You know what's a great game? Chrono Trigger. I was just randomly thinking about it today. Damn great game, great story, great world. It's close to what I'd consider a "perfect" game.
Shame they never made any more after that.
What's that you say? Chrono Cross?
Yep, shame they never any more after Chrono Trigger.
I'm about to fight Masa and Mune for probably the 50th time.
As for Chrono Cross--I played through that game seven times. Not because I enjoyed it, but because I was trying to make it's fuckedy mess of a story make any semblance of sense. I genuinely don't think it's all that great; there's a lot of parts that just off into nowhere, and the main story of it had no idea what it wanted to be about. The first 20, 30 minutes made some of you guys go WTF? Try the last few hours, where you swap antagonists four or five times. The first time I played the game and did a little weirdo quest so we could make a canoe fly to the floating final dungeon, it was such a cool looking place with interesting music and enemies, but I realized I had no idea what I was doing there. When you get to the boss of the place, it's really not clear why any of this is happening or how it really relates to what happened earlier.
Essentially you're dealing with warring parallel timelines, their fractured existences created by the events of Chrono Trigger. That's a brief cutscene and a lot of reading between the lines. If the game's story had focused on those elements, it could've had the same final few hours and been great. But since most of the game is fucking around, and then suddenly you're asked to care about a bunch of unrelated shit, concluding with a not-really-that-important plot thread from Chrono Trigger, it's just a mess.
Also, about half the cast of Chrono Trigger die off-screen, and one is killed as just a throwaway link to the first game. It's a pretty miserable affair.
And then, if you do the final boss the right way, the end ...
The world is turned into our world. Yup. Everything you cared about from Chrono Trigger? Gone. It's just our world now. Some reason we're supposed to feel melancholy as Kid wanders around a modern city during the end credits, and none of it matters.
Small wonder they never made a third one. Story-wise, character-wise, Chrono Cross was a disaster. And gameplay-wise, it was trying some new ideas, but only being able to level up by beating bosses made levels not really matter much, and the whole elemental system didn't work quite as well as the game wanted, though it did allow you to fuck over certain bosses, and is the only way to get the True Ending I mention in the spoiler above. It's an important game for my adolescence, but not a positive one.