Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
1 
Report this post
For example, the DS version runs at a lower resolution than the original SNES version, and is missing 14 vertical lines of visual detail. This makes the DS version's image appear thinner. The DS version also has a gross yellow filter covering everything. And this yellow filter takes away details in the artwork due to flattening the colours.
You can see a comparison of the original CT and the DS version with its yellow pee filter here:
https://i.imgur.com/70iRPMx.jpeg
The DS version also has vastly lower sound and music quality, music-looping issues, and some wrong sound effects used.
The wrong sound effects and ugly yellow colour filter also exist in the Steam port of CT.
And in my and a lot of people's opinions, the DS version also has a much worse translation, and grindy bonus content that doesn't integrate with the base game, and doesn't make the game better, but worse.
So, the DS version looks like the Steam version, while running at a lower resolution - which makes it worse looking than the Steam version, which itself looks worse than the SNES version. The DS version additionally sounds worse than any other version.
I mean all the stuff that was added in the 2008 re-release of CT as a purchasing incentive. It's notably of much lower quality than the original game, and doesn't affect the original game. It's generally known for being grindy and repetitive. A lot of people prefer to ignore it completely.
The 2008 DS re-release of CT was overseen by the guy who wrote the story for CC, and he retroactively added some new ending pieces to try to connect CT's story to CC's (despite CC's producer repeatedly saying CC isn't a sequel to CT, and CT Dream Team member Sakaguchi not acknowledging CC as a sequel to CT). But he failed in his goal, because the new ending in DS CT shows Schala's pendant arriving in Guardia with Kid in 1,004 AD, after, according to CC's story, Schala sent them there from "the darkness at the end of time". And this means that none of the events of CT could've ever happened, since, in CT's story, the pendant was in the possession of Marle in 1,000 AD (who it's implied had it passed down to her as a Guardia royal family heirloom), and so she was wearing it in 1,000 AD when it interacted with Lucca's portal, triggering the start of CT's story. And it plays an important role throughout CT's story. But in CC's story, it didn't appear in Guardia until after the events of CT had concluded - which would mean CT never happened, and therefore that CC couldn't happen.
The writer of CC, Kato, as asked about this contradiction in an interview, and he didn't have an answer for it. He just didn't realise he was negating CT's entire story. he also said in another interview that he doesn't really think about what he writes, he just puts down any silly idea that comes to him and leaves it up to others on the team to figure out what to do with it.
So, I wouldn't play a version of CT for that new ending piece, since it can't be canon to CT's story, otherwise it would be announcing that everything you just went through and played was a lie / didn't happen.
One of the other newer ending pieces Kato added to the DS version to try to create a link between CT and CC was removed from the Steam version of CT. That's the "fall of Guardia" ending. There are very claimed reasons for why it was removed. But I think even the Steam dev team might've just seen that it's awful and ruins the ending of CT. Kato had an axe to grind after his ideas for CT were constantly overruled by the rest of the CT team for being too dark and nihilistic. So, after everyone else was no longer involved, he took it out on and its team retroactively, first with his writing for CC, and then in the DS release of CT, which he was in charge of.
Ironically, he bungled his attempt to change CT's story with his irreconcilable CC retcon regarding the pendant. And then he also erased CC's story from CT's with CC's ending anyway, where everything that happened in CC disappeared and none of the characters remember it, because it was all only a figment of a broken timeline that vanished after it was healed. So, CC's story doesn't actually exist, either in CT's or CC's stories. It's like it was all just a fever dream.
had to stop reading this midway because of spoilers lol sorry I forgot to add that I still didn't play CT, I just mentioned what I read based on steam reviews, but from what I understood, that extra content was not part of the original vision for CT, and was only added to forcefully connect the two series? what about CC though? I understand that it's very different from CT, but is it worth playing too?
Sorry, I think I assumed you'd played CC. Yes, I think CC is worth playing. It's one of the best JRPGs made, IMO. It just doesn't belong in CT's story, is of a very different and contradictory spirit and style, and fundamentally doesn't work as part of it.
The stuff Kato added in the DS version of CT wasn't simply not part of the original vision for CT, but includes stuff the CT team explicitly overruled Kato on and prevented him from doing, because they saw it as contrary to CT's identity. Then, 13 years later, Kato, who wasn't one of the original designers for CT, didn't create its plot, and was even against it being a time-travel game, when he was in charge of putting together the DS re-release, went behind their backs without their involvement or consultation, and just changed things. And he added some additional game content, which he personally directed, for which there are memes mocking its terribleness. Throwing some of the worst b-grade, tacked-on side content ever made into the best game ever made isn't a good fit.
When people finish playing CT, they commonly feel like the ending is the chef's kiss to one of the most amazing and meaningful gaming experiences they've had. You can see people crying in their YouTube playthroughs of CT as they watch the ending, over how beautiful they think it is. But then CC (and the DS-added ending) tears-down and sh**s on the ending of CT, and is basically CC's writer, Kato, saying 'no' and 'eff u' to CT and its development team who kept vetoing and changing his ideas during the making of CT - which he said made him so angry that he couldn't stand going into work anymore towards the end of CT's development. Even the Steam CT porting team found part of Kato's DS ending so disagreeable to the game that they removed it.
That said, CC is one of the best JRPGs there are. It just is its own thing and isn't genuinely connected to CT anymore than Final Fantasy 7 is connected to Final Fantasy 6 because they share item, creature, and character names, as well as a bunch of themes. CC's producer (the producer being who sets the identity of a project and has last-say on all decisions) insisted repeatedly that CC was never intended to be a sequel to CT.
The original CT development team, led by Sakaguchi, had wanted to make a real sequel to the game. But Square's management refused to let them. Sakaguchi said that he fought hard for the project, but lost the fight. He thinks they didn't want a real sequel because they didn't want Chrono to become a competitor series to Final Fantasy.
But later, when Kato, one of CT's many writers, and the one who was disgruntled over his experience on CT, was asked to direct a game for Square, and he asked to do a project based on a short, text-based game he'd written, called Radical Dreamers. RD didn't originally have anything to do with CT, but at the end of its production Kato decided he wanted to make it about one part of CT. CC takes RD's story and massively revamps it. So, there are thematic tie-ins and call-backs to CT's story and lore, but CT and CC are based on diametrically-opposite universal constants, and their backstories fundamentally contradict each other, and are irreconcilable in the details - one of which I mentioned in my previous post.
No problem. Have fun, they're great games!
It's information from interviews I've read over the decades - most, if not all of which are probably archived on Chrono Compendium. Here are article screenshots[imgur.com] of some of the points I mentioned.
Speaking of Chrono Compendium, a lot of arguments made about CT and CC's stories originate not from the games, but from Chrono Compendium, which, for 2 decades, championed the idea of them offering a seamless narrative and presented their ideas in long-form as facts rather than the fan works they are. As a consequence, their ideas have permeated the fanbase, in which Compendium theories are often cited as dogma.
A lot of lore stuff claimed in YouTube videos and things people argue online actually originates from Chrono Compendium rather than from the games. When you encounter a "you just didn't understand the story" argument from someone insisting CC works as a genuine narrative sequel to CT, it's often coming from somebody pretending to have understood something in the game that's actually a Chrono Compendium fiction or theory that they assumed to be official lore.
To their credit, Chrono Compendium more recently admitted this, that, out of a fan-atic zeal for the games they were just making it all up as they went along, and apologised for it in a long editorial in which they concluded they were wrong to rationalise things so hard, and that CC genuinely can't work as a sequel to CT.
You can read their editorial here: Chrono Cross - A Mea Culpa for a Sea of Plot Holes[www.chronocompendium.com]
In that editorial they also cite the interview in which Kato acknowledges he was unaware of the contradiction between CT' story presenting Schala's pendant as being a Guardia royal family heirloom passed down to Marle, and CC' story presenting Schala's pendant as being sent by Schala with Kid to Guardia in 1,004 AD (which means none of CT could've happened), and he doesn't have a solution for it.
The editorial is an impressive about-face from the site that led the charge to rationalise the two games together since shortly after CC released. Here are a couple key excerpts:
A similar mythology has been created regarding Masato Kato's importance to CT's writing. While he was surely the production's biggest contrarian, he certainly also played a very-important role in CT being as great as it is, contributing writing and ideas. But his role is commonly greatly overstated / inflated, with him being given credit for things he wasn't responsible for (like designing the CT characters, which he didn't), coming-up with gameplay ideas that he didn't, and writing things that he didn't.
You can read both the source of some of the misconceptions about his contributions, and source-citing corrections to those misconceptions in this thread[www.resetera.com]. The OP presented a whole lot of assumptions based on personal inferences from vague article comments and the existence of certain design materials, while the 16th post in the thread shows that a whole lot of those assumptions are false.
There's a bunch of stuff that can be added, such as pointing-out that Horii saying he doesn't write a lot of details when making a plot doesn't mean that Kato filled most of the story's details in... when there were several other writers besides Horii and Kato, and especially when Kato said the very same thing concerning his own writing that Horri said of it: that he writes basic idea outlines that others flesh-out the details for. Kato also said the writers' work on CT tended to blend all together in the end - which is why he was proud that he wrote the story for 12,000 BC on his own - which, per what he actually said, still doesn't mean that he wrote all its dialogue and interactions on his own, only that it was his original idea and he wrote that section's story and events. He could've done that in a similar way to Horii writing the game's general plot (which Sakaguchi said wasn't some barebones outline, but was impressively detailed), while also then adding the next layer of details by doing the scenario writing (which is what I think he means by saying wrote all that section's events), while CT's sub-scenario writers, Tokita and Kitase, then created the next layer of additional details, and then the regular character writers did the dialogue for the character interactions. And that is most likely the case, since the different CT characters had assigned writers. For example, Kato handled Magus' dialogue, and Tokita handled Frog's.
It could've also been pointed-out that not only did Kato *not* create the original CT character designs, or guide Toriyama's own designs, but that at-least some of the characters' designs predate Kato even joining Square: For example, Crono's and Marle's, who were already designed before Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger split into two separate projects - which is why both Randi and Crono are spikey red-haired, bandanna-wearing, blue-clothed, swordsmen, and Primm and Marle are both blonde, pony-tailed, bell-bottom wearing princesses.
I think people sometimes assume that Kato was the main writer for CT because he was the "only" writer for CC... but he was part of a larger writing team on CT, and regularly had the rest of the team siding against his ideas. Also, the idea that Kato was CC's only writer seems somewhat contradictory to Kato's own comments that creating CC's characters was a team effort, that Leena was introduced at the producer's instruction, and that others had to flesh-out his ideas and reign him in.
I think for examples of what Kato's writing is like at the micro-detail level (such as character dialogue), as opposed to the macro-detail level (such as plot outlines and scenario writing), DS CT's Lost Sanctum and Dimensional Vortex bonus areas, as well as Magus' unique event reactions can be looked at - as those are things Kato was personally responsible for. They're not exactly stand-out parts of CT's dialogue, but are sub-par to the rest of CT's dialogue.