Successfully solving this weird little ending puzzle grants the good ending, which involves all of the events of the game being essentially undone as Serge gets deposited back on Opassa Beach with Leena at the moment just before he was pulled into Another World the first time.
I want to admire the way the puzzle requires intimate knowledge of the spell system, but I’m also annoyed that it’s such a crapshoot if you can’t put together the precise setup (I had to kick Sprigg, who I’ve used nonstop since she joined up midway through the game, out of my party because her element grid lacks any level 1 slots, which are essential to safely casting the Chrono Cross sequence without fear of interruption).
CHRONO COMPENDIUM DIMENSIONAL TRAVEL HOW TO
In purely mechanical terms, you have to know how to build a specialized element grid for your three party members that will allow them to cast seven spells back-to-back without getting interrupted by the boss, who may or may not use a technique that will disrupt the sequence. This mechanic is both pretty irritating and pretty ingenious, not because of the puzzle of the color order (that pattern gets repeated regularly enough throughout the game that it’s pretty easy to notice and remember), but because of the way you have to manipulate the battle system. You have to cast elements in a specific preset color order before you activate the Chrono Cross, which ends the fight and launches the good ending sequence (alternatively, you can just beat the Time Devourer to death, which results in a non-ending where the monster just escapes through a portal to another dead timeline where it still exists).
(Image credit: Chrono Compendium)įollowing all the revelations, we get to the actual boss fight, which is actually a minor puzzle fight. I don’t think this game is great, but it really did have some potential that got smothered by obligations to its predecessor. Naturally, because this is a story about the ramifications of time travel, things end where they began on Opassa Beach in Home World where a trio of ghost children who resemble Chrono, Marle, and Lucca from Chrono Trigger (they actually represent dead timelines don’t ask) await with a massive info dump for all the plot points that the writers didn’t work into the actual story (we finally learn the true origins of Lynx he wasn’t just an avatar of FATE, but also the repurposed body of Serge’s father Wazuki, who had been driven insane by his contact with the supercomputer why this revelation is dropped into a chunk of text which the characters don’t react to is befuddling to say the least) for reasons that I don’t fully comprehend but which can probably be summed up with “they ran out of time.” Serge and friends are ready to confront the Devourer of Time and use the Chrono Cross (I may not have mentioned this, but the eponymous item is necessary in order to get the good ending, and of course it’s not acquired through the course of the main plot, so you could overlook getting it) to weave the various broken timelines together into a cohesive whole that ensures Lavos’s destruction in the future and frees Schala from her prison in the Darkness Beyond Time.
It’s been a long road, but we’ve finally made it to the end of Chrono Cross.
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