Hironobu Sakaguchi Fought for a Chrono Trigger Sequel But...

[Eric]

http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/08/29/ ... -and-lost/

The legendary creator of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger designer Hironobu Sakaguchi spoke at a panel today at PAX Prime, and he revealed a bit of backstory about the plans for a sequel of the adventure of Chrono.

According to Sakaguchi-san, he and the development team wanted to continue Chrono Trigger as a series like Final Fantasy and develop a proper sequel, but they didn’t see eye to eye with Square’s upper management. He explained that he fought for it, but lost the battle, so in the end it never happened.

It's amazing how awful SquareEnix's management is, everything about that company has seemingly gone to shit post SNES days in terms of managing their games.

[Don]

Consider Chrono Cross was more or less trampling over everything that made Chrono Trigger good I'm not sure if I want to see it as a series, though it's still pretty bizarre that they wouldn't want to continue a proven product but think Lightning is going to be able to star her own mini series.

[Julius Seeker]

Just a tidbit, Chrono Trigger 2 was in the works for a while but was eventually rebranded and reworked into Project Noah, which became released as Xenogears. The story was originally in the works as a potential script for Final Fantasy 7 - the Gears were involved at this point as a successor for both Magitek Armour and Summon monsters. The Magitek Armour and opening scene of Final Fantasy 6 was the result of the work of Tetsuya Takahashi. When it got reworked into Chrono Trigger 2, Lavos was added - whose concept remained, but was reworked into Deus.

Eventually Square did develop Chrono Cross, but the game suffered in a lot of areas. The vibrant energy of the Chrono Trigger experience was absent from Chrono Cross. Even the audio direction by Mitsuda was very off, the music felt very tacked on and unfitting throughout. Chrono Cross in the end felt more like a poor attempt at a Xenogears imitation, and not at all like Chrono Trigger.

[Don]

Xenogears was nothing like Chrono Trigger and would've been a poor sequel. It was pretty much inspired by Evangelion and is a rather stark contrast from the simplicity of Chrono Trigger.

Chrono Cross I think ended up slapping the fans on the face because Chrono Trigger was a world where hope springs eternal even when you always knew the world was getting destroyed in 1999 AD, and then in Chrono Cross it's like 'you know all the hard work in Chrono Trigger? It didn't even matter and Crono got shot by some guy 5 years after the game ended and died'. Throughout the game, I always got the feeling that neither dimensions of Chrono Cross was even worth saving because they'll probably just shoot Serge or whoever saved the world immediately after the crisis is over. Even Schala was like 'thx for saving me now you get to disappear forever because you're not part of the right timeline, and BTW I dyed my hair blond.'

[Zeus]

Consider Chrono Cross was more or less trampling over everything that made Chrono Trigger good I'm not sure if I want to see it as a series, though it's still pretty bizarre that they wouldn't want to continue a proven product but think Lightning is going to be able to star her own mini series.

Hey, man, Cross was excellent. It had the tie-ins to Trigger but they were relatively minor. It was a great game on its own, easily one of the best RPGs of the SNES and PSX eras.

You wonder how they said "no" to Sakaguchi and then go ahead and make Cross then put Break into pre-development before cancelling it. What, their idiot upper management wake up, realized they should do one after telling him no, and just left him out of it entirely? They still released a PS1 sequel but not what he pitched so they left him out of it? Just don't make sense.

[Don]

Cross was a decent game on its own. Its relationship to Trigger is very bad because the mood of the game is pretty muche verything that Trigger doesn't stand for. It should've been a standalone game and the tie to Trigger seems rather gratitous.