AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Wowie, Chrono Trigger. I never knew it had a sequel before this comic.

hey it's roy's cousin

I'm triggered by the typo!

Hm, I just realized that magic does make the positioning and targeting system a bit redundant. I feel that there is a fair balance of the dual/triple techs that are enemy positioned based and all-target/single-target.

For some reason I was reminded of Saibamen.

Have you been playing Dragon Ball Fusions? Cuz that's what I thought at first and was like "wait, the max amount of enemies is 5" then I noticed Marle. Also Toriyama has a consistent art style.

This comic pretty much sums up how I feel about a lot of games with interesting game mechanics. They have all these things that offer interesting options, but then they get overshadowed by something that turns everything into a same-y endeavor with every encounter.

Marle doesn't quite grasp the finer parts of a strategy game.

Also Crono is apparently a queen in this situation.

All of Akira Toriyama's characters start to look the same after a while as he only has the one art style. Heck, in Dragon Quest IX you can customize your heroes to look like Vegeta, the android siblings, Shu (from Blue Dragon) and I think even Chrono. Though that's just for awesome fun

This I find highly hilarious.

Yeah, but it was let down.

The combat system took several steps backwards and abandoned most of the unique things that CT did like the geometric-based attack system. The game was basically a completely different game that hastily peppered in chrono trigger references to ride CT's coattails.

Also, on topic with the comic: There were actually a lot of bosses end game that had some kind of counter for full screen attacks. Hit the wrong part of them and they beat the crap out of you.

But that still means you are restricted to single target magic, since no other options really exist. Compare in the early game, where neither Chrono, Lucca nor Marle had a simple single target damage tech. You had to either use a regular attack or to consider what else you would be hitting.

The bosses of the game were interesting, yes, specially since you needed to make sure to not hit the wrong part with the wrong move. But since by them you are mostly restricted to "everyone or one", there wasn't that much to think about. It is just a matte of not using the screen clear moves.

Actually, that's not why fans hate it, the reason is...

-Lynx (the main villain of Chrono Cross, before Lavos returns) KILLED CRONO, MARLE AND LUCCA between games,

-The bad future you undid, ended up trapping everyone from said bad future in a cold dark void for all eternity. (Though this was foreshadowed in Trigger, as Marle mentions such a place when she was briefly erased from history)

-Lavos was never truly defeated and returns stronger than ever making the first game entirely pointless

So in other words, Crono Cross turning every awesome moment in Trigger into a tragedy makes one wonder why they even bothered with Trigger in the first place.

I feel obligated to point out a hardtype hack of Chrono Trigger that addresses this problem (and also makes the game a lot harder). It makes several skills that were originally single target, such as Magus's Dark Bomb, into geometric attacks that hit a small area. It also makes dual techs and triple techs actually worth using late in the game - originally they were almost exclusively worse than using regular moves, which was a shame because most of the late-game attacks with geometric patterns were dual techs.

Be warned: this is a hardtype hack. The game is going to be hard. You don't really ever need to grind, but you do need strategy, precise timing, and really good managing of items. You should expect to die several times on most bosses and 40+ times against Lavos.

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1740/

Chrono Cross was an incredibly tragic game in general. Everything you to to help anyone just makes things worse, and peopletakes every opportunity to remind you that everything is your fault. It's really depressing.