Category: Video Games

I really want there to be more to do in Tin Can, but unfortunately I think the premise has about reached its limit with a couple of hours of gameplay. I could play custom scenarios and longer ones, but it wouldn’t really change anything, I know how to deal with all the disasters and even if sheer fatigue catches up with me in a 45 minute or hour-long scenario, it wouldn’t be any more fun, I’d just need more stamina.

But I do think there’s more you can do with the gameplay. You just have to ditch the escape pod premise and instead have your tiny tin can be a fully functional spaceship that can go places on its own. This is ideally the realm of a full sequel, but if I were actually giving advice to the Tin Can guys, I would potentially release it as a series of free update DLCs instead, because then each update gives you a chance to get the game back into the public eye for fifteen minutes and that’s probably better business than completing every new feature so you can release the whole thing as a sequel. Also, I think structuring this blog post as a series of DLC updates will be more interesting and that’s overwhelmingly likely to be the only way in which these changes are implemented.

The first update is to swap out the distress beacon for a navigation system. You are not holding out in an escape pod until rescue, you are moving from one space station to another. This allows you to add in a series of missions to deliver messages back and forth between space stations. The only gameplay change this makes is that your distress beacon now has a CRT monitor displaying not just a timer, but also a map of the sector with your current route highlighted and how far along on the route you are from one station to another, and if your navigation system is offline it’s possible to be knocked off-course and once you’re back online you’ll have to readjust your trajectory with a little joystick or tuning dials or whatever control is easiest to program. Also, you’ll have some message cassette tape or something (the whole thing has an old-school 60s/70s NASA aesthetic) floating around, or maybe a written message that you can read. It doesn’t do anything, but delivering that thing is theoretically your goal.

The next update adds spy missions and two important new modules shoved in there somewhere: The radio and the radar. The radar lets you see things nearby, like ice clouds, meteorite showers, electrical storms, and other hazards that crowd space to an alarmingly dense degree, but also other ships and any space stations that aren’t on your star chart. Space stations are immobile things (well, they orbit stuff, which is not technically immobile but it’s as immobile as it gets in space) so you’ll only need a radar to find a space station if it’s a secret space station. The radar can easily detect ships with active radar, because ships with active radar are constantly sending out radar pulses to detect things based on how long it takes the reverberation to get back (wait – does that work in space? First of all, yes, for the same reason the sun’s light can travel through the vacuum of space to reach Earth, but also, how many fucking stars and black holes do you expect to swing past in the course of 30 minutes in an unguided escape pod? Don’t be fooled by the grounded aesthetic, this is a pulp game), but ships without can hide themselves in various debris fields pretty effectively. With passive radar you can detect ships with active radar, but that’s about it. Your radio works similarly: Lights you up on radar when sending messages, but is indistinguishable from a rock when receiving them.

Spy missions, then, are missions where you have to eavesdrop on a ship or station or else find an eavesdropping ship. In the former case, you find a good debris field to hide yourself in nearby and then have to reduce heat emissions until you turn invisible, then survive until you finish eavesdropping and escape back to a friendly space station. In the latter case, you go poking around a debris field until you find the enemy ship and demand their surrender (or skip to calling in the space artillery, depending on what tone you’re going for).

Tin Can is meant to be played in VR. It’s perfectly playable and reasonably fun on PC, but it needs to be a VR game which means the Tin Can needs to take place mostly in a small space. That said, it’s already got an opening section where you run around the storage bay of a much larger ship grabbing spare parts before the reactor explodes, so clearly they’re not married to the game being playable entirely in a 5 ft. square area. That means our next update is walkable space stations and a cargo bay. You can now have trading missions. For the most part you won’t be schlupping cargo in and out of the bay by hand, but instead you will have an interactable monitor in the cargo bay and can push a button to load in certain cargo. The gameplay here is that certain cargo has certain requirements. Some cargo are electronics that will get fried if a current from the electrical storm event runs through them so, like critical systems, you have to turn it off as fast as possible once that event starts, others are reptile or plant terrariums that must be kept above a certain temperature or they go bad, others are frozen food or medicine that must be kept below a certain temperature or they go bad, and others are weapons or mining explosives that must be below above a certain temperature or they explode. Cargo pods have independent temperature regulators, but of course, each pod has a separate regulator which needs to be maintained. If the cargo goes bad, it becomes worthless, if it explodes, it takes your whole ship with it.

As you might expect, this update brings with it an economy. You can now get cash dollars for completing missions with which you can buy cargo cheap to sell elsewhere where it’s dear. Cargo also means you can now supply planetary exploration and settlement, filling up your cargo bay with exploration probes (electronic), food (temperature controlled), mining explosives (volatile), and so on to help people settle uninhabited planets. Maybe also something with space station upgrades, although I’m nervous that will lean too far into electronics-heavy shipments, and you want a good blend of temperature-controlled shipments mixed in with those.

The final update is space combat! Cargo pods can instead be filled in with turrets. Turrets aim and fire themselves automatically at targets far beyond visual range located with radar. Weaponfire lights you up on radar just like active radar does, so you can use passive radar to surprise attack an enemy, but once you do the jig is up. Your three weapons are lasers, which are very power-hungry for poor damage but have great range and double as point-defense against missiles, plus, while they burn through batteries very quickly, batteries can be recharged, missiles, which have finite and fairly large ammo that will take up a lot of space and require regular reloading but have good range and do tons of damage, and railguns, which come with a lot of ammo and also you can toss basically anything in the hopper for more, but have poor range and damage. You want to have some of everything on hand and then once you know what weapons the enemy has, you want to focus on maintaining the turrets that counter those weapons and worry about fixing the others after the battle is over.

With weapons, of course, comes missions for patrolling space to keep pirates or enemy scouts at bay, hunting down specific bounties, and assaulting enemy space stations. This also means we can introduce a territory control mechanic, because it is fun to paint maps blue.

All of these missions stay focused on the core concept of unplugging parts from less important systems to plug them into more important systems while trying to keep your temperature reasonable, seal up any holes punched in your frame, and prevent any of your electronics from shorting out, all in hopes of minimizing the damage to your pod/ship, but they add more systems to worry about and a greater context for completing missions in besides just trying to survive longer and longer times.

Dungeons II greatly improves upon the dungeon heart formula giving me the one thing I always most wanted out of it: The ability to ascend into the surface world to wreck the towns of the heroes up top. Mechanically, it’s competent but unexceptional except for that surface world idea, which is enough to get me through the game so long as it’s reasonably easy, which it is. If there’s one bit of design advice that’s emerged from over a year of blogging through my backlog, it’s that if your gameplay is just okay, make it easy so I don’t have to dwell on it and I’ll still probably like your game as long as it has anything else to recommend it.

Dungeons II’s writing is, unfortunately, absolutely godawful. They got the narrator from the Stanley Parable to narrate things, but they don’t have any material to give him except stale parodies of WarCraft and Game of Thrones. And WarCraft is already an RTS game. Sure, World of WarCraft had completely taken over the franchise for ten years even at Dungeon II’s 2015 release date, but it’s not like Dungeons II is drawing on WoW expansion material for its referential “humor,” it’s drawing on basic plot beats the series keeps revisiting, most of which were established in the second and third RTS games. That would be fine if those games had been single-faction Alliance games so Dungeons II would be providing a chance to play the other side, but they’re not. I could already play the other side all the way back in WarCraft I.

Then there’s Game of Thrones, and the problem there is that it’s just got fuck all to do with Dungeons II’s theme. There are no dungeons in Game of Thrones, so having the undead dungeon lord be a cross between the Night King and Arthas doesn’t really add anything to what a straight Arthas parody would’ve been bringing, and having a bunch of Game of Thrones knock-off nobles in the Alliance doesn’t go anywhere because they’re all unified against you rather than bickering amongst themselves. Digging out a bunch of Alliance NPCs from World of WarCraft would’ve been perfectly fine if all you need is a stream of ten different good guys who you need to intercept as they trickle into the map, defeating them in detail before they can mass up an unstoppably large army, and that’s a perfectly good hook for a mission mechanically. The expansion DLC is even more heavily Game of Thrones themed for some reason. As far as I can tell, the guys making Dungeons II either just really liked Game of Thrones and shoved references in out of pure fanboyism or they were hoping to cash in on its popularity without overhauling the actual content of their game at all.

And also the main antagonist is a demi-god named Krotos, which seems like a transparent reference to Kratos except that Krotos is absolutely nothing like Kratos. He’s an angelic aasimar-y sort of demi-god, and a beacon of goodness and justice who steals word-for-word Aragorn’s speech at the Black Gate in the final stage. As of Dungeons II’s release date, Kratos was a vengeful mass murdering psychopath whose character arc had been entirely about shedding redeeming qualities until he destroyed what seemed like the entire world (not until 2018 did it come out that it was actually just Greece) to satisfy his own personal grievances with Zeus and the other Olympians. My only guess is that they thought Kratos was the most badass video game protagonist around, so they used a knock-off of him for the end boss, but then wrenched every other aspect of his character out to cram him into the role their end boss actually needed to play, i.e. a leader of the armies of Good rather than an unstoppable killing machine whose motivations are understandable but wholly selfish and whose legitimate grievances are wildly out of proportion to the collateral damage he inflicts within 15 minutes of the opening credits of any given God of War game (prior to the 2018 Norse-focused game that is infuriatingly called just “God of War” even though it is a sequel).

In the end, while I like Dungeons II’s gameplay alright and there’s not a lot of competition in the dungeon heart genre, the plot is a string of references and parodies that don’t really amount to anything and which I mostly ignore in favor of listening to podcasts. It was fun, but not so fun that I wanted to bother with the DLC when it saddled me with one of those missions where you only control one unit as a mechanism for delivering a bunch of worldbuilding and exposition to set up the kinds of major confrontations you might raise an army for. Your worldbuilding and exposition are shit, Dungeons II, and I’m not going to sit through an entire thirty minute level of them just to get to more of the decently entertaining dungeon heart gameplay, nor am I remotely interested in seeing where your stupid Game of Thrones knockoff plot about the Northlands beyond the Wall might be going.

Dungeons III is at least a little bit better at this. In Dungeons III, the protagonist is Thalya, a dark elf who is your principle general in the fight against Good. She was raised by the main antagonist, a paladin named Tanos, to be all good and pure, but after you juice her up with evil magic in the tutorial, she relapses back into evil (we are told she is relapsing, but never what kind of evil she got up to in the past – sometimes it kinda seems like her original “evil” might’ve just been the original sin of being a dark elf). In dialogue, Thalya gets into arguments with herself between “Good Thalya” and “Evil Thalya.” For starters, this is an actual character, not just a reference to a character from other media with the plot and arc excised leaving a mangled name to dangle from a quest target. But also, the narrator occasionally argues with Good Thalya, and at one point drops the line “stop doing the Therese and Jeanette thing!” This line is kind of opaque to people who haven’t played Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Colon Cancer, but from the fact that it’s a pair you can guess what’s being referred to, and the writing for once has the restraint to just drop the reference, let the people who get it, get it, and then move on without belaboring the point.

On the other hand, in the part when Thalya is first infused with dark power, all her attacks deal either 1337 or 9001 points of damage, and instead of just letting that joke stand, they had to have Thalya shout it out, so the writing isn’t massively improved.

Dungeons III also improves the mechanics to the point of being good without any major qualification. Certainly there’s still minor nitpicks, mostly in that they’re still glued to the same basic mechanics as Dungeons II, that being where you command creatures Dungeon Keeper style while underground, picking them up and tossing them down next to what you want them to do, but WarCraft style above ground, right clicking to move or attack with the pack of units you have selected. Of course, since all your base building takes place underground, there’s nothing to do up top except unit micro, but at least you can do that unit micro with reasonable controls. The Dungeon Keeper style controls just aren’t good and it would be way better if I could just select units and order them to attack like I can on the surface. It is, at least, a marked improvement on Dungeons I, in which your dungeon minions only guarded specific rooms they were placed in and all attacks had to be accomplished exclusively with your dungeon lord, and also there was no surface level so the plot and harder levels mostly revolved around beating up other dungeon lords with surface attackers as a secondary threat.

But Dungeons II and III give you the tools to get around the irritating control scheme, and a properly laid out dungeon basically runs itself while you focus on attacking the surface. Dungeons III makes those attacks on the surface much more satisfying by being far more transparent about how you gather “evilness.” In both II and III, “evilness” is a resource gained by attacking the surface, but in Dungeons II I was never totally clear on exactly how you get it. In Dungeons III there are clearly labeled shrines of goodness and if you kill their defenders they will turn into shrines of evilness, and periodically the goodies will try to recapture them. Likewise, instead of splitting the horde, demons, and undead into three different dungeon factions like Dungeons I and II, Dungeons III makes all three of them available to you even while each of them remains playable as a completely independent faction. You can decide to play as a pure demons dungeon if you want, filling in your limited population points with nothing but imps and spider monsters, or you can go pure horde with orcs and naga, or you can mix and match and probably also add some undead at some point, I dunno, they were a DLC faction in Dungeons II and I haven’t gotten deep enough into Dungeons III to unlock them.

Meeple Station has both a campaign and a tutorial. The problem is that the campaign gives you no guidance on how to build your starting station, and the tutorial is interminable. It’s possible there’s a good space station management sim here once you figure out the systems – legion are the indie devs who make perfectly good games but are so familiar with their own game that they’ve completely lost touch with how to teach it – but the tutorial is like an hour long and boring and the campaign does a poor job of introducing systems piecemeal, but instead asks you to build a basic functioning space station completely from scratch as your very first objective. It’s possible that there’s a good game here if I put in an hour or two figuring out the systems, but I’ve got too many games in my backlog to feel good about rolling those dice – especially when Meeple Station’s premise is pretty similar to games like RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included, which are already pretty good games.

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.

Continue reading “Chrono Cross Character Quests: Employees of the Zelbess and the Dead Sea” →

I don’t know what it is about Roadwarden. It has cool monsters and a focus on exploration and its illustrations alleviate the one thing I usually dislike about text-heavy games, which is that it’s hard to keep track of where everything is in relation to each other which can make the setting feel like a bunch of detached vignettes that you’re teleporting between with no intervening space or geographic relation to one another. About half of Roadwarden’s illustrations are maps (the other half are regular illustrations of small locations like a tavern or whatever, which are small enough you can keep the whole place in your head at once from a good description) and solve that problem completely. And for some reason I still just don’t like it.

It kind of feels like it has way too much resource pressure to allow for reasonable exploration, like I have to already know where important resources are in order to stock up before I run out, but I haven’t actually run out of any critical resources yet. It just feels that way. It feels too rustic and desolate even though it’s far more populated than games like Hollow Knight or Morbid: Seven Acolytes, which I liked (in the former case, which I adored). Maybe it’s because it’s too brown? But the game I switched to instead was Darkest Dungeon, and while that’s not as monotone, it doesn’t exactly pop with color, either. Maybe I’ve come to really hate text games? I used to play them all the time and mostly only stopped because it was getting hard to find good ones (I’d run through the backlog of genre highlights built up over 40 years of text adventure games and spin-offs), but that was a while ago. Liking reading much less in your early 30s as compared to your early 20s is usually the opposite of how things work, but maybe?

Anyway, since all I’m doing with Roadwarden is blinking in confusion as to why I don’t like it, I’m combining it with the August Humble Choice post in order to wring something of reasonable length out.

Disco Elysium is one of the big names used to draw people in and maybe look at the smaller ones while they’re here. I’m starting to enter an era where I’ve been getting new games through Humble Bundle almost exclusively for long enough that sometimes I actually don’t already have the big name, but this is not one of those cases. I’m not getting it because I already have it.

Chivalry II is a multiplayer first person slasher about mass battles in a Hollywood medieval aesthetic. It’s in the second big name slot, so presumably it’s very good at doing that for people who care about that sort of thing. I am not those people.

Road 96 is some kind of branching story paths game about a road trip across a fictitious authoritarian regime in the year 1996 with the ultimate goal of escape. It’s a love letter to a bunch of filmmakers which makes me very strongly suspect this is one of those games that should’ve been an animated film except those struggle to get funding on Kickstarter.

Trek to Yomi is a black-and-white game that’s doing its best to be a playable Akira Kurosawa film. Unlike Road 96, it’s got hack-and-slash gameplay so I doubt it’s an animated film in disguise, but its only gameplay feature appears to be “sword.” This game is selling itself purely on aesthetic and I’m not that into the Akira Kurosawa aesthetic. They’re great films and all, but not so great that filming Japan in black-and-white immediately releases dopamine into my system.

Arcade Paradise is about a bunch of hipsters who start an arcade or something? It’s a love letter to arcade games and I’m not a huge fan of arcade games. Like, they’re alright, but they’re time killers I play on my phone when I don’t have access to a computer.

SuchArt is a “genius artist simulator.” It seems like its main selling point is that you can actually do a art in the game and sell it for bazillions of space dollars to upgrade your space house and influence the war of robots vs. crabs on the surface of the planet. I’m not actually good at art, and while I doubt the game’s AI can analyze that at all, I wouldn’t really enjoy scribbling some random colors onto a canvas and then being told that I’ve revolutionized the art world with my stick figure in blue and yellow.

Tin Can is a first person sim game about being in a spaceship that is having a bad time. The idea is that you have to fix the damn thing by picking up parts and putting them in the right spots, but your health is indicated by audio cues for things like your heartbeat and your breathing, so your first alert that you are dying of CO2 poisoning and should probably make a priority of repairing the oxygen recyclers is that your breathing gets more labored. Exactly one person has played this on How Long To Beat and it took them about five hours, which is long enough for this concept not to overstay its welcome, so I’ll toss it in the backlog as something I can play in a lazy afternoon.

EDIT: And indeed it took less than five hours to complete. Tin Can’s clearly supposed to be a VR game and it might work really well in that context. You’re in a small escape pod grabbing things and plugging them into where they need to go before you run out of air and die. Even as a PC game, it’s okay, but it suffers a bit from the only gameplay mechanic being to pick a thing up and put it back somewhere else. You unplug broken parts to replace them with fixed ones, slowly cannibalizing every system that isn’t absolutely necessary (like taking apart the main lights to rely on emergency lights, or dismantling the main computer and its convenient all-in-one-place problems monitor to instead run around checking each system monitor individually) to use the spare parts to fix critical systems like your oxygen recycler and your gravity generator.

It’s not a terrible concept, but it could use more polish in a lot of different places.

Hot Brass is a game about playing a SWAT officer foiling assorted crimes. You pick your equipment and do some kind of top-down stealthy shooty gameplay. It’s pretty heavily equipment focused and looks like it might be a decent game, but SWAT teams in particular have not exactly been endearing themselves to me lately. I don’t feel the need to give this game a fair shake on its mechanics until someone pays me to do so and I know I’m not going to have fun playing as a SWAT officer in regular real life America (some kind of Judge Dredd cyberpunk thing works out fine for me, both because it’s easy to take the author’s word for it that SWAT teams are a good idea in the fictional world they have created to support that premise and because cyberpunk settings frequently leave it vague as to whether or not you’re supposed to be the good guys in the first place).

The only pick-up wound up being Tin Can, which I finished within 48 hours of picking it up, which has got my backlog back down to 164.

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).

Dungeons is allegedly a Dungeon Heart strategy game in the mold of Dungeon Keeper: You build a dungeon and repel attacking heroes, inverting the usual Diablo-style dungeon crawling action RPG. It’s really clear that what they actually wanted to make was a regular ARPG, though. The main plot is about descending down through three different tilesets of dungeons and confronting three dungeon bosses. It’s full of references to almost entirely Blizzard RPGs like Diablo and World of WarCraft (although in fairness Arthas was also a character in WarCraft III, an RTS), bringing up Dungeon Keeper only to explain how Dungeons works differently.

So how does Dungeons work differently? Well, your dungeon lord is at least 50% of your influence over the map. Monsters don’t venture far from the pentagrams used to summon them, and you can’t move those pentagrams after placing them. The pentagrams do expand your area of influence, so you use pentagrams to push out the borders of your control. You can’t tunnel very far past your area of influence, so pushing borders like this is, to some extent, important.

Dungeons’ big change from Dungeon Keeper is that your primary resource is now soul energy. Heroes come into your dungeon with zero soul energy, but as they fulfill needs like treasure, defeating monsters, finding equipment, or finding knowledge, they fill up soul energy. Once they’re maxed out, they’ll try to leave. You get a chunk of their soul energy when you defeat them and can get more by imprisoning them in a dungeon to slowly extract the rest.

Regular old gold mined out from veins in your underground lair is still used to place minion-spawning pentagrams, but every other function of gold is in helping you extract soul energy, either by placing loot or libraries or armories or other things that give heroes soul energy or else dungeons that help you extract it from defeated heroes. Soul energy is the currency you use to increase your dungeon level and place prestige items. The former makes all your minions stronger while the latter makes your dungeon lord stronger.

Your dungeon lord is the only unit you can move around with regular right clicks. Since all of your other units are tied to pentagrams which must be placed within your area of influence, your dungeon lord is the only one who can venture into enemy dungeon lords’ territory and is the only unit you can use for various scenario-specific objectives to do with ruining the heroes’ day, like intercepting a thieves’ guild smuggling cash through the underground or wrecking the cellars of various townsfolk (which spawns heroes in response). Your dungeon lord has an ability tree retained throughout the campaign, and while some of the abilities on that tree increase the power of your defensive minions, most of them increase the power of your dungeon lord either passively or through spells you can equip to your hotbar.

Additionally, at the end of each of the game’s three acts (not explicitly defined as such, but there’s three major antagonists in three different dungeon tilesets confronted in sequence), you must send your dungeon lord to fight the enemy boss alone. The more you’ve invested your skill points into dungeon management, the less effective you’ll be in these boss fights where your dungeon lord is the only usable unit.

What it all adds up to is an ARPG with a dungeon heart backdrop that mainly serves to distract from the ARPG elements. The strength of your character is pretty directly tied to the prestige items you can build for your dungeon, but those are bought with soul energy, and the system for accumulating soul energy involves a lot of babysitting heroes into taking a bunch of gold before dropping your dungeon lord on them (who is, remember, the only mobile unit, even in sections of the dungeon under your control), then waiting for more heroes to show up. The rate at which soul energy comes in is pathetic compared to how much you need to buy big-ticket prestige items that can significantly increase your power (or dozens of smaller ones that add up to the same cost for slightly lesser effect).

Focusing the dungeon management on being half dungeon lord and half game master made the dungeon heart gameplay less fun than games which focus purely on defeating heroes, and the rate at which heroes come in is far too slow when they’re the only source of the game’s most vital resource, and all of your offensive actions (which are the conclusion to basically every scenario – less than a quarter of the game’s sixteen stages are defensive) are carried out by playing the action RPG that they clearly wanted to be making instead.

The game also performs poorly on my machine, and while I normally chalk this up to my weird powerful processor + weak graphics card combo caused by the pressure crypto has been putting on the graphics card market, Dungeons is a 2011 game, so this seems like it’s more likely the thing where games from the 2010-2012-ish era run worse than games both before and after and upgrading the machine doesn’t help.

I took a quick look at the next game in the series and it does look like you can actually move your units plus you can venture forth to the surface world instead of always wrecking people’s cellars, so I’m not taking Dungeons II and III out of the backlog, but they’re definitely on notice to actually work, both in terms of performance and gameplay.

Serge has been pulled from his Home World to Another World, an alternate timeline where he drowned as a child. Almost as soon as he arrived he was ambushed by government goons of the Acacia Dragoons sent to arrest him for being a ghost, on the command of a mysterious villain named Lynx. Lacking anything better to do with his weekend, he heads up to to the Acacia Dragoons’ capital city of Termina to break into Viper Manor and confront this Lynx guy to see what he knows about all this wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey bullshit.

He’s also given his talking dog a walk and scritches behind the ears, helped a sapient occult artifact resolve his identity crisis with the power of archaeological digs and fishing, and gone on a date with the alternate timeline version of his girlfriend. He also met a thief named Kid and could hypothetically have recruited her, but also maybe he didn’t, so we’re talking about her now, when he’s more likely to do so, because some criminal expertise seems relevant now. You’ve also got to recruit someone else who’s trying to get in and wouldn’t you know it but there are three options: Help a magician climb up the cliffs in the rear, chase a rock star into a haunted forest to creep up from the sewers below, or help a foppish idiot playing hero charge the front gates directly.

We first meet Kid back in the Another Arni Village episode and it’s possible to recruit her there, but she’s more thematically relevant here and it makes some amount of sense that Serge might put off recruiting her for a while, seeing as how the game opens with a dream premonition where you shank her for no apparent reason and you might reasonably want to avoid that. After Serge arrives in Another World, main villain Lynx sends some of his government allies to kidnap him, and Kid shows up to kick their asses (so hard they’ll kiss the moon) just on the principle that these guys are bullies, laws are for wimps, and she has a personal vendetta with Lynx anyway. This is before you’ve had a chance to recruit Leena or Mojo or (in this version of the game) Poshul, so if you pounce on the chance to have a cute girl in the party, she’s your first party member besides Serge. If, instead, you turn her down, she’ll try to join you again in Termina while you’re plotting to break into Viper Manor. Even if you refuse, she breaks in for her own reasons and gets poisoned, at which point Serge will agree to save her whether the player likes it or not and she’ll join the party after she’s cured even if you’ve resisted recruiting her up to that point.

This is intentionally a break from the original game’s branching story, which locks you out of content and incentivizes you to make dumb story choices but ultimately has no impact on the narrative whatsoever. In the game as it exists, you have the choice to save Kid or abandon her to die from poison, which means you can pursue thwarting your dream vision as far as letting Kid die anyway just to give destiny the finger, and she’ll still end up getting cured anyway by a random stranger and then shows up just in time to get killed on schedule despite never having even been a member of the party. If we’re going to force Kid’s presence in the party (and we have to), then let’s do it when Kid is in life-threatening danger and Serge is compelled by JRPG protagonist instincts to save her. After you cure her, the game gives you an option to try and reject her from your party, in which case Serge explains his dream to her, and Kid scoffs and says she’s going after Lynx no matter what, so unless you plan on giving up your quest completely, you’re headed to the same place at the same time and she’s coming whether you like it or not.

Regardless of exactly when and how you recruit her, she’s a thief and needs a side quest about doing freelance professional crimes. She also has a revenge plot with Lynx that forms part of the main plot, and that could carry a character by itself, but Kid is also a thief and her criminal nature is a major part of both how she is depicted and how other people treat her. She’s even a former member of a gang called the Radical Dreamers, although that’s more of a reference to a spiritual predecessor game than a significant part of her backstory, so we’ll focus on Kid as a solo act for her side quest.

That side quest is going to have basically the same gameplay as Viper Manor from the main plot: Dungeons that emphasize avoiding enemies (Chrono Cross has enemies that are visible on the map and cause random encounters when you touch them), solving puzzle locks, and avoiding traps. They don’t have to be as involved as Viper Manor, but there should be a few of them tied together by being called, like, the Three Treasures of El Nido or something. People can talk about how they’re the most famous treasures in the archipelago and they were going to be brought together for display at the Viper Festival, but they had to cancel because there was a rumor the Radical Dreamers were going to come and steal them, and now Kid feels like she’e been issued a personal challenge. Even in the game as it exists, Kid is trying to steal the Frozen Flame, although she never even gets close to accomplishing this and the only purpose of that plot thread is to introduce the Frozen Flame as a legendary treasure so that when you later on learn that it’s a fragment of Lavos from Chrono Trigger you have some context rather than being like “yeah, I guess that’s a name you could have for a piece of Lavos, sure.”

There are three characters you can recruit to break into Viper Manor. In the game as it exists, these three are mutually exclusive because they really want you to do a New Game+. In this version, recruiting one doesn’t lock you out of recruiting any of the others and you can even come back for them after Viper Manor.

Nikki is the rock star. His dancer sister Miki can’t be recruited until much later in the game, but they’re a diva duo and they can share a side quest. Miki is also recruited in act two when you’re playing as Lynx (after a body swap, but you still have a different party), which means she can hold up that side quest while you’re in Home World. In the game as it is, Nikki is integral to a side quest where you help the demihumans of Home World reclaim their ancestral home on the island of Marbule (they never lost it in Another World) with the power of rock and roll, and we’re going to make that the capstone to a series of rock performances where you play a rhythm game of some sort, with a number of different songs.

There’s one set in Another World played at Termina, which you can play by chasing Nikki into Shadow Forest where he’s trying to find his long lost sister Marcy (he’ll be doing this kind of thing a lot), then completing the Viper Manor episode of the plot (including the part where Nikki confronts Marcy – turns out she’s an elite warrior for the Acacia Dragoons and tries to kill Nikki for breaking in, family, amirite?) and returning with Nikki to his unnamed ship. The other set is in Home World, played at the SS Zelbess by bringing Miki to the ship (docked with the Zelbess) after confronting the exiled Sage of Marbule, who then agrees (without saying it outright) to teach Nikki the song of Marbule. Completing the Another World set isn’t necessary to saving Marbule (Another Nikki plays the Termina sets, but Home Nikki plays the Marbule song), but completing the Home World set is, and the Home World set is amped up versions of the Another World set, so Another World provides good practice.

You still can’t save Marbule until you get Another Fargo back in your party. After completing the Zelbess set, Nikki will say he thinks he’s ready, but Home Fargo says the Zelbess is still unable to sail and never will be. Just like in the game as it exists, if you recruit Another Fargo and bring him to the Zelbess in Home World, he’ll take over and prove Home Fargo wrong.

Pierre is the faux-hero. He sort of has a side quest, in that he’s a weakling who can become quite powerful under the right circumstances, specifically, if you get him the hero’s sword (plus the hero’s medal and hero’s shield, but hero’s medal is trivially acquired while recruiting him and hero’s shield is straightforwardly lootable in Viper Manor, the episode of the game you recruit him for). Thing is, you recruit him in Another World, lose him when you get flung into Home World alone, and regain him when you gain the power to travel between worlds. His hero sword is found in Home World and in a location that gets destroyed behind you, so his side quest must be completed without him and then you give him the results and this apparently completes his arc to grow into the hero that he always pretended to be.

We’re replacing this with a straightforward monster hunt. Pierre seeks to prove his valor by finding and slaying terrifying monsters who plague the land on behalf of a hunter’s guild in the same style as the Final Fantasy XII hunt quests (the minimum number of hunts to serve the side quest is, like, nine, bearing in mind that the first two or three are straightforward and easy and only the last handful are typical JRPG optional content challenge level, but as long as we’re dreaming let’s imagine there’s 70+ just like FF XII). After several of the hunts he complains about how the sun was in his eyes and he’s feeling sick today and so forth, but he grows into a significantly more powerful character over the course of the hunts as well as becoming less of a fop and more dedicated to the hard work needed to become a true hero.

Guile is the magician. Early on the Chrono Cross devs planned to have Guile be Magus from Chrono Trigger, but they abandoned this idea partway through when they remembered that they resent the fact that their game is a Chrono Trigger sequel in the first place and will fulfill their contractual obligation to tie their lore into the events of Trigger exclusively by way of killing beloved characters, then go back to making the standalone game they wanted to be making the whole time.

That leaves us with the first character who isn’t just gimmicky but downright incomplete. Guile is a magician and he wants to break into Viper Manor basically just to prove that no fortress is impregnable, sort of a Houdini type. Perfectly good character, but to the extent any kind of side quest makes sense for him, it’s to break into lots of heavily guarded estates – which is exactly what Kid’s side quest already is, and it’s more fun to break into a place to rob it than it is to break into it just to prove you can.

Now I do plan on doubling some of these characters’ side quests up, but only when they’re closely related themselves. Kid and Guile might have aligned goals, but only by coincidence. They don’t know each other and have no obvious character arc with one another, the way that character sets like Nikki and Miki or Glenn, Karsh, and Riddel do. One option for Guile is to pair him with the game’s other magician (as bizarre as some of these characters get, 45 is enough that their schticks end up with a lot of overlap anyway) and give him some kind of magic show, but Guile seems less like a performer and more like an analogue hacker, plus the other magician (Sneff, we’ll get to him eventually) has a whole character arc about getting out of this kind of performance, and while that’s a specific circumstance, we still potentially want to avoid “doing a magic show” as being a big part of his side content. I’ll decide for sure when I get there.

There are two ways to weasel out of this, both of which could be used together, although neither involve any real side quest, just piggybacking off of other things. The first is to lean into the role he played in Radical Dreamers, a short game produced by some of the Chrono Cross team independently in which Kid, a mysterious benefactor named Gil, and the protagonist (unrelated to Serge but a vaguely defined ageless faceless gender-netural culturally ambiguous adventurer person, so Serge’s backstory makes as much sense for them as any other) breaking into Viper Manor to steal the Frozen Flame. Guile is a master magician who steals things just to prove that no lock is unpickable and nobody is safe, and he has a mentor/benefactor relationship with the talented Kid, who’s so fiercely independent as to resist the idea of anyone else looking after her even to the limited extent of a mentor/pupil relationship, but who’s nevertheless convinced into letting Guile help because his deep reserve of experience is undeniably beneficial. In this way, Guile can piggyback off of Kid’s side content. He can also carry Kid’s side content when Kid isn’t in the party, although he’ll object.

The second way to weasel Guile into having content but not really is to reintroduce the concept of Guile as Magus in disguise. His involvement in Viper Manor is still down purely to taking the idea of an impregnable fortress as an affront and breaking into it just to prove it’s possible, and he can still be impressed by Kid’s talent and take it upon himself to guide her growth – but also Kid bears an uncanny resemblence to his missing sister Schala, because she is a clone made by Chronopolis to intervene whenever history threatens to break the Chronopolis time loop, which is a Good Ending for humanity despite the shady methods employed by Chronopolis in the process.

In act three of the game, the second time you’re playing as Serge (as opposed to act two when you play as Lynx – sort of, you’re bodyswapped), Guile is going to have a side quest that reveals that he is Magus as well as some of the information regarding what happened to his sister Schala in order to take some of the heat off of the endgame exposition dump where the devs ran out of money and throw a bunch of NPCs to literally explain the plot to you. I’m not going to bother to work out the exact plot details until someone pays me to write a complete game script (why won’t you return my phonecalls, Square?!), but the point of the side quest is to establish that Schala has merged with Lavos and to direct the player towards combining the Tear of Hate with the Tear of Love to form the Chrono Cross to reunify the timelines, destroying the Time Devourer while freeing Schala. This is the Good Ending generally, but for Guile/Magus in particular, any other ending is unacceptable. It’s also really unsatisfying how you make the Chrono Cross in the game as it exists.

You get the Tear of Hate and the Tear of Love automatically, then you walk up to the dragon sage Steena and ask what to do with them, and she says to go to a specific place to combine them into the Chrono Cross. That place is a waterfall that otherwise looks unenterable on the world map (no label shows up to indicate it’s an enterable location), but it’s empty of monsters so you can just walk in and combine the Tears into the Chrono Cross. There’s no explanation for why this has to be done here nor does the game even explain what the Chrono Cross is for. On repeat playthroughs you can figure out that the Tear of Love is from Home World and the Tear of Hate is from Another World so combining them allows you to merge the timelines, but it’s not clear on the first playthrough, and Chrono Cross spends the first 90% of its runtime being a JRPG that straightforwardly tells you a story. You can’t swerve from that into being a Dark Souls game where it’s on you to piece the lore of the main plot together from clues and fragments. Players will be completely justified in the expectation that the plot is going to be explained directly to them at some point, because that’s what the game has been doing up until now, and there’s no way for them to guess that this specific part of the game is meant to be a mystery solved before you beat it, rather than a setup to be paid off in a mandatory story scene.

This is all a long walk towards saying that Guile/Magus has an endgame side quest that directly ties into the main plot and straightforwardly explains that combining the Dragon Tears from each timeline creates an artifact that allows the timelines to be merged and which (due to wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff) will also eradicate the Time Devourer’s essence, leaving Schala untouched.

This definitely means that this version of Chrono Cross is unambiguously running out the budget for the game as it exists, which I normally try to avoid, but that’s completely out the window for this thought experiment (the practical answer to “how should Chrono Cross have been made” is “with far, far fewer playable characters,” not “by tripling the size of the game to give its 45 playable characters enough content to justify their includsion”).

Oh, and while we’re making changes, the tear from Home World should be the Tear of Hate, and the tear from Another World should be the Tear of Love, because there’s a (possibly accidental?) plot twist in Chrono Cross where you are from the goatee dimension where everything went wrong, but for some reason they labeled the Dragon Tears from Serge’s perspective instead of the greater world’s perspective, even though he had nothing to do with naming them.