes to pass to create Chronopolis and get it sent back in time to reinitiate the loop. Kid is an agent of Lucca and basically her final piece on the board (there’s a couple of people – like Guile/Magus – who are kind-of allies of Lucca but make no effort to actively pursue her goals unless Kid or Serge show up to ask for their help). Harle helped Lynx kill Lucca several years ago, but at this point she estimates that Lynx is moving into scoring position and needs to be slowed down, so she’s going to help Serge save Kid and revive Lucca’s side of the conflict.

Those familiar with the game will realize I’ve drastically rewritten this section, which is why the plot summary goes on longer than normal. This is partly because it’s one of several very poorly explained parts of the Chrono Cross plot that I am rewriting to be more comprehensible and partly because I am collapsing Chrono Crosses’ meaningless plot branches together. Instead of having the chance to leave Kid to die and getting Macha, Doc, and best boy Glenn out of the deal, or else saving Kid and getting the much lamer Korcha, Mel, and Razzly for your trouble, I’m going with one plotline that recruits all six characters. This also solves the problem where you only get blamed for killing the hydra if you didn’t do that (because if you killed the hydra, Razzly is in your party and the fairies are more sympathetic to you) and Doc only joins your party if you abandon his patient and convince him to give up on medicine because he’s bad at it.

You need Korcha’s boat to get back to the big island to chase Harle, and also he has a crush on Kid, so he’s going to help you (another problem with the split timelines – if you refuse to help Kid, Korcha’s mother Macha forces him to give you his boat anyway). Korcha’s minigame is fishing. The fishing minigame is already assigned to Mojo, but Mojo also has an occult archaeology side quest, so I’m happy to say that the fishing minigame is really Korcha’s side quest, but also you use the same mechanics as part of Mojo’s side quest (but actually completing the entire fishing quest is not necessary – there’s one or maybe a handful of specific fish you need to catch with the Home Arni fisherman for Mojo’s quest, and Korcha’s is more completionist). Conveniently, we also pick up Korcha right before we get access to (bits of) Home World, so the fishing minigame is coming online for both of these characters at basically the same time.

Macha is the first character who isn’t just very strange (like Mojo or Nikki) nor a bad idea generally (like Poshul), but flat-out boring, which is both a bad idea and potentially impossible to rehabilitate. Macha’s theme is that she’s a mom, and that is like 100% of her character. She’s definitely leaning into the moms-are-tough archetype so she doesn’t come off as completely out of place as an adventurer (she’s definitely of the “motley crew of everyone willing and able” variety rather than the “elite group of trained professionals” variety, but the former are more common protagonists anyway), but there’s nothing else there. Her special attacks are all household chores, she has no sub-plots, and her only character relationship is with Korcha and Mel (who we’ll get to in a bit), her children. I would give her something about cooking, but there is a professional chef character coming, so that can’t bail me out. She’s also one of seven Guldove villagers (the others are Korcha, Mel, Doc, Orlha, Orcha, and Steena – only one of them is from Home World, the other six, including Macha, are from Another Guldove) who you can recruit in the game, which means nothing Guldove-specific can bail me out, either.

So we’re going to go with interior decorating. Y’know, a Sims-y, Animal Crossing-y sort of thing where you get a house in Guldove and can put credenzas in it. You can buy furniture, or make it using the game’s existing crafting system (in the game as it exists, it’s only used for weapons and armor, but it wouldn’t be hard to make it work on furniture and wallpaper, too), and you get points for putting fancier furniture in the house and synergy bonuses for stuff from the same set, with enough breathing room on the point totals required for Macha’s ultimate technique/weapon to allow for some creative expression rather than requiring you to stick to whatever maximizes score. This doesn’t have anything to do with Macha’s character in the game as it is, but it doesn’t seem super opposed to her character and it’s a weird enough side quest that it’s unlikely I’ll wish I’d saved it for someone else later.

Once we get back to Termina, there’s a few new faces we can pick up. First up: Greco. Greco is a medium who helps lay spirits to rest and decides to join Serge in his quest because Serge is technically dead in Another World so he’s basically a ghost which means Greco’s job is to help him out. He doesn’t seem to mind that Serge can return to Home World at this point, where he’s supposed to be alive (the text of the game sometimes implies Home World is an invalid timeline somehow, but the Good Ending is combining the timelines, not eliminating Home World altogether, so this doesn’t seem to be the ultimate conclusion).

He’s also a luchador wrestler. That second part doesn’t seem to be part of his job or backstory, he just has the aesthetic and fighting style of a luchador for no reason.

Greco’s side quest is straightforward, basically take Phasmophobia and Case of the Golden Idol, stir them together, and put them in a JRPG. There’s a few spooky haunted places that need Greco to lay their spirits to rest. Greco gets psychic visions into snapshots of the past when at these haunted locations. You have to use these clues to figure out what happened in this place. Once you’ve properly filled in your mad libs, Greco can hold a seance to lay the spirits to rest using the information you’ve learned.

Viper Manor is mostly abandoned as the Acacia Dragoons have retreated to Fort Dragonia to resist an imminent invasion of the Porre military, but you can visit the nearly abandoned site to find Luccia. Luccia is the first of several characters who are blatant rip-offs of a Chrono Trigger character but are also clearly not that Chrono Trigger character. Luccia is a mad scientist who looks basically exactly like Chrono Trigger inventor Lucca except older and also evil, but it’s a major plot point that Lucca’s dead in Another World (and probably in Home World, too – Lynx killed her, and he’s active in both timelines).

Chrono Cross totally ignores the uncanny resemblance to Lucca so we are, too. Luccia is an optional mad scientist and she’s going to have a chemical mixing minigame. You know the one, the spatial reasoning game where you have a bunch of vials with different-colored fluids in them which absolutely do not mix, and you can pour the topmost layer of mysterious science juice from one vial into any other vial with room left, and the goal is to get all the vials with the same color, or maybe to create a mixture with some specific combination. You can find different color chemicals as treasure in the world, and Luccia’s ultimate weapon requires all five of them, but you can get other prizes for completing puzzles with just three or four of the chemicals. Some of the other characters, like Pip and NeoFio, can also get upgrades from Luccia’s chemical puzzle – we’ll talk about those when we get there.

Assorted misadventures in Hydra Marsh lead to meeting Razzly, a fairy who’s been captured by a giant pentapus monster (one of several weird monsters who live in this place). Fairies usually live on Water Dragon Isle, but Razzly came here to check up on the hydra, which you are, uh…here to kill. The native dwarves of Hydra Marsh find Razzly and imprison her in the lair of the pentapus, and will later attack the fairies of Water Dragon Isle in a fullscale invasion. In the game as it is, Razzly has a weird thing where you can only get her ultimate technique if you do not bring her to fight the hydra, which means she does not find the hydra eggs, which means her sister Rosetta does not survive the dwarves’ attack, and then later you can visit Rosetta’s grave and Razzly gets her level 7 tech. I’m pretty sure this is one of those things where Chrono Cross is trying to nudge you into a New Game+ by making you wonder what happens if you recruit Razzly but then don’t save the hydra species. The thing is, it’s not good game design to hide ultimate techniques/weapons behind stupid choices that most people will only get to when they’re trying to find every single story branch.

There’s an interesting question to potentially be asked here if, after saving Razzly, she tells you that the Hydra Marsh is doomed if you kill this last hydra before it can raise its children. Do you let a party member die in order to preserve the ecology? Or do you finish off an entire ecosystem to save one person? If you spare the hydra, there’s no guarantee it won’t get knocked off anyway, but you’ve already seen what happens to the Hydra Marsh in Another World, so you know for a fact that things are going to get bad if you kill it.

The problem is, we can’t actually let Kid die, for plot reasons. So the game contrives to have Kid survive anyway even if you choose to spare the hydra, and by the time you meet Razzly you’re already committed to killing the hydra and can’t back out without loading a save or starting over, and the way you get her ultimate technique is actually to kill the hydra and then just fail to find and protect its children.

So barring a massive rewrite of the game to put a more expendable character in Kid’s place (probably Leena?), I’m instead going to rewrite the Hydra Marsh so that, in addition to the live hydra, there is also a hydra graveyard where you can potentially find some leftover humour, but it’s in a much harder to reach part of the map. Because there are no more living hydras in the area, it’s full of poison, just like Another Hydra Marsh, and you have to harvest anti-poison grooblies (berries or something) from the healthy parts to give you an anti-poison buff or else just buy a whole lot of antidotes and consumable healing. Maybe also chopping down some wood to build a bridge or something – there’s a full-on survival scenario for another character later on and I want to build up to it a bit with this one.

After you whip up the antidote for Kid from the hydra humour, local Guldove rapscallion Mel steals her elements, and yes, this is exactly like when Yuffie steals your materia in Final Fantasy VII. We’ve already got a thievery side quest for Kid, and while I don’t like it, I want to wrap this post up, so I’m going to have Mel piggyback on it. There are certain estates that can only be burgled by taking advantage of Mel’s tiny size.

Curing Kid inspires her doctor Doc to join the party. He felt useless just watching Kid die because he didn’t have the right medicine and joins the party to stock up. His side quest builds on survival-crafty gameplay that Razzly used, but with the specific objective of crafting medicines. Different areas have different materials that add up to different tech trees, with specific medicines to be crafted in Lizard Rock, the Isle of the Damned, Gaea’s Navel, El Nido Triangle, Mount Pyre, and Earth Dragon Island. Each one is associated with an element: Lizard Rock is blue, Mount Pyre is red, Earth Dragon Island is yellow, Gaea’s Navel is green, the Isle of the Damned is black, and El Nido Triangle is white. Hydra Marsh has a lot of overlap with the Gaea’s Navel tech tree, Shadow Forest has a lot of overlap with the Isle of the Damned tech tree, and Water Dragon Isle has a lot of overlap with the El Nido Triangle tech tree, so you can complete most, but not all, of the tree from those locations. Likewise, El Nido Triangle has chunks of the blue tree, and there’s some materials that show up in a lot of different tech trees, so they’re not completely distinct.

After saving Kid, you meet Glenn, an Acacia Dragoon who doesn’t like this Lynx fellow one bit and agrees to join Serge’s party to thwart whatever nefarious plot Lynx is pursuing, which Glenn suspects is going to be bad for General Viper and El Nido Archipelago. Glenn’s older brother Dario disappeared under mysterious circumstances after coming into contact with the cursed sword Masamune, and the game as it is has a whole side quest with Karsh, Dario’s rival who Dario consistently trounced, and Riddel, Dario’s fiancee who was left pre-widowed when he disappeared, and you can eventually find him and fight him as an optional boss and if you do you get the Masamune, which is…Serge’s ultimate weapon, for some reason. Glenn has an unrelated side quest where he can retrieve Einlanzer from Home World in the third act. We’re fixing this by making Masamune Glenn’s ultimate weapon.

With Kid back in the party (or having joined the party for the first time, if you’ve been real stubborn about keeping her out up until now – she won’t take no for an answer at this point), you set out for Mount Pyre, atop which sits Fort Dragonia, where Lynx and the Acacia Dragoons have retreated to await the coming of the Porre military, who plan to invade El Nido Archipelago. The plan here is basically the same as Viper Manor except hopefully this time we don’t fuck it up: Confront Lynx, defeat him, and interrogate him as to what his vendetta with Serge is and how he knew Serge would be arriving when he did.

While on the way to Mount Pyre, the party sails through mysterious fog and is kidnapped by pirates, who are then attacked by undead. In the middle of the three-way battle they meet Pip, a lab experiment of Luccia’s who you set free in Viper Manor (or didn’t, but if you didn’t then you can’t recruit her here). Pip’s mechanical gimmick is that she evolves Pokemon style into either an angel or a devil version based on whether you use more white, blue, and green elements (for angel) or black, red, and yellow elements (for devil). I’ve heard there’s something busted about the system, but I never checked, because this game has too many characters as it is.

For this version, I’m giving Pip a total of eight forms. Her base form is innate element white, because all characters must have an innate element, but we are treating this one as “untyped.” Whenever Pip has 1) cast more elements of one type than all five others combined and 2) cast at least ten elements, she transforms into a form matching that element, so she has a grass-and-tree themed green form, a water-themed blue form, and so on. If you transform Pip into all six of her elementally themed forms, she gains her ultimate technique and the power to switch forms at-will. Additionally, if Pip’s first transformations into each of her six elementally attuned forms follow the yellow-red-green-blue-black-white sequence used to activate the Chrono Cross in the final battle, you unlock a special time/dimension themed super form. This is definitely a New Game+ kind of achievement which is why Pip’s ultimate technique/weapon comes from getting all six forms in any order and does not require this ultimate form, because by the time you recruit Pip you’ve had none of the clues as to what that elemental sequence is (the hints are extremely opaque even in the lategame – I might rewrite that when we get there).