Through the machinations of rival supercomputers FATE and the Prometheus Circuit, Serge wound up DNA locked to the security system of high-tech future city Chronopolis. Lynx, an agent of FATE, swapped bodies with him so he could unlock the security system, but the enemies he made along the way are fighting tooth and claw to keep him from returning to Chronopolis, unlocking the security system, and once again giving FATE the power of the legendary artifact called the Frozen Flame. Cat!Serge, stuck in Lynx’s body, was cast into an alternate timeline, which isn’t even the first time this happened to him. After sorting out how to cross between timelines again, he has linked back up with the anti-FATE coalition and helped them rebound from Dark Serge’s attacks.
The six dragon gods of the region seem sympathetic to the anti-FATE coalition, but they’re reluctant to provide direct assistance for unclear reasons. They rescued cat!Serge when FATE collapsed the alternate timeline version of Chronopolis on top of him, but they haven’t been flying around torching Dark Serge’s ships or anything. For that matter, they won’t even pop a new body for cat!Serge out of Fort Dragonia, which cat!Serge needs in order to get access to Chronopolis before Dark Serge can. Cat!Serge already has (an alternate timeline version of) the Dragon Tear used for bodyswapping, all he needs is a body to swap into, and the dragons say they can provide it, but apparently he needs to first obtain their blessing by reaching and defeating each of the six of them in turn. Only then will Fort Dragonia create a new body for him which he can use the Dragon Tear to swap into (best not to think too much about what happens to the discarded cat body).
This is a lie. The Black Dragon created an army of monsters to control Marbule basically just as a fuck you to some imperialist colonizers who tried to invade it. Any one of the dragons can create a new body for Serge no problem. The real truth is that they were on the losing end of a war with Chronopolis 6,000 years ago, fought for control of the Frozen Flame, and that Chronopolis has been unstoppable since winning and getting control of the Frozen Flame. The storm that DNA locked Serge to the Frozen Flame’s security system, locking FATE out of it, was the first chance they’d had to meaningfully fight back against FATE in millennia. So long as Serge’s DNA, whether in Dark Serge or reincarnated Serge, is outside of Chronopolis, Team Dragon is still in the game. If either copy of Serge gets to Chronpolis, unlocks the Frozen Flame, and then does not hand it over to Team Dragon, the dragons are fucked. They need to be absolutely positive Serge has what it takes to crack Chronopolis open before he goes in there. If Serge isn’t going to succeed, they’d rather he die somewhere where one of them can immediately obliterate the corpse, and maintain plausible deniability about whether or not they’re in the anti-FATE coalition in case Dark Serge gets back into Chronopolis.
But they don’t want cat!Serge to know any of this, because it’s very important they maintain their mystique as vaguely benevolent nature gods of El Nido. Pretty much any one of FATE’s minions can theoretically sit down with cat!Serge right now and explain that the dragon gods are the nature deities of a third, radically different timeline where dinosaurs won the ancient war with cavemen (something which happened in this setting, it’s in Chrono Trigger) and an entirely different civilization developed. And their basic plan here is to kill all humans to recreate their old timeline in this one. The dragon gods have been lucky that FATE is so spectacularly bad at diplomacy that no one’s ever said that to cat!Serge and he probably wouldn’t believe them if they did, and if Team Dragon swaps the mystique of “dragon gods work in mysterious ways” for “we’re not confident you can defeat FATE’s robot army,” it might encourage cat!Serge to think of them as less incarnations of benevolence and more as conventional allies who might betray him after their common enemy is defeated. FATE has done most of the damage to a potential anti-dragon coalition all by itself, but the dragons don’t want to bungle it at the last second.
While running around gathering up the blessings of the six dragon gods, cat!Serge also runs into a few final allies.
Leah is a cavegirl raised by pteradactyls or something out on Gaea’s Navel, the domain of the Green Dragon which is accessible only by the giant wingapede that lives in Hydra Marsh. Her side quest is the capstone of the survival mechanics that a couple of other characters like Doc and Funguy have been leaning on a little. Since (in this ridiculously over-funded version of the game) some amount of engagement with the survival mechanics is required to hunt down the Green Dragon anyway, Leah requires you to max out the tech tree completely, building some extravagent Swiss Family Robinson super treehouse mega-fortress.
Turnip is a fairly literal take on “onion knight,” a little onion/leek/vegetable man who is a knightly type. You recruit him through some shenanigans with ice breath and timeline hopping, but it’s totally unclear why this works or what he does and he seems like one of those things added to a game to sell strategy guides back in the days before the rise of GameFAQs. Turnip claims that he’s the dream of an Acacia Dragoon who you can find asleep in Viper Manor, although I believe this is only possible in a New Game+ that allows you to get all your old characters back in the party long before you reach the point in the story where you would normally be able to recruit them.
Like a lot of Chrono Crosses’ philosophical babble, this doesn’t really seem to understand what Zhuangzhi was saying about a dreaming butterfly. Like, there’s no wondering here, obviously Turnip is the sleeping dragoon, both of them share the same world and they both have enough awareness of that world to know this is plainly true. When the dragoon wakes up, he can just go knock on cat!Serge’s door and be like “hey, weird question, did a small vegetable man claim that he’s me when I’m dreaming? Because I remember that dream.” Cat!serge can leave him a note. Turnip can leave himself a note. This isn’t philosophy, it’s just fantasy worldbuilding.
It’s not bad fantasy worldbuilding, though. If Chrono Cross didn’t have such garbled philosophy in other dialogue, I wouldn’t assume it was trying to be philosophical here. Like, sure, the reference to Zhuangzhi is obvious, but not ever reference to a philosopher is required to itself be philosophical. The general philosopher-knight vibe of Turnip is not a terrible concept for a character. It was a terrible idea to add it in as Chrono Crosses’ 43rd character, but it was not in a vacuum a bad idea.
If we want to do a philosopher-knight thing, then I think the best side quest is to do Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher. Turnip has a couple of philosophical debates with various people who hold different philosophical and interrogates them with Phoenix Wright-esque pursuit mechanics.
NeoFio is yet another one of Luccia’s mad science experiments. This one is a plant that can be brought to life with a “life sparkle” retrieved from Hydra Swamp. Which sounds like you could probably do it way earlier than at this point in the game? I always remember NeoFio being a really late game character, but I guess that’s not because you actually have to wait until the end of the game to recruit her, it’s because she’s a dumb character and I only ever hoovered her up near the end when maxing out my party for the sake of completionism. Not that this ever stopped me from recruiting Funguy.
NeoFio has no history before the point when you animate her with the life sparkle, nor any particular motivation afterwards. She joins you, apparently, for lack of anything better to do, and her only apparent personality trait is being friends with Turnip, the other short plant person in the party. Giving Turnip a buddy feels like it could go somewhere, but it does not actually do that. It’s easy to imagine how a philosopher-knight might find NeoFio’s situation interesting, though. Is Luccia NeoFio’s mother? Is Serge her father? Who are “her people?” Is she alone? Is it just Turnip? Or does Serge’s entire party count as “her people?” It would be kind of neat to see Turnip turning these ideas over aloud while NeoFio is mildly curious why any of these questions matter, given their lack of material impact on her life.
So far as a side quest, I’m going to cheat slightly and have NeoFio be a character in Turnip’s side quest, serving as the Maya Fey to Turnip’s Phoenix Wright, a companion character who provides someone to bounce dialogue off of but lacks the relevant skills (or in this case, enthusiasm) to solve things personally.
Draggy is the last dragonian, unless you count the dragon gods or the demihumans (the latter being animal-people who are somehow connected with the dragonians – the dragon gods use them to replace the human population if you get the ending where they win). His egg wound up in Fossil Valley. Somehow. The bones of his mother in Fossil Valley claim she gave her life to protect his, but it’s not clear how. The dragonians have been extinct for ages, and Fossil Valley is, uh, fossilized. That process takes about 10,000 years, and while we can accept some slop as artistic license, it’s really clear that the dragonian extinction is not a recent event, but rather something so old that archaeologists tell passing player characters about it as fascinating trivia that you probably didn’t know. JRPG protagonists from 1999 get common local knowledge told to them by random bystanders with such regularity that you’d think they were all from another continent and had no familiarity with anything, but this fun trivia isn’t coming from a random local, but from an archaeologist, which suggests that to the extent the locals know about it, it is because archaeologists told them.
However the egg got there, if you yoink it, you can put it in an incubator in Fort Dragonia that gets unlocked after Serge has his body back, and out pops Draggy, whose speech gimmick is baby talk and double-rs, which, holy fuck, was the Way of the Shaman guy was cribbing that from Chrono Cross? Like, “baby dragon talks in baby talk” is the kind of thing you’d expect people to invent independently, but the emphasis on Rs is weird. Not so weird that it couldn’t be coincidence, and, like, this is a thing from the English translation of Chrono Cross which means Vasily Mahenenko would have to have played that version. Is that unlikely?
Regardless, Draggy’s schtick is that he likes his friends and takes their side over Team Dragon. Like, yeah, he is nominally the last of the pureblooded dragonians, the people who built Terra Tower and the original worshipers of the six dragon gods, but his family were all dead by the time he hatched (although he talks about them as though he’s been hibernating? But he still takes Serge’s side against Team Dragon). He has no investment in dragonian civilization because it was over by the time he was born. Not just in decline, but gone.
This ties into the “what’s up with dragonian civilization” side quest we’ll get into with Steena shortly, but Draggy is a terrible choice to carry that side quest. Steena, despite being human, has more reason to be invested in the dragon gods being good than Draggy does, so it is a bigger deal for her when they turn out to be evil. The only reason Draggy has to be concerned is if people associate him with the dragon gods because he’s dragonian, but Serge and his party never show the slightest sign of doing so, nor for that matter does anyone else. Plus, Draggy is a child, and even if we write out the baby talk, he’s still a less compelling protagonist for a side quest about the dark history of the dragon gods.
So instead we’re just gonna do a thing where Draggy gets bigger and cooler looking after doing some number of fights with him. This is super lazy since the only “side quest” is to use the party member in any random combat, but I’m trying to put a bow on this series and the characters you unlock in this stretch of the game are, like, two-thirds lame gimmick characters, so whatever.
Home Steena is the dragon shaman of Home Guldove and helps cat!Serge use the six dragon blessings to regenerate a new body in Fort Dragonia, and to operate the Dragon Tear in order to swap into that body. Another Steena is still the apprentice to Direa, the previous dragon shaman, who is still alive in Another World. They’re also allies of Serge but do not join his party. Steena is a keeper of the dragon lore and she and her Another World counterpart are basically on Team Dragon until the very end when they play their hand. Steena is human, so once the dragons reveal that the endgame is to kill all humans, she stays with Serge rather than siding with them. Team Dragon is easily the most underexplained faction in Chrono Cross, with a lot of their lore being delivered via exposition dump in Terra Tower and on the beach right before the fight with the Time Devourer, where three random NPCs deliver the game’s remaining lore directly, with no explanation for who the Hell these kids are and why they can dump this exposition on you.
So let’s make a side quest for Steena where we unpack some of that. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail, but basically she ventures into the most forbidden of all dragonian ruins to discover the truth of the dragon gods after their betrayal, when they take the Frozen Flame from Serge and use it to revive Terra Tower and start murdering everyone. This can serve as a vehicle both for the creation of the Chrono Cross from the shards of the dragon tears of both Home World and Another World as well as a way to deliver the exposition for what the dragon gods are. Chronopolis itself contains some information on this, in particular it talks about Chronopolis’ war with Terra Tower 6,000 years ago, telling the story from the perspective of Chronopolis’ origin (this war happened immediately after they accidentally flung themselves back in time, pulling Terra Tower into the timeline as a result of the same botched experiment).
We can mix this in with Guile’s side quest where we learn he is Magus and is searching for Schala, who is still embedded in the Time Devourer somewhere in the darkness at the end of time. He is trying to create the Chrono Cross to that end, so he and Steena have the same goal in that regard. The Chrono Cross, created from the shards of the Dragon Tear across both timelines (that is, Home World and Another World, not Terra Tower’s origin), can collapse them back together again.
Recruiting the tiny alien Starky itself requires a little side quest where you retrieve a star fragment from Home El Nido Triangle, a patch of ocean where his UFO crashed. When he sees you have the lost part, he’ll attack, you beat him up, and then he’s your friend. Starky’s quest is an episode of the main plot, expanded slightly here, to find all the parts for his UFO across both dimensions. In the game as it is, his UFO is almost completely intact in Another World, and you can pull the parts needed from there, with no sign of Starky himself. In this version, Starky is alive in both worlds, but only decides to join you in Home World, mainly because 1) that’s where you most likely first encounter him and 2) that way we don’t have to worry about two versions of the script for if you recruited Another Starky instead.
Anyway, you need to find all the parts of Starky’s ship in Another World so that he can rebuild the ship’s engine and attach it to your boat to reach Terra Tower, which rises from the sea after Serge either gives the Frozen Flame to the dragon gods for safekeeping or else Harle steals it and gives it to them. Possibly we can give the player the option to choose to give the Frozen Flame to the dragon gods or not and Harle is the backup in case the players see where this is going, but in a game with a linear main plot like Chrono Cross it’s probably better not to pretend the player has any impact on the story in the first place. Serge decides to give the Frozen Flame to his apparent allies, the dragon gods, for safekeeping, and if you think that’s stupid, well, you’re not wrong. He’s seventeen, cut him some slack.
Anyway, the part of Terra Tower that stuck out of the sea was Sky Dragon Island and the dragons kill all humans on it after it rises into the sky, so clearly they’re bad news and Serge needs to fly up and deck them in the schnozz, which means he needs Starky’s space engine from Another World, because Terra Tower lifted off in Another World (Home World’s fine, except for all the other ways in which Home World is fucked, but those have been baked in since the start of the game). You can get Starky’s ultimate technique if you also help him do the same thing back in Home World, where the parts are in different and harder to reach places in the waters under El Nido Triangle.
At that point there is nothing left to do except storm Terra Tower, kill the ultimate dragon god made from all six dragons fused together, and retake the Frozen Flame which, luckily, the dragon gods don’t really have the infrastructure to make full use of (yet) so they’re not unstoppable with it the way FATE would be.
The official final boss of the game is the Time Devourer, some alternate form of Lavos that you can only reach at the end of the game. I forget what the justification for this even is in the game as it is, but in this version it’s because you need the Frozen Flame, which has been safely locked in Chronopolis where no one (not even FATE) can get to it for most of the game until you gave it to the dragon gods, who then used it to start murdering all the people, and only after defeating them and taking it back can you use it to reach the Time Devourer.
This whole thing is a bit of a Necron situation (no, not those ones), where the end boss has almost no connection to the rest of the plot. It’s not as bad as actual Necron because at least the Time Devourer ties into the greater lore. It’s a form of Lavos, which means something if you played Chrono Trigger, and even if not, the Frozen Flame came from this thing, so that’s something. But it does kind of feel like you’re just tying up a loose end, like, the villains the plot was actually about are defeated but as long as you’ve got the Frozen Flame, can you go ahead and defeat Lavos’ hidden final form at the end of time and maybe deploy the secret spell puzzle combination that merges the timelines and frees Schala while you’re there?
We have Steena and Guile/Magus’ side quest between Chronopolis and Terra Tower in this version to set it up a little, but I’d definitely want to give this whole thing a drastic rewrite to make Team Lavos a thing in addition to (or instead of) Team FATE, Team Dragon, and Team Lucca. Internet Lore says that at one point in development Serge was supposed to have been bonded to Lavos the same way Schala was, and that this bonding is retconned as a critical component of how Zeal ran the Mammon Machine back in Chrono Trigger. The bond with Schala allowed Lavos to survive its defeat at the hands of Crono’s party, and also allows Serge to kill it where they could not, however if Lavos consumes Serge, it will become unstoppable.
This is something, but it still has the problem that the number of contrivances required to link a random fisher kid to Lavos is pretty extreme, and it might be better to massively rewrite things so that the arbiter of the Frozen Flame is Kid, who is a Chronopolis refugee, cloned from Schala and linked to the Frozen Flame on purpose by FATE to rule the world, busted out of cyber-jail by the Prometheus Circuit both to keep FATE from controlling the Frozen Flame and because enslaving clones so you can use their DNA to control a time-devouring kaiju is wrong on first principles, and pursued by Lynx so they can get the Frozen Flame back under control immediately rather than waiting for a new clone to grow.
And here it helps that Kid is only sixteen years old – depending on how often Chronopolis grows a new Schala, they probably haven’t even started gestating her replacement at the time she escapes Chronopolis, and depending on how old you have to be to be a useful arbiter of the Frozen Flame, it could be as much as 15 years between the gestation of a new clone and the point at which FATE has control of the Frozen Flame again. This provides a reason for why we have the standard teenager-dominated JRPG party: Because Kid’s escape from Chronopolis was timed at around exactly the time she was old enough to take over as Arbiter to maximize the amount of time before a new clone could be grown and trained, and her party members tend to be near her age because she’s gathering people piecemeal and other teenagers are the closest thing she has to a peer group.
In fact, one easy prompt for the escape might be if FATE prefers younger, more easily controlled arbiters, and also wants to keep the total number of potential arbiters running around to a minimum to guard against the possibility of one of them being used against Chronopolis, so it has one active arbiter at a time, one that’s growing up to take over for the old one, and once the new one is old enough to take over for the old, the old one “retires.” Maybe she gets a few months or even a year or two of real actual retirement before being incinerated to sell the lie to the new arbiter, maybe FATE just relies on controlling their upbringing to convince them despite a lack of hard evidence. You could even use this to explain their names. The active arbiter gets called something like “Schala,” “Arbiter,” or “Chrono Trigger” if we want to keep that title drop, and the upcoming arbiter gets called “Kid.”
Serge isn’t a special pre-destined hero with extra destiny, he’s a viewpoint deuteragonist whose main job is to not know things about Chronopolis and FATE that, in this version, Kid would know from the beginning, allowing the first section of the game to retain that intrigue of not knowing what’s going on with all this alternate timeline stuff. This even plays well with how Kid aggressively tries to recruit you early on and you have to refuse her three times to get her to leave you alone. She’s the JRPG protagonist running around hoovering up people with good base stats, you’re just her first party member. Serge isn’t totally unexceptional, he’s dead in Another World and that’s not true of most people. The timeline split wasn’t caused by his death, it was linked to Kid somehow, probably related in some way to why or how she escaped Chronopolis, but just like many of Kid’s other party members are very different in one timeline from another, Serge is dead in Another World, and a lot of early plot points revolve around grappling this. Since Serge is the viewpoint character, this is structurally part of the main plot and even drives it early on, when Kid isn’t telling him much about her vendetta with Lynx. Viewed in-universe, though, the whole “ghost boy” thing is Serge’s party member side quest, not ultimately more important than Orlha finding her dead sister in the timeline where her sister lived and Orlha herself died.
This gives you a couple of things to explain. None of them are particularly difficult, but edits are required. How does Serge get pulled into Another World? If we assume a more actively dimension-hopping Kid, does she bring him through? What for? Does she meet him in Home World and dimension hop to escape some kind of danger she’s gotten him dragged into? If so, what’s Serge’s motivation for the raid on Viper Manor?
Why does Lynx bodyswap with Serge instead of Kid in Fort Dragonia? Dark Serge ends up with Kid on his side anyway, so this doesn’t massively derail the plot (Dark Serge is using his spiffy new Serge disguise to lure Kid back to Chronopolis under the guise of raiding the city for answers or leverage or something when he is actually leading her into an ambush or something), but it suggests that the bodyswap either went wrong somehow, doesn’t occur at all and playable Lynx is either removed completely or else you are playing as actual Lynx, or else Lynx does bodyswap with Kid and the game follows cat!Kid while leaving Serge and Dark Kid behind, even though Serge has been the viewpoint character up until now.
When and how does Kid rejoin the party? This is so glossed over in the original game that I didn’t even bother mentioning it, and for all her entanglement in the backstory of Chronopolis, she has no involvement whatsoever with the plot past Fort Dragonia in the game as it is. If she’s the Arbiter, though, then she is the center of the Time Devourer plot, which means her reincorporation into the party deserves more attention. It has to occur somewhere between the return to Another World after the Dead Sea but before the raid on Chronopolis in the Sea of Eden, and there’s plenty of options in there.
None of these questions are particularly hard to answer, they just require answering at all. Since this is the end of the series, though, I’m not gonna bother untangling specific answers to any of these questions. Someone talke Square into giving me like fifty million dollars for a remake and I’ll figure it out then.
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