In Japan there seems to be an annual event where people make CG videos of stuff and submit them, so I was going through them and perhaps unsurprisingly there's quite a bit of stuff based off the opening of Chrono Cross, the Scar of Time:
Although music is highly subjective, Chrono Cross is certainly worthy of being in the discussion of best game OST ever, and the opening theme of Chrono Cross is clearly a powerhouse track. However there are a lot of Scar of Time videos, and the one currently on top at around 8th place overall is this one:
The characters are based on Touhou but the text/appearance literally makes no sense whatsoever. Multiple characters get subbed in for Serge/Kid/Lynx/Harle too. It's basically just a collection of a large number of Animeish characters substituting every entity that appeared in the Chrono Cross opening. While there are no shortage of videos based Chrono Cross, this one appears to be ahead by a lot, and yet it's mostly a bunch of stills or minimal movement. Of course, if you go back to the original Chrono Cross opening, you'll notice that most of the models indeed have minimal movement and the whole thing might even be doable with just CG stills plus moving camera around in clever ways.
And then it occurred to me that Chrono Cross (and Trigger as well) has a monopoly of cool stuff to do in a game, and since the music video replaced every scene verbatim it basically inherited the same coolness, so it easily beat out all the other videos that actually tried to do something on their own. What makes Chrono Cross and Trigger special isn't any of your standard stuff. It's not gameplay because both are only about above average (and Cross's system is too complicated for most people to understand). It's not music because other games with Mitsuda composing music sure isn't nearly as well received. It's not graphics because while the graphics in both games are great, they certainly have long been surpassed. But Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross remains some of the coolest game ever even this day. What game do you get to summon a giant frog to squash your enemies? When the T-Rex is doing the countdown scream, all your character looks scared, and that's all they do! Miguel is some guy who looks like an archelogist who has a huge lightsaber (Holy Dragon Sword). Having a boss do an Infinity (think it's called Vigoro in English version) combo on you is awesome. Literally every scene in the Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross opening involves someone doing something really cool. This isn't like your Final Fantasy CG cutscene where you can go have lunch and not miss much when you come back. Cross actually goes a bit too far when you consider some of the scenes in its opening are either:
1. Never happened in the game(say the one Serge running up with his swallow sword).
2. Completely irrelevent to the story (far too many to name).
In fact, as the scenes in Cross gets revealed throughout playing the game, it only leads to disappointment because the truth is not as cool as what those awesome short clips show. Kid's introduction is quickly ruined by her fake Australian dialect. Harle may look mysterious and enigmatic but I kicked out the fake French joker out of my party as soon as I was allowed to. Lynx never looks anywhere as cool or menancing as he does in the intro. The scene where Kid is waiting at the beach (I assume it's supposed to be an allusion to the Sands of Time) doesn't actually make sense because she's never supposed to be waiting for you anywhere. No other game makes such great use out of rather limited cutscenes. Chrono Trigger could actually back up most of the promised awesomeness in the game itself, while Chrono Cross never lived up to what was promised in the opening, and I think the popularity of the two games reflect that. Still, when you consider Cross essentially had only music and coolness (I really like the gameplay, but it seems like almost nobody liked that aspect) and is still viewed as a pretty good game, that's a lot of mileage out of the coolness factor.
And I guess this is why making a sequel/remake of Chrono series is very difficult. The game itself, even Chrono Trigger, isn't THAT special without the intangible coolness factor, but this is something you really can't count on ahead of time. I'm not a believer of 'back in my days the game are better' but I'll give Chrono Trigger a pass on that because it truly had something that isn't even what can be quantified as 'gameplay', because the game engine itself is just a refined ATB from Final Fantasy and nothing special. I really see no reason to expect whoever takes over, even if they worked on Chrono Trigger/Cross before, to capture the same thing. Case in point, the DS remake that features you fighting the Devourer or whatever the Lavos-Schala entity was called, was definitely not cool. It was just a recycled Lavos sprite with Schala in it, and if it's meant to be a challenge boss it's definitely weaker than Spekkio at level **. Yes I realize it's tough to top Spekkio at level ** in terms of sheer difficulty (Luminare does around 980 damage against maxed magic defense) but that's not my problem. It chooses its attacks poorly and generally will not use the Lavos's most impressive looking attacks (Grandstone, Dreamless, Crying Heaven, Dark Star, etc).
Although music is highly subjective, Chrono Cross is certainly worthy of being in the discussion of best game OST ever, and the opening theme of Chrono Cross is clearly a powerhouse track. However there are a lot of Scar of Time videos, and the one currently on top at around 8th place overall is this one:
The characters are based on Touhou but the text/appearance literally makes no sense whatsoever. Multiple characters get subbed in for Serge/Kid/Lynx/Harle too. It's basically just a collection of a large number of Animeish characters substituting every entity that appeared in the Chrono Cross opening. While there are no shortage of videos based Chrono Cross, this one appears to be ahead by a lot, and yet it's mostly a bunch of stills or minimal movement. Of course, if you go back to the original Chrono Cross opening, you'll notice that most of the models indeed have minimal movement and the whole thing might even be doable with just CG stills plus moving camera around in clever ways.
And then it occurred to me that Chrono Cross (and Trigger as well) has a monopoly of cool stuff to do in a game, and since the music video replaced every scene verbatim it basically inherited the same coolness, so it easily beat out all the other videos that actually tried to do something on their own. What makes Chrono Cross and Trigger special isn't any of your standard stuff. It's not gameplay because both are only about above average (and Cross's system is too complicated for most people to understand). It's not music because other games with Mitsuda composing music sure isn't nearly as well received. It's not graphics because while the graphics in both games are great, they certainly have long been surpassed. But Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross remains some of the coolest game ever even this day. What game do you get to summon a giant frog to squash your enemies? When the T-Rex is doing the countdown scream, all your character looks scared, and that's all they do! Miguel is some guy who looks like an archelogist who has a huge lightsaber (Holy Dragon Sword). Having a boss do an Infinity (think it's called Vigoro in English version) combo on you is awesome. Literally every scene in the Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross opening involves someone doing something really cool. This isn't like your Final Fantasy CG cutscene where you can go have lunch and not miss much when you come back. Cross actually goes a bit too far when you consider some of the scenes in its opening are either:
1. Never happened in the game(say the one Serge running up with his swallow sword).
2. Completely irrelevent to the story (far too many to name).
In fact, as the scenes in Cross gets revealed throughout playing the game, it only leads to disappointment because the truth is not as cool as what those awesome short clips show. Kid's introduction is quickly ruined by her fake Australian dialect. Harle may look mysterious and enigmatic but I kicked out the fake French joker out of my party as soon as I was allowed to. Lynx never looks anywhere as cool or menancing as he does in the intro. The scene where Kid is waiting at the beach (I assume it's supposed to be an allusion to the Sands of Time) doesn't actually make sense because she's never supposed to be waiting for you anywhere. No other game makes such great use out of rather limited cutscenes. Chrono Trigger could actually back up most of the promised awesomeness in the game itself, while Chrono Cross never lived up to what was promised in the opening, and I think the popularity of the two games reflect that. Still, when you consider Cross essentially had only music and coolness (I really like the gameplay, but it seems like almost nobody liked that aspect) and is still viewed as a pretty good game, that's a lot of mileage out of the coolness factor.
And I guess this is why making a sequel/remake of Chrono series is very difficult. The game itself, even Chrono Trigger, isn't THAT special without the intangible coolness factor, but this is something you really can't count on ahead of time. I'm not a believer of 'back in my days the game are better' but I'll give Chrono Trigger a pass on that because it truly had something that isn't even what can be quantified as 'gameplay', because the game engine itself is just a refined ATB from Final Fantasy and nothing special. I really see no reason to expect whoever takes over, even if they worked on Chrono Trigger/Cross before, to capture the same thing. Case in point, the DS remake that features you fighting the Devourer or whatever the Lavos-Schala entity was called, was definitely not cool. It was just a recycled Lavos sprite with Schala in it, and if it's meant to be a challenge boss it's definitely weaker than Spekkio at level **. Yes I realize it's tough to top Spekkio at level ** in terms of sheer difficulty (Luminare does around 980 damage against maxed magic defense) but that's not my problem. It chooses its attacks poorly and generally will not use the Lavos's most impressive looking attacks (Grandstone, Dreamless, Crying Heaven, Dark Star, etc).
