Hours Played/Hours Total - 2 hrs / 2 hrs
Starting Point - The Beginning of the Game.
Current Goal - Begin Chrono Trigger. Make some progress. Save the world most likely.
What Happened - And so it finally begins! A new age of Recurring Fantasy begins with the secret shame... The secret shame that I've never fully played through or beat Chrono Trigger. I KNOW! It's crazy to hear/say it, but it is very true. Thus, I shall start here and now... and finish this timeless, classic RPG.
Before I start, I'll cover the minor detail you might be wondering. I'm playing this game on my PS3 via the PlayStation Classics copy of Chrono Trigger (AKA it's the PS1 version). It's cheaper than trying to purchase a Super Nintendo copy, and it's faster than finding the Nintendo DS version of it. Also... I've owned it like this for quite some time. Just makes the starting and playing process easier, ya know? Anyways! Without further ado, I begin the journey into.... CHRONO TRIGGER!
Starting at the beginning...I get to name my character! It's the main guy here, and as usual, I'm going with the built-in name. In this case, it's Crono. (In the spirit of livening up posts, going to try and throw in some art where I can.)
Then we head into a nice and lovely 2D cutscene opening! There are birds. There is a boat. Then some sorta fair-looking place with balloons and fireworks. I miss the simplicity these older games offer sometimes...
Now, I'm in a house, and Crono is being woken up by his mother. She reminds him that the Millennial Fair was today and that his inventor friend, named Lucca, invited him to see her new invention there. Before leaving, I talked to his mother again, and she supplies me with Crono's allowance of 200 gold. Now it's off to Leene Square for the fair!
Upon leaving the house, I'm face-to-face with the world map. It's an interesting site to see. I can't really describe it accurately, so I'll throw up a screenshot of it instead.
It's nothing necessarily new, but it's got a nice style to it. Your character isn't this huge block walking across a grid. You are free to move and explore the world as it is. It's a nice change of pace from how most of the Final Fantasy games did it. Anyways... ON TO THE FAIR!
I go inside the fair, and it seems pretty straightforward here. There are booths with little mini-games. (Guessing the outcome of a race, the ol' strength test to strike the bell, and a few others.) You earn Silver Points and use them to do... something. I haven't figure that out yet. I hit up a few of the shops and stock up on a few healing items. (Thank you for being super cheap and affordable! 50 HP potions and status healing potions for 10 gold apiece.)
As I'm exploring the north half of the fair, I bump into a girl. This causes her to drop a pendant. She starts looking around for it, so I go pick it up and hand it to her. She thanks me and then asks a favor. Says she's from out of town and could use a guide around the fair. I agree, and she tells me her name is Marle.
But what do those Silver Points do? Well... lots of things! (Okay two things but roll with me here.) You can trade off your Silver Points for money (10 points for 50 gold), or you can go to the front of the fair and play a special mini-game with unique prizes. Among the prizes, I earned a stuffed toy and a Chrono clone. There's a third mini-game to beat, but it required 80 silver points. I ran out of patience and figured it was time to move on.
At some point, an announcement let me know that Lucca's invention was ready, so I leave the rest of the fair to continue the story. Lucca's invention turns out to be a teleportation machine. Nobody wants to volunteer to try it out though, so Crono gets volunteered instead! I step inside, and I'm teleported like fifteen feet. Wooooo. Marle decides that looks fun and decides to give it a shot. Of course, that's when disaster strikes. Her pendant from before starts to glow, and as she spins around to teleport, a giant blue warp hole opens up. She's sucked inside as her pendant is left behind.
Lucca and her father start freaking out at the disappearance and aren't sure what to do. As Crono though, I get to grab the pendant and volunteer going after her. They quickly reactivate the machine, and I'm pulled through the same warp hole into... a random forest? Things would be going well right now if not for the group of blue monsters that just showed up. It's battle time!
The game has adopted the Active Time Battle system, but it works a bit differently than the Final Fantasy style. Rather than the screen flashing, going black, or glass breaking, the battle simply takes place in the environment! It's pretty cool looking and smart if you ask me. Enemies are able to move around, and positioning plays a part. You don't have a direct way to move your characters though, but they always take up their position when the fight starts.
Aside from that, the battles go pretty much the same. You have a gauge that slowly fills up over time based on character speed. You can attack enemies, use items, use techs, and such. (I'll get more into Techs here in a bit.) When the game first started, it asked if I wanted to do Active or Wait style of battle. Active means the battle is always going with no pause (unless you actually pause), or you can set it to Wait where the battle pauses during menu selections.
With that explained, I quickly fight off the Blue Imps (that's what they are) and proceed to explore my new forest location. I go through a few more battles before I leave this location to find the world map... strangely familiar. It's a dead ringer for the world map of where I was, but it's missing the fairgrounds. I figure to explore the few houses that are still around, and things point to a change in time but not a change in place. One person straight up says this is 600 AD. Thus... it's time travel.
Exploring the world doesn't reveal too much at the moment. There's some forest and a few buildings. West of that is a church-like structure and a castle. Going to the church reveals nothing, so I head up to the castle instead. Getting to it requires going through a small forest, but that goes easy enough. I even gain some experience along the way including Tech Points. After a few fights here, I suddenly learn the Cyclone tech ability. Thus... it hits me what the Tech Points are. You see, rather than gaining abilities as you level up, your abilities are on a separate system that uses earned Tech Points to slowly learn more and more techs. Cyclone seems pretty basic and simply spins around and hits enemies in a small area.
Enough about that though, time to find out what this castle is about. As soon as I enter though, the soldiers here start giving me a bit of grief. Things don't look well until a woman shows up and informs me that I'm her friend and they're to leave me alone. The woman, identified as Queen Leene, does look somewhat familiar. I head further into the castle and talk with a few people. They mention recently finding Queen Leene, and it seems she wishes to speak with me. I head upstairs and turns out it's Marle. She's very happy to see that I came for her (despite us knowing each other all of like twenty minutes), but then.. she suddenly disappears into thin air.
Huh... I head back downstairs and run into Lucca out of nowhere. Skipping past how she got here, she informs me that Marle was actually Princess Nadia from our time. Crono (who doesn't talk) seems to pass on that she suddenly disappeared just a moment ago. Lucca goes into the basic time travel problem involving descendants and such. Marle is a descendant of this time's Queen Leene. The actual Queen Leene was kidnapped and rescued at this time, but with Marle being mistaken for her, they stopped the search and never found her. Thus... Marle would disappear from existence.
With this in mind, Lucca suggests we go out and find Queen Leene ourselves. Hopefully doing that will bring Marle back. Lucca joins the party!
And thus, the simplistic Tech system jumps up to be incredibly awesome. Basically, as you gain more characters and Techs, it's possible for them to team up and combo their Techs into one super powerful ability. Fire Whirl simply sets the Cyclone on fire, but it does an impressive amount of extra damage versus doing each attack separately. Keep in mind, it does use the same amount of MP and requires both character's gauges are full. Regardless, it's generally worth waiting for because the outcome is amazing.
Back to the game at hand, I run back to the town to visit the shop. Buy a few items here, and then back out to the only other place available at this time... That random church. Inside of the church is a pile of very suspicious talking nuns. We head to the front of the church and find a mysterious hair pin. Lucca identifies it as having the royal insignia, and then the suspicious nuns come to us and fit into their suspicious part even more. They burst into flames and reveal themselves as monsters!
Somehow, a bunch of Naga-ettes (that's what they're named) were disguised as humans. With the use of my Dual Tech and a few good hits, they're down and out for the count. Lucca heads forward as things look okay.. but then they aren't. A Naga-ette drops out of nowhere and grabs her. Then a large frog man appears and slays the Naga-ette. He seems to be here to save Queen Leene as well and offers his assistance. Lucca doesn't seem to like frogs, but she figures she can push pass that since we need the help. Huzzah. (Strangely enough though, it did give me the option to decline his help. Not that I would.)
Our newest teammate is a frogman who goes by the name... Frog.
Frog suggests we look around for a secret entrance. This proves to be pretty dang easy since there's nothing to examine here other than a large organ. I go up, play the organ, and magical door appears from nowhere! We head inside to explore the secret area and hopefully find the Queen. Now... the next portion of this is going to take a pretty big jump because there's not much to say here. There were a lot of monsters back here, some funny bits found, and more monsters disguised as humans. Also a statue to someone called Magus that they were worshiping more or less. That said and done, I did a lot of fighting and learned a few new Techs along the way.
The biggest thing to gleam is that there's a monster behind all this called Yakra. He kidnapped the Queen, and he even replaced the royal chancellor with a disguised monster. (Turns out to be him.) After lots of the fighting, I find myself in the final room. It seems to be occupied by Queen Leene and the Chancellor?!? The Queen immediately recognizes Frog, and he tells her to stand back as we take care of business. The Chancellor steps forward and reveals his true form as a... giant yellow bear/slug/bull combo.
Guess what? It's... BOSS BATTLE TIME! (Feels good.) Since it's a first boss and all, Yakra is pretty simple here. He's got a small group of attacks, and he's pretty easy overall. The main ability I made use of here was the Dual Tech X-Strike. Did quite a bit of damage, but Yakra tended to strike with one of his specials everytime I used it. (Dunno if it's a counter attack or what activates it.) He bounces around the room and strikes all three characters for minor damage. Even at half health, it wasn't much to worry about. Beyond that, just kept everybody up on health and strike at him where I can. Only attack worth noting was this spike strike that did a pretty good chunk, but even then, it wasn't something to get scared about.
With Yakra's defeat, it's time to get the Queen back to the castle. Before going though, I open up the few chests lying around. One's just a normal item. The second one actually contained the REAL chancellor within it. He comes with us of course. One quick trip to the castle later, and everybody's happy!... except Frog. It seems he feels disgraced that he let the queen get kidnapped in the first place. He takes his leave now, and... we're forgetting something.
Oh! Marle! Lucca suggests we check the last location she was in, so I run upstairs. Just as I enter the Queen's room, Marle reappears in front of us. She isn't sure where she was or what happened, but she's glad to be back. Lucca reveals that we know her true identity as Princess Nadia. Marle apologizes and says that she didn't think Crono would have treated her the same if he'd known. (I said that wasn't true, and she thought that was soo nice of him.) Problems are solved, time is correct, but... how do we get back?
There's not really any clues of where to go or what to do, but I figure the best bet involves where I dropped in at. I head back to the forest, and there's a funny blue spot in the area I first came into. Lucca shows off her scientific genius and pulls out something she just made... THE GATE KEY! She's identified the blue hole/warp hole from earlier as a Gate. She figures these Gates are time warp holes that connect specific spots in different eras of time. With that said, she uses the Gate Key to open it up and send us home.
We come back out at the Millennial Fair, and it seems that everything here is normal. Lucca apologizes for the incident, but Marle doesn't seem to care. She claims that she had fun and made friends in the process. So we're all good. Marle invites them both to the caslte, but Lucca has other things to do. Thus, Crono gets the job of escorting her home. Time to head to the castle in this time and find out what horrible event will befall me!... in the next post.
Yes, that's right. I'm ending the first post right here. Why? I'm trying to get myself on a good schedule of posting at least once a week. For the next couple weeks, that's going to be Chrono Trigger updates. Figure I play the game one day and take notes while using my second day off to actually write said post. Pardon the shortchange this time, but I promise more next week. And thus the end comes!
Ending Point - 1,000 AD
Current Party
- Crono - Level 7
- Marle - Level 6
Next Goals - Return Marle home and find out what problems occur at that point.
*Images taken/borrowed/whatever term you prefer from Creative Uncut.
~May the Crystals Guide Me~
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