Yes, indeed, the weirdest game is this:

Of course, when you first turn it on, you have no idea it's going to make no sense. You absolutely fall in love with it at first; it's just really really pretty. Then some odd things start happening, and then it gets stranger and stranger, until finally not even the most colorful painted background scenery can hide the fact.

There are really two kinds of Square games. Square games that try to be cool, and Square games that try to be "beautiful." Square games that try to be cool have appealing characters, fun gameplay and a rockin' soundtrack(FF7, CT, Vagrant Story). Square games that try to be "beautiful" have whiny angst-ridden characters, a story that doesn't explain why it does half the things it does, and an overall sense that you wasted your time when you finish. I guess I'll finish Chrono Cross someday, but it was really weirding me out...like sitting in a room with some guy who keeps winking at you and making fart noises.

Well, let's start the game. You're "Serge," some kid on an island whose mom named you after a short-lived soft drink. You grab your girlfriend and walk down to the beach; but somewhere along the line you fall down an interdimensional warp portal and wind up in a dimension where you're supposed to be dead. Now everyone thinks you're a ghost, except for this Australian girl with almost nothing on who calls herself "Kid" and beats up people all the time. Now, I'm a pretty strange person myself; so I didn't have any problem getting any of this so far. But it gets more interesting....

Your first fight is with "Solt" and "Peppor," two early 90's music sensations who hit rock bottom and now have to play idiots in this game. Later on in the game, if you let the Frenchman with the bad accent join your party, Solt and Peppor return to beat you up again and this time, they have "Ketchop," who growls, "TOMAAAATO!!" and "SAAAAUCE!!!" Oh yeah, and I have no idea how these people can be British, Australian, German, etc if they all come from the same island.

If you're familiar with the game that came before this one, Chrono Trigger; things are about to get 194% weirder. You see, in CT there were three races: people, Mystics, and Reptites(lizard-like little guys). Supposedly Chrono Cross takes place 20 years after Trigger....so, uh, what the heck happened? You see talking cats, mermaids, dragons, half-human-half-animal people, cyborg assassins, fairies, Great Scott. What IS all this? And don't say "Well, he's on another dimension." All these things are also in Serge's home world too, just in different places. And by the way, there are no Mystics or Reptites to be found, go figure.

Speaking of Chrono Trigger, this is supposed to be a sequel. It's very hard to believe these two games are even remotely connected. The battle system is completely different; it's not in Guardia; no time travel is involved; the tone is somber instead of light; heck, these two games are even more far removed from each other than any two Final Fantasies are. It does, however, let you know what happened to some of the Chrono Trigger characters. It says they're dead. In fact, they died shortly after the happy ending of the original game. That's......nice to know....

So, should you play Chrono Trigger first, or Chrono Cross?....well, I'll say this: if you don't want to hate Cross, don't play Trigger first. As a game whole, Cross is not that bad(just extremely weird). As a sequel to Trigger, it's hideous.

Now, Chrono Cross is so strange, and so NOT Chrono Trigger, that it had to be from a completely different set of developers, right? They just came around four years later and tried to slap together a sequel, right? WRONG. I was surprised to learn this, but the first version of Chrono Cross was on the Super NES, in 1996.

Most websites will tell you that thing is Crono's hair. I don't think so. It's more than likely the first version of the Frozen Flame(one of those weird artifacts with powers that have to be in almost every game). This was a text(meaning no action; just reading and making decisions every once in a while) game for the Super NES satellite system(released only in Japan...see how obscure this thing is?). It had Serge, Kid and some guy who wasn't in Trigger OR Cross, trying to get the Flame back from the villain in Cross. Is it as weird? I don't know; but reportedly someone on the Net is working on translating this game; we will know soon enough. Anyway, back to Cross, folks.

You soon meet the villain...Lynx, a giant cat in clothes. He's after Serge for some reason. And Kid hates him; also for some reason. Oh yeah, and Serge keeps having this vision of killing Kid. Soon, you meet a floating marshmallow girl in a clown outfit who calls herself Harle and talkz like ziz. Are you following me? Okay, she might be connected with Lynx and then again she might not be. Over the course of the game, you can recruit a puppy named Poshul and Leene, your girlfriend(although they're from the other dimension, not yours), a skeleton in a clown outfit, a talking turnip, a scarecrow named "Mojo", someone who abnormally has a mushroom for a head, several knights, some stupid magician with bad teeth named "Sneff", the cyborg assassin I mentioned up there, some creepy German mad scientist, and "Pip." Oh yeah, and Nikki...I should have listed him in between the mushroom and the turnip somewhere.

To make a long story short you go to a tower and you do stab Kid..well, it's not you anymore. Now you're LYNX; his evil plan was to switch bodies with you and go on a rampage while you get blamed, ha ha! Then for some reason you wind up in the "Dimensional Vortex" with a troll named "Sprigg." You get out with the help of Harle, who hangs around for a little while. But you're back in the home world and the action is in the other one! D'oh....
So you go into a frozen time area where you have to fight a huge robot with a chainsaw; after that you must battle a kid named Miguel to restore the wormhole that'll get you back to the land where Lynx-Serge is. Other battles you fight soon will include a giant roach, and Orcha the cook, who morphs into "Hell's Cook" and is about to torture a nice girl named Riddel until you stop him. Then he joins your party. By the way, you can gain control of over 50 people in this. You're still Lynx and Kid is with Evil Serge thinking he is Serge. You actually have Aeris in FF7 for a longer time than you have Kid in this game. If you spent time leveling Kid up, the yolk's on you. Now you must fight 7 dragons for a reason I forget. Oh, right...it was to unlock the fort where Dark Serge is hiding. You fight him and get your body back, but Kid still isn't there. Now you must battle this giant robot face for apparently no reason, and then go into "Chronopolis" and battle FATE! Yes, it's Fate, personified as a giant robot woman. You might think after beating Fate all your problems are over--now she can't boss you around. But no, now things get even worse somehow and you must fight Royaljelly the Jellyfish, the Six Elemental Robots, and finally "the enemy of every living thing on the planet," the TIMEDEVOURER. I think the game ends after that. I haven't even gone into why you do all those things...'cause frankly, I don't understand why. As someone told me, you need a degree from Harvard to fully comprehend the plot of Chrono Cross. With Chrono Trigger, all you needed was a fifth-grade education.

I stopped playing this game around the 7 Dragons. Trying to understand it left me seeing spots. I staggered out onto the street and saw Chrono Cross characters everywhere. It was awful.

NO!! NO!!! STAY AWAY!! STAY AWAAAY!! AAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

And by the way, we're not getting a third one of these. Square registered a trademark for a game called "Chrono Break," then sat on the rights....and then the producer of the first two games quit the company. Square said "ahh, forget it then" and cancelled the copyright. On the plus side, this means we won't see another Chrono Cross. On the worse and sadder side, it means we won't see another Chrono Trigger.

Please send all irate death threats to PeerSchneider@IGN.com.

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