In 1995, Chrono Trigger debuted on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The delightful game, featuring a great soundtrack, lovable characters, colorful designs, and intuitive combat became an instant success for publisher and developer Square. Captivated audiences had only one complaint: How could such a great game have such a diluted plot?
Forums were packed with confused fans. Videos longer than the entire game itself dedicated themselves to solving the many inconsistencies and contradictions within the convoluted plotline. Fans eagerly anticipated the next major release, Chrono Cross, which debuted in 1999 and was based on the Japanese adventure game Radical Dreamers, set in the same universe. Hopeful for some clarity, people completed the game, only to get an equally nonsensical story with eleven or more different endings that were even more confusing than the first installment.
10 A Parallel Universe To A Universe Of Parallels
Chrono Trigger was coherent enough that, even with a few plot holes, fan theories were able to glue the pieces together well enough to create some semblance of an understandable universe. Then Chrono Cross came along and messed all of their hard work up.
Chrono Cross is most definitely not on the top ten list of the games with the most satisfying endings, and it would not even be in the top one-thousand. When it was pointed out to the developers that none of the endings made one iota of sense, they were quick to suggest that the game must have been in an entirely different dimension. So much for honoring the source material.
9 Serge’s Illness
Gamers may gather around and discuss how Zelda might have possibly made for a better protagonist than Link and entertain a lively debate on the topic, but there will not be any contention about how basically anybody would have been a better protagonist than Serge. No one would disagree.
The silent protagonist is not a new theme for video games, but in other games, the silence is assumed dialogue from the main character. At the end of Chrono Cross, the cast is begging for any human reaction at all from Serge, but there is something wrong with him that is never disclosed or discovered. He either cannot speak or does not want to speak and it is never explained why.
8 Lynx’s Body
This might be the most easily identifiable problem with the endings. Serge and Lynx switch bodies randomly. Some of these endings can be initiated before Serge gets his body back from Lynx and/or Lynx gets his body back from Serge. Yet they occasionally swap back and forth in the portals without rhyme or reason.
Is dimensional changing some kind of cosmic dice roller to see if the characters stay in their bodies? Final Fantasy has gotten away with some weird stuff over the years, but even they wouldn’t leave a plot hole this glaring.
7 Ghost Stories
So if this game’s ending only makes sense if it’s in a universe unrelated to the universe of Chrono Trigger, what kind of cosmic shift happened to make the ghosts of Crono, Marle, and Lucca appear? And how did they find out that Belthasar planned to empower Serge?
Even if the universes were to merge a little bit despite what the developers explained, there would be no way for them to know about the Time Devourer. The Chrono gang is giving the folks over at Resident Evil a run for their money on senseless storylines.
6 Schala’s Survival
Speaking of the Time Devourer, how is it supposed to come to exist again? Apparently, this entity is the result of Schala fusing with Lavos. But how did such a thing even become a risk? Schala’s pendant is passed along to Marle.
It is assumed that Schala survived the collapse of her palace with the power of transportation from that same pendant. The gap in logic is meme-worthy, to say the very least of it.
5 Kid’s Origin
So the player meets Kid. Kid is not a kid, but she’s clearly not an adult yet. So this misnamed teenager enters the story, that’s not a problem. But then the cast of Chrono Trigger, dead for a long time now, reveals at the end that Kid is a clone of Schala, part of a project creatively called Project Kid.
So if she’s not old enough to have ever met these characters, how did they know? And why do Schala and Kid look nothing alike? Do they even know what a clone is?
4 Magic Diary
With all of the incredible time and space altering effects, fans of the game rightfully wonder what the heck is behind it all. Is it the pendants that transcend the universe? Is it the portals? Is it powerful beings like Schala and Crono?
Wrong, wrong, wrong; it’s Schala’s Diary. Yes, in multiple endings of the game, Schala laments that Serge won’t remember anything, writes what she always wanted to have happened in her diary, and makes it so. So why didn’t she just do that to begin with?
3 Merging
Science fiction video gaming has mused on the concept of fusion between two living entities before. For example, Half-Life 2 used creativity to merge two entirely different dimensions and at least attempted to explain how this happened.
Chrono Cross makes no such effort. After fusing with Lavos for some reason, Schala then merges with Kid. Seems hardly fair to replace the personage of Kid, who had her own separate personality and style, but those are the breaks in a world when some lucky people can just hijack anybody’s body that they feel like taking.
2 Kid: Married But Looking
In some endings, a portrait of Kid shows her in a wedding dress married to someone. And those same endings then proceed to show Kid wandering around looking for somebody. So wait… Did she find Serge like she promised to do and marry him? Or is she still looking for him and married some poor sap to tide her over in the meantime while she searches for her true love?
1 This is… Earth?!?
As Kid wanders around the modern-looking cities at the end of the game, players will begin to notice the area she’s in is Earth during the player’s current time period. That’s right! As if it wasn’t enough to mess up the plots for two different universes with a bundle of parallel universes, they practically broke into the gamer’s own world as well.
Truthfully, the developers put very little work into trying to make sense of any of this, and attempting to resolve the ending to this game might result in committing more brainpower toward cohesion than they ever did.
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