Ordinary JRPG protagonist Serge got pulled into an alternate timeline where he drowned as a child. Mysterious villain Lynx attempted to capture Serge for unknown reasons, evidently aware he would arrive. Serge chases Lynx down to try and get answers out of him, but in their second confrontation Lynx is able to swap bodies with Serge. Serge, now in Lynx’s cat-person body and sweet black outfit, is cast back into his Home World timeline, except now he is a cat and also all his friends are in mortal peril from Dark Serge. By this point in his adventure, Serge had acquired a means of traveling between timelines using the Astral Amulet. Unfortunately, Dark Serge now has the Astral Amulet.
Fortunately, cat!Serge can get around this using alternate timeline bullshit by tracking down his Home World’s version of the Astral Amulet in the Dead Sea. To that end, he uses his new identity as Lynx to commandeer a boat from the Porre Military and head to the SS Zelbess, a luxury cruise ship where the refugees from the village of Marbule are employed as grunt labor. The former Sage of Marbule knows how to get into the Dead Sea, but he works in the restricted section of the ship and Fargo, captain of the boat, doesn’t want to let “Lynx” back there. You’d think with his military connections that cat!Serge could force the issue, but apparently not, so cat!Serge has to get up to various shenanigans involving the backstory of Nikki…a character whose backstory was explored back when he was first recruited in the Viper Manor episode like a month ago.
Miki is recruited on the SS Zelbess as you try to convince the former Sage of Marbule to help you get into the Dead Sea. She has the same minigame as Nikki (Home Nikki is here to headline all of her performances so you don’t have to go fetch Another Nikki).
Irenes is a mermaid and former inabitant of Marbule who is now, I guess, some kind of mermaid vagabond. She’s part of the subplot to re-establish Marbule and is the sister of Zelbess, the mermaid Home Fargo married but who then died and Home Fargo turned evil. That plot is already carried by Nikki’s side quest, though, so Irenes’ is about treasure diving in sunken ships. Her ultimate weapon is in the biggest and most dangerous of the ships, and is connected in some way to Zelbess. The circumstances of Zelbess’ death are left unstated in the game as it is, so ship-diving is going to have been a hobby of hers and she met an untimely demise at the hands of some sea monster in the big wreck.
In order to get into the restricted section of Fargo’s ship, you have to blackmail him by revealing you know his casino is rigged. In order to do that, you have to get turned into a cat. Like, a real cat, not a khajit. And in order to do that, you have to attend a magic show put on by Sneff. Sneff is working off his huge gambling debts by performing on the Zelbess. He’s a stage magician, but I’m not sure how to make gameplay out of that (which is too bad, because then Guile could lean into it, too), so I’m going to focus on the gambling addiction and give him some kind of Blackjack or Texas Hold ‘Em minigame. Maybe a made-up version like Sabacc from Knights of the Old Republic so you can buy cards for a deck to get an advantage.
Janice runs a monster-battling arena in the restricted section of the ship that you can get into after blackmailing Fargo and meeting Nikki (who wants to learn the Song of Marbule to help re-establish Marbule in honor of his mother Zelbess), and also she is a bunny girl and likes carrots (all the displaced people of Marbule are animal-people – although Lynx (and by extension, cat!Serge) is not Marbulian despite being a cat person). You recruit Janice by completing Sprigg’s side quest, using her monster-copying powers to build a monster party to defeat her monster parties in the monster-battling arena. That’s not Janice’s side quest, though, it’s Sprigg’s.
In the game as it exists, you get Janice’s ultimate technique by going to a special New Game+ location that lets you fight monsters from the entire game and talking to a weird blob monster Wobbufet looking guy who hangs out there. There’s a secret boss here that references Chrono Trigger but you don’t actually have to beat them to unlock Janice’s ultimate technique, you just have to walk up and talk to the blob guys hanging out there.
Instead, Janice’s ultimate technique is going to be from a fighting arena where the gimmick is that you face enemies with a similar composition to your own party. The secret boss from Chrono Trigger is kind of like this, it’s a mini-boss squad of three guys with slightly different fighting styles, but this version is going to be available without a New Game+, its bosses aren’t necessarily references to anything, and they’re all three guys who rely on healing and buffs and debuffs like the players’ party rather than four-digit HP and multi-target attacks the way most bosses do. This might not make for the most compelling fights (mirror matches usually don’t), but it helps set Janice’s arena apart from Pierre’s monster hunt, and it should be good enough for a C-list character’s side quest.
After the Sage of Marbule tells you how to get into the Dead Sea, you resolve Radius’ backstory to get Einlanzer to cancel out the power of Masamune and open the path, and step into the Dead Sea, which is a frozen time snapshot of Lavos destroying the world. See, the Dead Sea is actually Chronopolis, the hidden time traveling city from the utopian future of 2400 AD created as a result of the protagonists’ victory in Chrono Trigger, which accidentally flung itself far into the past and then dedicated itself to preserving the timeline. When the timeline branched at Serge’s death somewhere around 1005 AD, with Serge dying in one timeline and surviving in the other, it created Home World, a timeline where the Chrono Trigger protagonists just never showed up in 1999 or 2300. Their time machine travels forward and back along one timeline, Another World, which means their adventures fighting Magus in 600 AD and their shenanigans in the Mystic civilization of 12000 BC are common to both timelines, but their confrontation with Lavos in 1999 AD only happened in Another World. That means there’s no Chronopolis in Home World because it’s from the future, except there is because it appeared sometime between 12000 BC and 600 AD (and immediately went into hiding to preserve the timeline). To resolve the paradox, FATE pulls in the city that would eventually become Chronpolis from the moment of its destruction in the Lavos cataclym in 1999 AD and freezes it there using the power of Home World’s version of the Frozen Flame, a Lavos fragment they brought with them from the future.
And also the whole place is guarded by Miguel, Leena’s long lost father, who bargained Leena’s safety from FATE’s wrath in exchange for becoming the guardian of the Dead Sea. Miguel and Serge’s own father, Wazuki (how are these two from the same village?!) set out for the Zenan mainland seeking treatment for Serge after he got poisoned by a panther demon at the age of five, but there was a storm. The storm knocked out power to Chronopolis and blew Miguel and Wazuki off course into the Sea of Eden (the old name for the Dead Sea, which it retains in Another World where FATE is still active). With Serge’s health quickly failing, Wazuki heads into Chronopolis – he has no idea if they have a cure for him in there, but it looks fancy, and with this storm there’s no way he’ll get to Zenan in time, so it’s either go inside and pray someone can help or sit and do nothing while his son dies.
The Prometheus Circuit is still active through the storm even though FATE is offline, so it takes advantage to lock access to the Frozen Flame behind Serge’s DNA, keeping it out of FATE’s hands. Now the only person who can activate the Frozen Flame’s time powers through the Chronopolis infrastructure is Serge, a five-year old child. Even better would be if the Frozen Flame was locked to a corpse, but the Prometheus Circuit is the good guys so he uses Chronopolis hyper-tech to heal Serge and tells Miguel and Wazuki to get the Hell out. FATE starts to reboot as Wazuki, Miguel, and Serge make their escape. Miguel stays behind to guard the escape while a critically injured Wazuki and Serge make their escape. Wazuki lives long enough to get Serge back to Arni now the storm is clearing, but succumbs to his injuries soon afterwards.
In the original game, FATE somehow gets its hands on Wazuki and turns him into Lynx (it doesn’t happen during Wazuki’s visit to Chronopolis, because someone gets Serge home to Arni Village and it isn’t Miguel). It also gets its hands on Miguel and turns him into the guardian of the Dead Sea. The personal relationship between Miguel and Serge is important to the plot – it puts Miguel in a position to explain what happened when Serge was poisoned by the panther demon and how the Frozen Flame’s locks got linked to his DNA, which is the whole reason Lynx is after him. Wazuki secretly being Lynx does nothing. It never informs how Serge and Lynx interact and there’s no character-driven reason why Lynx winds up enemies with his son, his personality (and physical appearance!) are completely overwritten by FATE. Someone just liked Star Wars but didn’t get why Vader being Luke’s father is emotionally significant, I guess.
So in this version Lynx is a bespoke agent gestated by FATE’s cloning facilities and flash-grown to adulthood for the specific purpose of hunting down Serge and bringing him back to Chronopolis. He looks like a scary cat-man because Serge is scared of cats because a panther demon just tried to kill him, but his father wasn’t meaningfully part of the template. Lynx arrives at Arni but is fought off by Radius. Deciding this isn’t going to be a simple one-and-done kidnapping, he starts looking for allies who can help him storm Arni Village. Nobody in El Nido is responsive, at least in part because the dragons are working against him however they can, hoping to swing the balance of the war back in their favor after their defeat thousands of years ago, so Lynx sighs, grumbles, and commits to helping the most pliant city-state he’s able to find – Porre on the Zenan mainland – develop enough military power and imperialist ambition that they can project force into El Nido Archipelago. This will be a project.
And while Lynx is busy doing that, Serge goes and gets himself drowned. Without access to the Frozen Flame, FATE can’t travel back in time to save him, but the Prometheus Circuit can, and decides to do so – if he had healed Serge but not told Wazuki and Miguel to flee, then FATE would’ve just imprisoned them in Chronopolis, and not even in some kind of dungeon, but just, like, forbidden them to leave the city and used its robot security force to enforce that (this is what it did with Miguel for the two years between capturing him and the split in the timeline). Then it could teach Serge how to operate the Frozen Flame as he grew up and be back in control in a decade’s time. The only reason Serge was in a position to drown is because the Prometheus Circuit sent him home, an act which got his father killed and was done purely for the Prometheus Circuit’s own reasons (for the greater good of keeping FATE from taking control of the Frozen Flame, but still). To undo this mistake, the Prometheus Circuit uses the power of the Frozen Flame (or possibly conspires with Lucca to deploy Kid from the future – the disadvantage is that this is more convoluted, the advantage is that it keeps things focused on major characters rather than on time artifacts) to create a timeline split, one where Serge drowns and one where he survives, gambling the fate of Home World that he’ll be able to use the Chrono Cross to merge the timelines into just the version where Serge survived – but since there will only be one timeline again, Crono and his friends will still show up in 1999 to defeat Lavos.
This is why the ghosts of Crono, Lucca, and Marle are pissed at Serge at the end of the Dead Sea. The Prometheus Circuit has risked that all their adventures were for nothing in this timeline in order to protect just Serge, because he felt bad that Serge had been at the beach without a lifeguard as a distant convoluted consequence of the Prometheus Circuit’s actions. Accidental deaths happen, sometimes to children, in every place and time through the whole world, but the Prometheus Circuit decided this specific accident needed to have an entire timeline’s happily ever after staked on it.
But this is the fundamental ethical difference between the Prometheus Circuit and FATE. FATE believes that since 2400 AD turned out great for humanity, the timeline getting there must be preserved at any cost. The Prometheus Circuit believes that you can never really predict how your actions will impact the future, and knowing about a specific version of the future doesn’t change that. Time travel or not, Chronopolis is in the same position as everyone else, not knowing for sure whether their actions will help or hurt other people in the long run, but that doesn’t mean they can act like a bunch of sociopaths because it might turn out for the best 1400 years from now.
You don’t recruit any characters there, though, so I’m just exposition dumping, partly to keep the plot straight in my own head and partly because a rewrite of Chrono Cross from the Dead Sea onwards is the kind of thing I would put in a blog post so it may as well be this one. Also, I’m not even sure how much of this is me rewriting the game to be more clear about what it’s plot is and how much is me rewriting the game to have a more coherent plot in the first place, because the Dead Sea is where the story goes off the rails completely and I am fixing it without worrying much how much of this is clarification and how much is revision.
On a related note, this is a heavier rewrite than I want to get into for a blog post, but some of this really needs to be off-loaded to before the Dead Sea. There are so many new concepts introduced here: The way Lavos destroys Home World because the timeline split means Crono and his friends only confronted him in Another World, the way Serge was healed by Chronpolis but his DNA became vital to it in the process, the way the timeline branch was caused by FATE to protect Serge, who is the only one who can unlock the Prometheus Circuit, the way FATE gets a very specific and kind of arbitrary list of time-related superpowers from the Frozen Flame, that Lynx was created to hunt down Serge, why he’s had so much difficulty doing that.
In the game as it is, the details of Lynx’s creation and some of the details of how Team FATE works and what they want is saved for Chronopolis. The problem is that delivering the plot beats out of order and far away from one another makes it difficult to keep track of what’s going on – it’s already super convoluted, and this is after I streamlined it by stripping out the part where Lynx is secretly Serge’s father (in a totally inconsequential way)! The backstory reveals in Chronopolis should revolve around Dinopolis, Project Kid, and how the Prometheus Circuit and FATE became enemies, rather than filling in the first half of a story we got the second half of eight hours ago. Basically, the Dead Sea should be about how Serge became vital to a Team FATE victory and so FATE created Lynx to hunt him down, while Chronopolis should be about how Kid was created by a conspiracy between Lucca and the Prometheus Circuit to rescue Schala from Lavos. These are both convoluted enough stories that having just one episode of the story dedicated to them is already packing things tight enough to be hard to keep track of, we don’t need to also split one of them in two. It makes Chronopolis baffling because its story clues add up to two different plot threads one of which needs you to remember the details of the Dead Sea.
But also, the mechanics of time travel and timeline splitting needs to be explained in advance of the Dead Sea so that the Dead Sea can focus on why the timeline was split for Serge’s sake in particular. It’s not clear why the Sage of Marbule or Garai would know this, but there’s already a sort of “wander around figuring out how to get into the Dead Sea” bit here, so as long as we’re assuming unlimited time and budget, we can add another episode where we find some wrecked time machine and some notes from Balthasar (a character from Chrono Trigger who has a cameo in Chrono Cross and who is in a position to know these things) about how he’s worked out that the timeline split in 1007 (the year Serge did/didn’t drown) for some unknown reason and now he’s stuck in the version where the future is still doomed because Crono never shows up in 1999. Balthasar was on Team Lucca at one point but basically never helps you do anything, so my explanation for that is that once the Prometheus Circuit (also on Team Lucca) split the timelines to save Serge, Balthasar washed his hands of the whole conflict for fear of creating more doomed timelines.
And actually there’s more exposition bullshit to be dumped in here: Since the Frozen Flame predates the split in the timeline, there are two of them. But since Chronopolis only exists in one of them, the other Frozen Flame isn’t locked to Serge’s DNA (the DNA-lock happened before the timeline split, but Chronopolis can’t be in Home World because the world is a post-apocalyptic ruin in 2400 in no condition to be experimenting with time travel, except it is because Chronopolis phased into the timeline in like 10,000 BC, ages before the timeline split, except in the Home World version of the timeline there’s nowhere for it to phase from – by having the Chronopolis scientists be themselves baffled by the nature of this time paradox, we can use it as a giant rug under which to sweep any plot holes created by time travel bullshit). FATE is able to use it via Miguel in the Dead Sea, which is why it’s able to pull the 1999 version of Home Chronopolis in to stabilize this part of the world, why everywhere in Home El Nido sucks except the parts where Serge is growing up, and why it’s able to destroy the Dead Sea after Miguel is mortally wounded, necessitating a rescue by the Sky Dragon.
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