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.
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