Chrono Cross

When the opening tones of „Scars of Time“ ring out, the matter is settled - this game will get you before you even manage to pick up the controller. Chrono Cross from 2000 is an indirect sequel to the legendary Chrono Trigger and ranks among the most visually and musically enchanting titles ever released on the PlayStation.

At the heart of the game are two parallel worlds - Home and Another - between which you travel and watch how a small decision in the past branched reality into two different forms. You can recruit over forty playable characters into your party, each with their own personality, story hook and a way of being reached. It is a richness that no other game of the time offered on such a scale.

The combat system abandons classic MP and builds on the „Elements“ system - you slot spells and abilities into a grid and juggle stamina levels depending on how powerful the attacks you want to use are. Added to this is the colored battlefield, where advantages shift according to the elements. It is elegant, tactical and refreshingly different from most JRPGs of the time.

The music was handled by Yasunori Mitsuda and his soundtrack ranks among the absolute peaks of game music ever - from melancholic guitars to soaring orchestral motifs. It is precisely the music and the artistic conception that you carry away most deeply from Chrono Cross into your memory.

The relationship to Chrono Trigger remains to this day the subject of passionate debate. Some fans of the beloved predecessor took hard the way Cross handles its legacy and characters. But judged on its own it is a masterpiece with its own identity, atmosphere and sorrow over branched fates. In 2022 it moreover received a remaster in the form of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition.

Why play it: For one of the most beautiful soundtracks in the history of games and an ambitious story about parallel worlds that stands firm even without its famous forebear.