Chrono Crossing

There is a story I wish to tell. Now, many people already know this story because I enjoy telling it, but after reading my friend Jared's hilarious blog post concerning cheese, I was inspired to write on this ignored blog. Plus, there's a few people I know of who haven't heard this story.

I'm a big fan of the Chrono series. A few years ago, I played Chrono Trigger for the first time and loved it. I then set out to buying Chrono Cross, the sequel. After a while, I found a copy on the Gamestop website which I purchased. I was pumped, I couldn't wait to play this game. When it arrived at my house, I popped it in. After starting a new game, the opening cinema played, seemingly normally. But then was the first indication that I had gotten screwed. Towards the end of the movie, one of the scenes froze, with that really annoying sound which is just the sound at the time lagging and thus repeating. Hopefully you know what I'm talking about. It froze like that for a few minutes, then continued normally, if laggy. I hoped that was the end of it. But this was only the beginning. This disc was beyond scratched.

Chrono Cross is very much a JRPG, so keep in mind those mechanics as I weave this tale. The next problem I found was that whenever a character cast a red and sometimes white spell in battle, their casting animation froze in place with that annoying sound again. Strange thing was, the music still played normally, and I could pause the game. This continued for another few minutes, then the animation finished. As you can imagine, I rarely used red spells. And so I progressed through the game like this, for around 10-15 hours of game time.

Then I reached Fort Dragonia, a location in the game. When you first reach the fort, a cinema plays showing you what it looks like. This movie froze, too. However, no matter how long I waited, it never continued, the game actually froze there. Even after I cleaned it around three times, it still would never proceed. As you can imagine, I was pissed. But I figured out a way around it, eventually. I got my hands on disc images of the game, a Playstation emulator, and when my birthday came around, I also got a PS2 adapter for my computer and a DexDrive, which allowed me to put my PS1 memory card's files on my computer and vice versa. With this, I finally managed to play past this part and continue playing on the PC. I eventually put this save file on hold while I played other games.

Fast forward to last weekend. While at a retro video game store near me, I came across a new, sealed copy of the game, for only $20. As you can expect, I bought it as fast I could. I also bought a pretty sweet Chrono Cross clock for $5, so I really made a killing that day. I'm playing through the game again, and it feels so good to play it without it freezing all the time. Now if I only hadn't accidentally spoiled some of it already....