As with almost every one of their Playstation titles, Squaresoft has succeeded in building a graphically phenomenal monster with fantastic musical composure that shines brightly with potential, but ultimately failed on delivering half of what the SNES predecessor was, and once again lets their standards for delivering a quality sequel to a great 2D game swirl down into the deep recesses of death.

The story initiates reasonably well. One day when our speechless protagonist, Serge, awakens after a dream of his later escapades, he goes to visit his friend Leena at the docks of Arni village where they both reside. There she asks of Serge a necklace made of Kodomo scales, which can be obtained at Lizard Rock, a small area consisting of plant life and the Kodomo of whose scales Serge needs. Upon retrieving the scales, Serge was asked by Leena to go to the beach just at the tip of the strip of land where Lizard Rock is. Upon arrival to the beach, Serge talks with Leena, but soon a portal opens that sends him to the alternate dimension of the world in which he lived in.

When he enters town to see what had happened to him, no one knows of his existence and some say that he died ten years ago. Worse is that his home has been occupied by someone he doesn't know and his past seems to have been eliminated from the bowels of time. This leads our character on an epic journey through the two dimensions to solve the mysteries of his dimensional crossing, and to find out the details of his true past.

The main theme of Chrono Cross is one of high ambition. A time-traveling masterpiece that blends together a spectacular color scheme, very well done graphics and one of the best soundtracks of all time. Yet with all this Chrono Trigger Fanboy hype came the inevitable 3D treatment from Square, which considering the low quality of Final Fantasy VIII, meant only one thing for those with any respect for this company left after Racing Lagoon, major letdown.

The gameplay is actually pretty well done, but combined with the murderous pacing and telling of the story, drags the score down significantly. The battle system took quite some time and manual reading before I could fully utilize its various features in my attack strategies, but it proved adequate after that.

The field effect meter is a nice addition but is ultimately what bogs many of the battles down. The idea is that you must cast three or more magic spells colored in a certain element so that your fourth, fifth and sixth casts of the same color (any magic of the field color) will be more powerful. The catch is that your opponents can also do the same to the field effect to even the odds out for them. In short, a very important chunk of battling is paying attention to the field, but more often I felt as though entire battles were just struggles over who can fill the field with their own color. I found myself and enemies casting even the weakest of fireballs just to make the field red so that they could attack and do more damage. But since the game's battles randomize turns with intolerable cruelty as the enemy spider-thing can have three attacks (some during your party's turn) and you have only one, when the field turned my color, the enemy quickly turned it into a different color so that the player has to resort to casting weak spells just to have the same procedure repeat itself.

Although this system is in no way horrible (it's actually rather impressive ), more time should have been put into ironing out the way in which this field affects the pacing and overall entertainment value of battling in Chrono Cross.

The other features of the battle engine consist of the main attacks (strong, medium, low) and the ability to cast magic located in the same area as the attacks. When you have enough stamina, you are allowed as many attacks as the stamina dictates (if your stamina level is four, you can do four weak attacks, two medium attacks or a single strong attack combined with a weak attack). You build stamina by basically watching while the enemy attacks you, watching as your enemies attack or after long periods of time. But the one tactic here is that at times you may need to save your stamina (basically defend) for when you have the meter full, or if you're in the negative amount (negative amounts of stamina? believe it!). This area of battle is fairly complex and is the meat of this engine.

While I certainly commend Squaresoft for their achievement in terms of innovation, the meter is just downright unorthodox until you reach about thirty hours of playtime, it really takes a while to get used to after all those years of ATB's and turn-based, simple battle engines.

One last tid-bit of info on the battle engine. The game utilizes a Summon variation of spells, which means that the game has some reference to Final Fantasy in that regard, but the animations never take forever to end or repeat in casting. The summons are in actuality just spells that you can cast only once in a battle. They are also brief and not nearly as screen-filling as those in the Final Fantasy series.

When considered on all fronts, Chrono Cross' battle engine is good, but still is a letdown. The battle engine should have been more particular to Final Fantasy or Sony's masterful Legend Of Dragoon. The awesome ideas here would have made those engines that much more lovable and exciting. As it stands though, the battle engine is an ambitious yet lacking effort on Squaresoft's part.

The camera is static placed on various angles to convey the painting-like world of Chrono Cross. The gameplay here consists of moving the character in eight directions and pressing the "accept" button to open chests and talk to characters, engage in battle, things of that nature. There is no fault here as the angles always gave me a good perspective of the action, in and out of battle.

I applaud Squaresoft for attempting to innovate and scrapping all old material, but when the innovation is of such a faulty state, even if it has its bright areas, it deserves no more than a slightly above-average score of 78%. Maybe if random battles had been incorporated as an option so that you could choose to level up past your enemies instead of just staying at the same level they are, and if the experience system didn't have so many nuances that deprive it of a quality label, the system would have seen more love in my eyes. As it stands, it's just borderline decent.

The graphics have to be one of the best areas of the game. The whole game feels as though it was an interactive painting that has you running from brightly colored town to dimly lit dungeon. Although I detected a shade of slowdown and graininess, these minor graphical hiccups in no way subtract from the game's visual impact.

All of the game takes place on prerendered maps (except for battle and CG sequences). The world map is nicely animated and could pass for a storybook scenario. The game left one of the most immediate impacts on me just from the sharp, nicely designed buildings in Arni village, and the superb lighting effects in the Fort Dragonia areas. These are easily the best of the best Squaresoft render jobs.

The character models are beautifully designed and usually very creative in structure. They are composed of some really tight polygons and unique lighting to make them rival Square's cream of the crop, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy VIII. The animation for all the characters is not always unique though. Square misused the thought of whimsical characters and made a few playable characters that just annoy. When Poshul first joins your party, the prospect of this nicely animated dog aiding you in your battle escapades is iffy, but you learn to accept that as you delve deeper into her battle abilities.

However, once you start to attain party members, including an egg monster, a flower bud thing, some other monster that was grown in the Viper Manor laboratories and other little furry creatures, the miniature state at which these animals live in are just too eye-piercing to please. I want my party to be big, armed and ready to take on all comers. Instead the battles appear as though they were being broadcast on a cartoon show. Never is this more apparent than when you watch as a badly designed alien not even half the size of Serge casts a spell, the character looks ridiculous and this in turn alienates the mature stature the game aimed at from the dawn of it's development.

The characters almost never miss a beat when they're on the overworld map or during other rendered areas. But it's a whole different thing during battles. Some highly detailed allies such as Zoah or Dragon animations occasionally slow down and cause a minor disturbance in an otherwise clean animation sequence board.

The rest of the game's graphics are spectacular in every category. This game was a visual behemoth from the minute the disc went in to the minute it went out. Barring some slight glitches and character design choices, this is one beautiful RPG, possibly the best on Playstation until Persona II and Final Fantasy IX. The score would actually have been higher than 91%, but the Computer Graphics cut-scenes are under-par when set side-by-side with FFVIII. The animation in the CG is not nearly the caliber of FFVIII and was jaggy in some areas.

The sound/Music is, in a word, brilliant. Some of the greatest RPG emotional melodies and enthusiastic beats played on while I romped through the many smooth locations. To clue in as to probably the best theme in the entire game, The Guldove track is a relaxed and easy-going, repeating tune that makes leaving the town a chore. Other amazing tunes are... you know what, they're all fantastic. I would go on and list them but that would be just listing the entire soundtrack. All the music welcomes with open arms. If it's a deadly dungeon such as Fort Dragonia or a cheerfully evil monster grounds such as Lizard Rock, nothing in this game feels out of place or needless. Every sight and sound that this game is placed in its exact spot, which makes this game's sound/music perfect...well at least almost.

The sound part is the lesser of the aural traits exhibited by this game. It is exceptional mind you, but sometimes it can just be there and never contribute anything to Chrono Cross at all. Sometimes it took me an hour of being in a certain location just to notice that anything was playing at all. This is, again, VERY minor, but I just wanted to point it out as justification for a 98%, not a 100%.

Thankfully the game has no voice acting, which means that unlawful, piercing-the-ears voice actors that have no perception of what they are doing have no place here. This in partnership with the already stupendous music and sound effects make for a 98% experience that I'll never forget. If you buy one Chrono Cross product, make it the OST. It's wiser than buying the game. Why? Read on....

My, how times have changed. Squaresoft was at once the premier plot conceiver that even outshined the best of Enix, Atlus, and Sega (prior to their explosion on Saturn), Game Arts (prior to Lunar) and Konami. Yet, with this Squaresoft offering, they seem to have not only taken a miraculously large step backwards as seen in the Playstation Final Fantasies, but they have fallen down the stairs, out the door and onto the street.

Never is this more apparent than when you start to first see the awful onslaught of boring, repeating characters that have no imagination in their designs or personalities. The developers needed depth to tide over the masses until their next 3D blunder, so they threw in 45 characters that cancel each other out until you're left with about three different protagonist design ideas that are regurgitated and retooled about fifteen times. Pathetic.

This obviously eliminates any sort of character development that could have happened. You have a choice of watching as three characters develop in their thoughts, emotions and attitudes. But unless you never change the three characters that you play as (impossible if you've played the game), then you'll see a character mildly get a personality overhaul after ten minutes of play until you swap him for some other bozo that has more HP and strength. And even if you do steer clear of using more than ten characters during the entire game (something I strived for), they still barely develop at all as you must always watch as a character who is not in your party now talks to someone/thing about their personality. They seem to be reading a Shakespeare script as they barely use any emotion or made me relate to them. The vocabulary used in the text is also laughably fabricated. It's WRITING words that play the pre-dominant SPEECH roles. Do you see where I'm headin' to?

Altogether it's a bad story that unloads at a snail's pace and rarely focuses on developing a single character. Sure Serge gets a lot of spotlight time, but since he says the equivalent of half a sentence during the entire game (not to mention his Styrofoam-constructed facial expressions), he seems to just be a walking mute that all the other pro/antagonists talk about. He could very well not care about anything at all, just be in it for the chicks eh! I say that he is the single most disgraceful RPG character since the Chocobo, and even THAT had some emotion to it.

Even if the story is a nice take on the non-linear, future possibilities type-engagement, it still lacks everything that makes RPGs worth the effort: good characters, a solid, well-told plotline that develops the characters well and makes you hate the baddies and a good script. "I'll take none of the above, Bob". Hopefully FFIX will redeem Squaresoft's dignity from the garbage dump. I would have given the story a 0%, but it was understandable, but in no way the enjoyable epic that it had been hyped up to be. " I bid 38%!". "Sold to the disgruntled Trigger fan!".

Wisely observed, this game turned out to be what the future of RPGs will be. Boring romps that have no inner meaning to them besides blah characters and god-awful storylines. Hey Square, you got one more major franchise that you can flush down the toilet with 3D characters, Xenogears. How about a sequel to that amazing epic that contains no story and beautiful graphics and (who cares for anime?) CG. Then all the mainstream gamers will flock to you while the hardcore fans that made you who you are will be damned for all eternity. "Good ideas buzzing around my head, I gotta' write this down!" -Mr. Sakaguchi