The Stack

Marco Innocenti gives us a followup to last year’s Andromeda Awakening. Spoilers follow the break.

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Spoilers follow the break.

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Spoilers follow the break.

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Spoilers follow the break.

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Spoilers follow the break.

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And here’s our first you-are-a-zombie game of the year. Will there be more, like in 2010? Spoilers follow the break.

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Spoilers follow the break.

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It’s that time of year again! In fact, it’s been that time of year for more than a week now, but now I’m ready for it. A manageable 28 games up for judging this year, and the few I’ve already tried have been quite short, so I encourage anyone reading this to give it a go themselves instead of just reading blogs about it. (If you can play four a day, you’ll be done in a week!)

Notably, seven of the entries — fully a quarter of the total — are HTML-based, and five of those are in a new CYOA system called “Twine”. Inform is still the most popular authoring system of the Comp, but Twine is more popular this year than all the other non-web-based systems combined. Whether this is the beginning of a trend or just a band enthusiasts agreeing to enter the Comp together, only the future will show.

It took me a while to complete the side-quests to my satisfaction, and it’s entirely due to one area: a lost city peaceful reptites (humanoid dinosaur-folk, seen elsewhere as enemies) that managed to survive in a hidden valley until medieval times. What happened to them after that, I don’t know. These reptites host a seemingly endless series of fetch-quests in their hidden valley over the course of two eras, but they don’t really have enough land to support it. Consequently, they send you running through the same few areas over and over, running into the same few unavoidable encounters along the way. It seemed very much against the spirit of the game as described in my previous post, and it turns out there’s a good reason for that: this entire section is an after-the-fact addition. It’s extra content put in for the Nintendo DS version, which is apparently what the iOS port was ported from. In other words, it’s there for the True Fans who love the game so much that they just want to keep playing it indefinitely, not for newcomers like myself for whom seeing new stuff is part of the appeal. So I ditched the reptites and got on with the main quest.

I still did things the long way, mind you, going through the final dungeon known as the Black Omen to reach Lavos instead of just time-jumping directly to him. It’s a pretty long dungeon, and it leads into what has got to me some kind of record-breaker for the number of distinct stages in a single boss fight ¹I guess it’s got some competition in Final Fantasy VIII, though, which essentially makes its entire final chapter into one long unbroken string of boss stages. This makes me suspect that later JRPGs which I haven’t played may take things to even greater extremes. (some of which, I understand, are skipped if you take the shortcut in). It starts with a difficult-to-survive fight with Lavos’ chief minion, then repeats every single gimmick boss you’ve fought in the entire game before pulling out a couple of new tricks. Between stages, you get to take a break and apply restorative items, like a boxer going back to his corner at the sound of the bell, but you don’t get to save the game until you’ve reached the end of the recapitulation sequence. I imagine it would be quite frustrating to lose at the final stage of that sequence and have to start it over from the beginning. That may be why the deadliest part is in the very beginning, and also may be the reason the designers let you short-circuit most of the encounter.

After winning the final encounter, there’s a certain amount of ending material, and it’s pretty satisfying stuff. Two of my favorite types of endings are ones where the story comes full circle, putting you into a similar situation as the beginning, and ones where there’s a big party in celebration of your victory. Thanks to the Millennial Fair, Chrono Trigger gets to do both at once! It’s nighttime at the fairground now, time for christmas lights and fireworks, and ultimately time to leave the fair and go to bed. Thematically, playtime is over. Even if Crono and crew deny this with their actions: playtime is never over when you have a time machine! And I suppose this is mirrored in the way that winning the game immediately opens up “New Game +” mode, even conspicuously showing a cutscene of new time rifts opening.

Speaking of bedtime, there’s a loose theme of dreaming around the whole work. The mystics of antiquity have an entire city devoted to the art of dreaming, with people asleep in beds out in public, a juxtaposition that would be dreamlike even if it weren’t specifically about dreams. Conversations in that place contain odd comments about how creatures born of dreams must return to dreams and such, which seemed at the time like it might be leading somewhere. And I didn’t much like where it seemed to be leading. The game starts with Crono waking up at home to the pealing of bells, and this is echoed a couple of times later in the game — in particular, right after defeating Magus, there’s a brief scene of Crono waking up at home in a world where he’s apparently married to Marle and trying to hold down a job instead of having adventures. Was the whole story a dream, and that moment our only glimpse of reality? It would make a certain amount of sense: with time travel, you have the possibility that most of the story will have been wiped from reality by the end, so who’s to say that it was ever more than a dream? Fortunately, the game doesn’t take it that far. The dream stuff is left vague; saving your state at the end for New Game + yields the description “Dream’s End” in the save slot, but to the extent that the story is a dream, it’s all a dream, all equally unreal.

Just one more thing I’d like to note before bidding Crono goodnight: there’s more to the nostalgia factor than I was aware of when I wrote about it previously. One of the side-quests triggers a conversation about the origin of the time gates, in which it’s speculated that they were created by some entity’s desire to see “the days of its past”. It’s a hint of a mystery. What entity? Given all the folding-back of plot elements, it feels like this should be resolvable by attentive consideration of what we’ve seen. But consulting the Internet, that appears to not be the case. There are fan theories, but nothing definite, even after two sequels. I guess it’s just there to let you know that you don’t know everything, no matter how many times you’ve replayed it.

But then, the expectation that you’d replay brings to mind the meta possibilities, such as that the “entity” is the player. This doesn’t fit the first time you play the game, of course. But even I, a person who doesn’t really intend to replay the game at all, have played about half of it twice (not counting micro-restores resulting from TPKs). This fits with the dream stuff, too: if the whole story is a dream, surely it’s the dream of any real person experiencing it.

Having rescued Crono, I’m at the point now where all I have left to do is finish up any side-quests I feel like doing, then jump into the final battle.

I actually polished off a few of the side-quests before rescuing Crono, because I suspected that bringing him back might be the point of no return that leads into the endgame, but that turned out not to be the case. I was also worried about forgetting all the unfinished business I had all over the world in different eras, and was all set to lament the lack of a quest log in the classical JRPGs, but it turns out that Gaspar, the guy at the End of Time who you can go to for guidance about what to do next, keeps a list of what you haven’t done yet.

As for jumping into the final battle, this has actually been an option for most of the game. At the End of Time, where you have access to all the other portals, there’s a portal directly into a fight with Lavos. Apparently the ending you get varies according to what stage of the plot you’re at when you beat him. Now, if you try to fight him the first moment he’s available, obviously you’ll be severely underpowered, lacking the experience and equipment that the rest of the game brings. But I’m told that people have managed it, presumably by doing lots of extra grinding in the areas that are accessible beforehand. You’d really have to love the game to do that. Me, I’ve come to like the game, but one of the reasons I like it is that it’s largely grind-free. Just progressing through the story yields enough experience to keep pace with the difficulty curve without repeating fights. (So at last I have the reason that so many of the fights are avoidable: so you don’t have to repeat them if you don’t want to.) Also, rather unexpectedly for someone trained on Final Fantasy, there are no random encounters. Each dungeon has a fixed set of monsters, that don’t respawn unless you leave, at fixed locations, and the overland map doesn’t have any monsters at all. So, although you can grind if you really want to, the game doesn’t seem to expect it.

Which suits me fine. I intend to finish the game by weekend’s end.