Chrono Chronicles

This is a good game, plain and simple. It isn't one of the best ones, but I would say it certainly ranks up there. Anyone will enjoy it who was/is a fan of Chrono Trigger. The story picks up a year after the defeat of Lavos and finds the heroes of the game in a strange land. At first the story is kind of, well, meh, but it gets better towards the end. Something else that gets better towards the end is the difficulty. Chances are the first few dungeons and bosses you run across won't bother you all that much. By the time you get to the volcano area, you might run into some difficulty.

The story isn't the greatest thing either. The gameplay basically consists of "Point A to Point B" the whole game, with no real interaction with the characters. They tell you the information they need to, and then become useless. The townsfolk have no interesting dialogue. At all! "Hello", "How Are You", "I'm cold", "Get away from me!", you get the point. That was definately a bad spot that should have been fixed.

Also there's a lack of backtracking in the game until you get the boat and the airship, of course there's not much reason to considering the world map is so small. Just thought I'd point that out though.

The enemies are standard RPG Maker fare, at least from what I know. Some of them are fairly challenging but not too much. I didn't quite enjoy the regular battle theme but I am glad the maker decided to retain the CT boss music and use certain other themes throughout the game.

One thing that dissapointed me though were some of the attacks. For instance, Chrono seems to be primarily a holy wizard with a sword in this game cause for most of the game his biggest spells are "Sacrament" level 1, 2, and 3, holy spells. Marle has a lot of healing spells, status effect spells but no real ice magic until towards the end. Frog gets these weird moves which don't cost any MP, and no real magic until towards the end of the game. Your fourth party member (dont wanna spoil the game on anyone) happily keeps his awesome ability of having like every spell available.

I was also confused because I saw a few monsters listed in the database that didn't come into play in the main game. Mainly boss looking types, but it's a moot point I guess.

The dungeon areas are all custom made, no random generation. But they suffer from a slight lack of entertainment. Sure they are full of monsters, usually two or three groups. But one thing I had a problem with was that I could run into these large group of foes and eliminate them all with one multi-hit spell. Example is the sewer area you enter after the first boss. I was freaked out by the large amount of enemies; then I used use a Sacrament spell and they all died.

The other point about the dungeons is the lack of treasure. The dungeons are fairly large, and they have mutliple paths to make you confused. But there should be something down at least a couple of those paths, but there's not. Most of the exploring in some of the dungoens comes mainly from looking for a key to open a door, especially in the final dungeon. Find a key, open a door, fight a boss, go to the next floor, find another key, open another door, fight another boss, then you're close to the end of the dungeon. I didn't mind it, but some might.

If you're a diehard CT fan and you want to kill a few hours, download this. The fights are fast paced, RM2K3 style, and although the storyline and dialogue are slightly lacking, it's more then enough to keep you entertained. And the challenge and epicness of the game seems to increase towards the end. So go ahead, and play it. What have ya got to lose?