Chrono Cross is a pseudo sequel to Chrono Trigger.  I think its set in the same world, or something like that.

If you have never played Chrono Trigger; it was a time travelling game on the Super Nintendo, where you had about five different time periods to go to.  In Chrono Cross, you only have the home world and the alternative world to worry about.  Believe me; that is enough.

You can name the main protagonist, so I called him Dave.  He was originally called Serge, which I thought was a terrible name.

You start off with what is a dream sequence.  You run up to the top of the castle and beam yourself up to a floating building, like they would have done in Star Trek.  After the doors bulge backwards and forwards, as if you are on acid, we see Serge standing over Kids body and he starts to smile to himself.  That's a weird hero I thought.  I know why he's smiling but if I told you, it would spoil about twenty five hours of gameplay.

After collecting some shells for Leena, which I just thought was a way to stretch the game out further, we see Serge have some flashback or is that forward and then when he wakes up, no one recognises him back in his village.  He finds out that Serge died ten years ago.  How can that be when he's standing right there in front of them?

There are a lot of twists an turns and it will take you a while to complete this game.

The battle system is interesting to say the least.  You don't have random battles anymore.  You see the enemy on the screen and can fight them or avoid them.  It reminds me of Grandia in that regard.

You get these magical skills and they can be used once in a battle.  Where you place them on your magic table can affect how useful they are, so you will probably be spending sometime to begin with, learning where to put them to get the most out of them.

There are so many characters in this game that can join your party and I can't remember them all.

I noticed that the victory battle music was very similar to Chrono Trigger.

There are meant to be at least thirteen different endings but, I have no intention to play this game that many times to see all of them.

The game is OK but, if I had a choice, I'm not sure I would have spent sixty pounds on this game.  It was never released in the UK and that left me with the only option of importing it from the USA.

She's called Harley and I wonder if the creator liked the animated Batman series.  She has a French accent for some reason and is weird.  She's even weirder than the rest.		This girl here is called kid.  I'm serious here.  They couldn't even be bothered to give her a real name.		Serge is such a gay name if you as me and he really has little or no personality to talk about.		Leena is a friend of Serge, or his girlfriend.  It's hard to tell and has no personality to speak off.		Lynx!  Now we're talking.  He is our arch enemy.  There's a twist involving him and another one of these characters.  Can you tell?

I have a few gripes with this game though.

1:  The game doesn't always tell you where you need to go and remember that there are two worlds.  So you can go to a place in the home world and then find out after many tries, that the person was talking about the alternative world.  Sometimes it never even mentioned where you needed to go but would mention someone that lived there.  My memory is terrible; how am I going to remember where a character lives, that was mentioned 30 hours of gameplay ago?

2:  I'm sure that in Japan, it is normal to have puzzles in their games but this is meant to be a roll playing game.  If I wanted so many puzzles, I would play a puzzle game and not an RPG.

3:  Most of the characters are soulless individuals that I couldn't really cared less about.  At least they're not a whiney as that twat from Final Fantasy 8 I guess.

	This is the main screen that you see and provides you with some basic information.			The main status page.  It's useful to check this page in case you are poisoned, or for any other ailment.
	This is the magic screen.  It is important because the positioning of your magic can be affected by your level.  If you use a spell too powerful in the wrong slot, it will be less effective.			One thing I noticed was that all the spells seemed to be more powerful from the right to the left.  If I put a level 1 spell in the furthest right slot, I would get a +6 to its ability.
			This can be important in some of the battles, where I survived by the skin of my teeth.  Just as putting a spell further to the right would increase its potential.  If you was to put a level 4 spell in a level one slot; it too would lose some of its potential with a -3 to it.  This is very important and can mean the difference.  Here's an example: If I use a water spell on an opponent, I might get 190 for example.  Now if I use the same spell with a -2 for example, I would get about 60. That is a big difference is one that should be taken into account when placing you spells.
	This screen has all your spells that can be used outside of battle.  If you get poisoned for example, you would come here to alleviate your symptoms.			This is the armour screen.  Pretty basic really.
	All your items that are needed in the game but can't be removed are stored here.  See below as to their significance.			Customisation screen.  I used the analogue control because it allows me to run with the analogue stick, in a similar way to Mario 64.
	This is very important.  I should really have read the manual more thoroughly first.  All important Items like this world tele-porter are held here.  You can bring the menu up by using
the square button and you'll have to use this a lot latter in the game.

Spoiler warning

It turns out that Kid is in fact the princess from Chrono Trigger and Luccia is Lucca's friend.