Should I Cross Over?

Another game I acquired in the great video game binge of 2007 was Chrono Cross. I had originally played Chrono Trigger in Snes emulation's infancy and still found it to be an amazing experience despite garbled sound and flickering sprites. I only played about 3 hours of it before I decided to try and track down a real copy of it. I looked all over the place, unfortunately, my local Funcoland had turned into some lesser chain and finding the game became difficult. I had no way of finding the game up until it was released as part of the Final Fantasy Chronicles boxset.

I wasn't upset about the Chronicles version's flaws, although I did notice them. Waiting for the battles was agonizing and I tried to avoid going into the menu screen at all costs. Looking back, I must have really had no patience what-so-ever. In hindsight, sound was pretty awful aswell now that I have a base to compare it to; Remember, when I had first played it, snes emulators couldn't make any appealing sounds to save it's life. In the end, I still enjoyed myself with it.

Despite me enjoying Chrono Trigger oodles, I never got around to finishing it despite playing through to the end about four separate times. Maybe I had a short attention span, but I would always seem to move onto a new game everytime. Part of the problem was the fact that I never liked to level grind, making a lot of things incredibly difficult for me. I remember the fight with Flea Plus, Super Slash and Ozzie the Great as the one that really turned me away from wanting to play anymore. It was just too damned hard and I didn't have the mental faculties to come up with a decent tactic to survive.


Flash forward to about a week ago, I had been watching HCBaily's Let's Plays and started watching Chrono Trigger. I just couldn't stop watching and it eventually gave me the itch to pull up an old save file at Magus' castle. Around 10 hours later, I had maxed everyone's techs and pummled Lavos not once, but twice. I beat the extraterrestrial, doomsday insect to the ground on the Black Omen and immediately went into the Newgame+ and smashed him up after Lucca's Teleporter. I've always loved the game, but this time, it really hit home for me.

Now you may find yourself asking "Why did he mention Chrono Cross in the beginning of this post?", it's simple really, I think I want to play through it, but I've heard nothing but mixed feelings from all the reviews i've read. Now normally I don't really think too much about reviews, but all of them seem to be on complete opposite poles of each other. I'm talking like 1/10's and 10/10's all across the board.

I'm about to start a new semester at college, so my time is going to be limited. Desperately, I need to find out whether the game is going to be worth it to me. One thing I do know though is that the music rocks. Dragon God has got to be one of the smartest pieces of music I've heard in a video game to date.

I just wish I had the ability to time travel and give myself an opportunity to find out for myself or inter dimensional travel and ask parallel BusterLogic if he enjoyed the game or not. But then again, if he was parallel, would him liking it mean I would hate it, or would his word be golden? Great, now I'm going to be up all night wondering.