Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest, most well put together video games of not just the 16 bit era of gaming, but in the entire history of video games. Its sequel, Chrono Cross...you either love it or hate it. Now, on paper, Chrono Cross is not only a great concept, but one that could potentially surpass its predecessor in artistic merit.The main theme of Chrono Trigger is time travel, while the main theme of Chrono Cross is dimension hopping. in Chrono Trigger you hop around different eras of the world, while in Chrono Cross you jump between two alternate timelines. It sort of makes sense, after all, it is very difficult to make a sequel to a time travel story that does not, in some way, repeat something done in the first story. Now, I am not here today to review Chrono Cross as a game, nor as a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, as I feel like that's been done before. I'm here to make the argument that Chrono Cross is a game that follows the thematics of Chrono Trigger, only with a different perspective.
"Time travel is, summed up in its most basic form, the notion of traveling through the past and future as one would travel through space. When we travel through time we either go either to a point in time before our starting point, or to the future without experiencing the passage of time itself. Whatever technological device we utilize to travel through time is typically referred to as a time machine."
The story of Chrono Trigger is famous among gamers, but I believe it would not hurt to sum it up. A kid named Crono and his friend, Lucca, one day discover time travel. Marle, a girl Crono met on that same day, is accidentally transported 400 years into the past, so Crono and Luca follow her into the past. After certain events happen, the trio accidentally find a portal to the future, where they discover a ruined, dying world. The trio discover that 999 years into their future the world will be destroyed by a being named Lavos, a mysterious entity that arrived from outer space and crashed into the planet in the year 65 million BC. The trio then embark on an adventure to save the world of the future, gaining friends and enemies along the way. It is an adventure through various epochs: prehistory, antiquity, the age of sword and sorcery, and the distant future.
"Although a fantasy, there is a few things regarding time travel that one must always be mindful of. It is not the same thing to travel into the future, as it is to travel into the past. In fact, traveling to the past is more dangerous, because the slightest change may cause untold changes in the timeline. What may seem like a simple detail to you may in fact be a crucial component of the timeline: a chair that's out of place, a bucket of soap water, a mosquito sucking blood. When traveling to the past one must be cautious to change nothing, as the changes may be catastrophic enough to cause a temporal paradox. This is known as the Butterfly Effect."
Crono and his crew vow to stop the catastrophe from happening. To this end, the crew travel through time to find a way to destroy Lavos. Using the End of Time, a dimensional hiccup that exists outside the Space-Time Continuum as a hub of sorts, this collection of anachronauts (time travelers) plan a way to save the future and destroy Lavos once and for all. What they don't realize, however, is that such an action would create a temporal paradox.
"A temporal paradox is a paradoxical situation that arises out of time travel. Allow me to demonstrate. Let us say that you go back in time and accidentally, or not, kill yourself when you were an infant. This way, you have not only nullified your own existence, but you have created a situation in which an extra temporal object has meddled with its own origin point. If this object no longer exists, than it is no longer possible for it to go back in time to nullify its own existence. Therefore, if the object is unable to nullify itself because it no longer exists, than nothing should prevent the origin point from forming as if nothing happened. And so we enter a loop that goes on forever, in which an extra temporal object destroys its own origin point, only to never exist in the first place because its own origin point no longer exists, and if the meddling object no longer exists to meddle with the origin point, than nothing should keep the origin point from existing, as the object that destroyed the origin point no longer had an origin point that allowed it to exist."
By eventually destroying Lavos, Crono and his crew managed to make a future where Lavos never existed, one where humanity can advance with nothing to impede it. The grim future is no more, instead there is a new future, a better future for not just humanity, but for everyone. So, what happens to the future that Crono and his friends fought to prevent? The only way they could have ever stopped Lavos was by traveling to this future and see the world that could be. So, what happens to this world? Does it get erased permanently? Actually, yes and no.
Very early in the story, Marle's origin point was in danger of being erased. She had traveled to the age of swords and sorcery (Middle Ages by the game's own terminology) and got confused for her own ancestor, the Queen of the country that had been kidnapped earlier that day. In her normal timeline, she had been rescued by the knights of the kingdom and brought to safety, but due to Marle's presence, the knights did not bother. Because of this, the real queen is not rescued, which means that Marle's ancestry line gets cut out, which then leads to Marle herself never existing. What happened to Marle? She disappeared, removed from the timeline. Noticed I said removed, not erased. Marle still existed in a void outside of time. She is, of course, rescued, and brought back to existence.
"An object with a determinate origin does not necessarily have a determined future. Every temporal object is a dynamical system, only one future state is determined by the current state. If the origin point of an object is altered, than the object itself is greatly altered to reflect the change. Do you think that the Universe would crumble just because of a little thing such as an origin point being altered? Of course not, the Universe itself would change itself to better fit the alteration. Nothing can exist because it can't, because everything that exists does so because it can. So what happens to an object that can no longer exist? It ceases to be, simple as that. After that, the Universe just fixes itself and makes like it never needed the object to begin with, because it never did. The present may determine the future, but the approximate present can not approximately determine the future. This is Chaos Theory."
The world destroyed by Lavos still existed, it's just that the Universe fixed itself to allow a world where Lavos no longer existed. Because of this, there were now two mutually exclusive worlds: one where Lavos did not destroy the world, and one where it did. Crono's actions merely altered his timeline, allowing his world to develop into one where Lavos did not destroy the world. But in a parallel dimension, Lavos still existed.
We're almost to where Chrono Cross comes in. The fact that two alternate worlds can exist raises the question: can more worlds, more timelines exist? The short answer is: yes. In fact, Chrono Trigger shows us not two, but over ten different timelines. I already mentioned two, but there are others. Perhaps the most striking of the timelines is the one where Lavos is destroyed before it hits the world. Because Lavos did not hit the world, it did not cause the ice age that wiped out the dinosaur like people known as the Reptites. Because the Reptites were not destroyed, they wiped out the early humans, creating an alternate world where Reptites, not humans, develop the world. In other words, since the Universe had to deal with a world where Lavos could no longer make humanity possible, it simply kept on like Lavos never existed.
"The big mistake humans make is to see History as one long chain of Cause and Effect. The truth is that there are an innumerable amount of events that influence the Universe, likewise there are immeasurable amounts of conditions that allow the Universe to be as it is currently. Many of these events are so minuscule that one would be forgiven for thinking that they never occur. Likewise, many of these conditions are so common that we assume that they had always been like that. In this way, History is not a chain but a gigantic timey wimey ball of circumstances and events that are nearly impossible to make heads or tails out of it all."
And now we finally get to Chrono Cross. This game's story is a bit more complicated than Trigger's, so I'll try to be brief in my description. One day, a teenager named Serge fell into a dimensional hole that brought him to an alternate version of his world, one where he died as a child. To find a way home, Serge teams up with a slew of colorful characters (over forty total). During his journey he discovers that his existence is a fluke, that the world he was born in was a timeline artificially created by a super computer from the future that had traveled to the past and confronted travelers from an alternate timeline where Reptites ruled the world. This super computer then created its own artificial archipelago, where the time travelers from the future and the dimensional travelers from another time existed together, until the humans from the natural land outside this zone came in and colonized the islands. One day, Serge got mauled by a panther and his father tried to find him some help, but he ended up on the site where the future computer was located thanks to a storm. The super computer then healed the boy, creating two worlds. In one world, Serge lives. In the other, he dies. Serge's father is then corrupted and transformed into Lynx, a pawn of the supercomputer to control a piece of Lavos that had managed to remain in the world: the Frozen Flame. Also some stuff happens...and uh...this plot's complicated.
"Nope, I'm not bothering with that plot. Cheerio!"
Anyway, in Chrono Cross we have four confirmed alternate timelines to exist. The first timeline is the one where Serge gets to live a healthy, normal life. The second timeline is the one where Serge dies. The third is the timeline where the original time travelers that made El Nido, the setting of Chrono Cross, came from. And of course, the fourth timeline is the one where Reptites rule the world. Each of these timelines is possible thanks to the actions of Crono and his crew. In other words, Chrono Cross is, in many ways, acknowledging the mess that Chrono Trigger made.
The main theme behind Chrono Trigger is that the future can be changed, even if the past cannot. Chrono Cross shows us that trying to change the future can be catastrophic, and that all actions have consequences. This creates a conflict between the two games: whereas Trigger is happy and cheery, Cross is not. Cross is serious and thematically mature. This is even reflected in the art work of both games.
To the left: The main character of Chrono Trigger, Crono
To the right: The main character of Chrono Cross, Serge
While Trigger is cartoony and idealistic, Cross is realistic and cynical. In Trigger there are good guys and bad guys, and there is a clear line between the two. In Cross, the good guys are few, the bad guys slightly fewer, and between the two is a lot of gray. Unlike the altruistic crew of Trigger, the Cross crew have more personal reasons to do what they do. Cross did away with the heroic idealism of Trigger, replacing it with the doom and gloom that was so popular in RPG's during the time Cross was made. It is for this reason, and many more, that many people dislike Cross as a sequel to Trigger.
"Although Science marches on, we often find that the spirit of humanity lags behind it. When the airplane and the radio were invented, humanity had the resources to make of national borders a thing of a more barbaric time, but they did not. Inventions whose very essence cried out for the goodness of man were used for business, war, and entertainment, their true potential locked away by those who lacked the foresight to see what they truly had in their hands."
But when I think about it, when I put together everything that happened in Trigger and Cross, I find something amazing. When you combine the stories of Cross and Trigger, you find a cautionary tale, a tale about more than the dangers of time travel and dimension hopping, but of trying to control your fate. Crono tried to destroy Lavos because he thought it was the right thing to do. He succeeded, he saved a timeline and an untold number of human lives, while creating several alternate timelines by accident. Crono kept changing the past and the future, all with the best intentions. Serge was the one stuck dealing with the consequences of Crono's actions, and it was not just Serge who suffered, but many, many more. And Crono could not have known that this would happen.
"The illusion of control, as summed by the film Kung Fu Panda, is to have a peach seed and thinking that controlling where you plant it, you are somehow in control of its growth. You may think you are in control of the peach because you choose to plant and where, but that's how far you go. In the end, you will only ever get a peach, and that's only if the tree is taken care of. If you take care of the tree, you will get a peach. If you neglect the tree, it might die, it might not. You are not in control of anything, you merely work with what you have. You are free to do what you want, but no matter what you do, you will have to deal with the consequences. If you choose to plant the tree, you will have to deal with the tree. If you choose not to take care of the tree, you will have to deal with the dead tree. If you choose not to plant the tree, you will have to deal with the fact that you will not have a peach tree. All actions have consequences. Freedom means having the choice in which ones to deal with."
In this way, the Chrono series becomes a fable that presents its lesson in two halves. Trigger teaches us that the future is in our hands and that we can change it. Cross shows us that trying to change the future has unintended consequences, and that sometimes other people are the ones who will have to pick up the pieces. On the surface it kind of looks like Cross is arguing that you shouldn't fight fate, but the game never really says that. Cross merely states an inconvenient truth: sometimes, things are just outside of our control. We make mistakes. We often don't know better. What we think is the right thing, might not be the right thing.
So what we have here is that Trigger is the original idea, while Cross is the Deconstruction of the idea. It is up to you, the player, to determine whether you are satisfied with how this lesson is presented to you. Many are those that disregard Cross and focus solely on Trigger. Just as many are those that enjoyed Cross, hailing it as one of the best games ever made. You either love this game, or hate it. I'll throw my opinion here: I didn't like it. I feel like the game could have been better. At first I thought that Cross was a disgrace to Chrono Trigger, a sequel that never needed to be made. But with time, I saw that Trigger raised a lot of questions that needed answers, and in one way or another, Cross answered them. It's just that the answers were more cynical and bitter than we wanted them to be.
And this is where I'll throw my hat into the ring once more. I think we need a third Chrono game, one that takes the answers provided by Cross and works with them to show us that, in the end, taking action to make your future and dealing with the consequences is, in the long run, better than doing nothing. Chrono Cross deconstructed Chrono Trigger, and we need a game to reconstruct Trigger once more, to reconstruct the heroism of a group of time travelers that risked life and limb to make sure the far off future that they would never live to see was a good one for all of humanity.
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