Characters of Chrono Cross
Chrono Cross is a role-playing video game developed and published by Square for the PlayStation video game console. It is the successor to Chrono Trigger, which was released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
While its predecessor, like most role-playing games at the time, only offered a handful of playable characters, Chrono Cross was notable for making 45 different characters available for recruitment over the course of the game, each with distinct backstory and speech patterns. The game's writer, Masato Kato, started with the core characters from Radical Dreamers, a rare, Japan-only visual novel he felt ultimately went unfinished, and greatly expanded the cast and scenario, while leaving the creation of some minor characters to various other members of the development team. The developers also created an "auto accent program", to apply accents and other quirks to character's dialogue, making the dialogue altered depending on who was present in the player's party.
Reception for the game from critics was very positive, with some publications, such as GameSpot, even giving the game a perfect score. However, reception for the cast of characters was more mixed; some critics were impressed by the quantity, variety, and individuality offered by the characters, where others complained of an emphasis of "quantity over quality".
Creation and influences
''Radical Dreamers''
A few of the core characters from Chrono Cross originate from an earlier game titled Radical Dreamers. Chrono series writer Masato Kato felt that the first game in the series, Chrono Trigger, did not wrap up all its story arcs, and as such, wrote the story of Radical Dreamers to conclude some aspects of it. However, due to the rushed nature of the development schedule, it being a short, text based visual novel, and being released on an obscure add-on for the Super Famicom, the Satellaview, Kato would label the game "unfinished", leading to the conception of a more complete game, which would be Chrono Cross. [|Serge], [|Kid], [|Lynx], [|Viper], [|Radius], and [|Riddel] all originate from the game. Additionally, the Radical Dreamers character Magil, who is an amnesiac Magus from Chrono Trigger, was originally going to be the character [|Guile] in Chrono Cross, before Kato wrote him out of the script, fearing he could not do the character justice in the massive scope of Chrono Cross. While Radical Dreamers characters were used as a base for the characters of Chrono Cross, Kato made changes as well. In Radical Dreamers, Serge acted as the game's narrator, rather than a silent protagonist, and Lynx, is just a regular human, rather than an anthropomorphic cat. With the release of Chrono Cross, the characters and events of Radical Dreamers were retconned as being from a similar but different alternate reality.Conception
Once work on the actual Chrono Cross started, the initial vision beyond character recruitment was even more expansive. The game initially was intended to be able to have the player recruit any person they encountered, through either interacting or battling them. However, eventually the development team found this to be too ambitious, and narrowed it down to 64 playable characters, and then again down to 45 characters for the final game, which were then drawn by character designer Nobuteru Yūki. The backgrounds of some minor characters were left to members of the staff. The development team also considered the idea of having each character have their own ending, each with three variant scenarios based on events occurred in the game, leading to over 120 endings, but the idea was scrapped as being not feasible.Parallel dimensions
The developers of Chrono Cross created a setting consisting of two parallel dimensions; the "Home World", where the game starts, and the "Alternate World", that is introduced shortly afterwards. The two worlds are used to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect; both worlds have the same basic make-up, but show key differences that have resulted from one minor difference; the main character, Serge, died years ago in the "Alternate World". Some effects are direct, such as his mother no longer living in his home village, or that people he knew in the "Home World" no longer recognizing him in the "Alternate World". Others are far more indirect, with his absence leading other characters to make different decisions in their lives, effecting whether they end up being rich or poor, or follow their dreams or gives up on them. As such, there are sometimes two very different versions of characters, or conversely, characters who are only present in one world or another, due to dying or leaving the game's setting due to events happening in only one world. The development team conceded it was difficult for even them to keep track of all of the game's characters, with complications arising in keeping all the relationships and events straight across so many characters and two parallel dimensions.Accent system
A vast majority of the 45 characters in the game possess their own unique accents and speech patterns. When lines were being recycled for a number of characters, instead of storing over 40 slightly different static variations of the same text and running into potential memory issues, the localization team adapted and expanded the Japanese version's auto-accent generator, to allow text to be converted into a dozen of variations that retain most of the features of the various characters. With this system, only one generic version had to be stored internally and shared by all characters. For example, the static text "How are you?" would be stored, but if spoken by an Australian character it would be changed to "How are ya?"; if spoken by an Alien character it would appear as "How aare yoou?" Translator Richard Honeywood would say in retrospect that while the converter helped deal with memory constraints, creating and working with it was described as "mind-boggling". The system did not work well with some more detailed scenes that required more context; these were treated as independent lines, retaining an original version of the dialogue for each character.Characters
Playable characters
The game contains a total of 45 playable characters. While some join automatically as the plot progresses, others only become playable depending on the actions of the player. For example, early in the game, the player is tasked with breaking Serge into a heavily guarded manor house. The player must explore the town outside of the manor in order to find assistance with breaking in. The player may choose to ask Guile, Pierre, or Nikki for help on different approaches to breaking into the manor. The player may only choose one, and only that respective character will join the party. At other times, characters will not join if other characters are present. Early in the game, Leena will only join if the player opts to have Serge traveling alone at the time; if Kid is already with him, she no longer feels the need to help, and will not join. As such, it is impossible for all characters to join over the course of a single game. However, the game employs a New Game + system, where, upon starting a second game, characters who had been recruited on the prior playthrough will become available towards the latter part of the game. As such, the player can retain characters from the first game, while taking alternate paths to recruit characters missed the first time.The characters are presented in the order given in the game's master list of playable characters.
Serge
Serge is the silent protagonist of Chrono Cross; his motions alongside the reactions of other players indicate that Serge talks with others, but none of Serge's actual dialogue is shown outside of occasional dialogue trees. Instead, he is meant to be interpreted as "the persona of the player". Much of the game involves the player following Serge after he's been sucked into an alternative dimension where no one he previously knew recognizes him, and many are in his pursuit.The game's events reveal that Serge had died years prior in the Alternate World. As a child, he had come in contact with the all-powerful "Frozen Flame", a remnant of the all-powerful Lavos creature from Chrono Trigger. Once Serge had made contact, it sealed off the ability for anyone else to gain access to its power. With Serge dead in the "Alternate World", the Serge alive in the Home World was now necessary in the Alternate World. Kid pulled him through the dimensions as part of Balthasar's lengthy plan to defeat the Time Devourer and free Schala from it. Meanwhile, Lynx needed his body in order to gain access to the Frozen Flame's power. While Lynx succeeds in this, resulting in the two switching bodies for a period of the game, leaving the player controlling Serge trapped in Lynx's body for the middle third of the game, if the player directs Serge to find the legendary "Chrono Cross" item and use it to fight the Time Devourer, Balthasar's plan also succeeds.
Lynx
Lynx is an anthropomorphic feline that serves as one of the game's primary antagonists. Initially, he is seen as a character that is searching for Serge with the Acacia Dragoons, and loathed by Kid, both for then unknown reasons. For the middle portion of the game, Lynx switches bodies with Serge, where he is the primary playable character for a third of the game. It's eventually revealed that, due to a complicated series of events, Lynx is actually Serge's father, taken over by a supercomputer named FATE, that ultimately needed Serge's body to access the all-powerful Frozen Flame. In addition to this, Kid's hate stems from Lynx's past abduction of Lucca Ashtear, Kid's maternal figure from her orphanage, who had stood in the way of his goals.Lynx does not have a particular speech pattern, and is silent when Serge is inhabiting his body. All of the game's events depict the "Alternate World" Lynx; the "Home World" Lynx is not ever seen. Kato, in the Ultimania guide, states that in the Home World, Lynx dies in the Dead Sea with Harle and the Acacia Dragoons.