Chrono Cross

Chrono Cross is a console role-playing game developed and published by Square (now Square Enix) for the Sony PlayStation video game console. It is the sequel to Chrono Trigger, which was released in 1995 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Unlike its predecessor's "Dream Team", Chrono Cross was developed primarily by scenarist and director Masato Kato and other programmers for Chrono Trigger,including art director Yasuyuki Honne and sound planner Minoru Akao. Composer Yasunori Mitsuda scored Chrono Cross and Nobuteru Yūki designed its characters.

The story of Chrono Cross focuses on a teenage boy named Serge and a theme of parallel worlds. Faced with an alternate reality in which he died as a child, Serge endeavors to discover the truth of the two worlds' divergence. The flashy thief Kid and forty-three other characters assist him in his travels around the tropical archipelago El Nido. Struggling to uncover his past and find the mysterious Frozen Flame, Serge is chiefly challenged by Lynx, a shadowy antagonist working to apprehend him.

Chrono Cross features standard RPG gameplay with certain innovations. Players advance the game by controlling Serge through the game's world by foot and boat. Navigation between areas is conducted via an overworld map, depicting the landscape from a scaled down overhead view. Around the island world are villages, outdoor areas, and dungeons, through which the player moves in three dimensions. Locations such as cities and forests are represented by more realistically scaled field maps, in which players can converse with locals to procure items and services, solve puzzles and challenges, or encounter enemies. Like Chrono Trigger, the game features no random encounters; enemies are openly visible on field maps or lie in wait to ambush the party. Touching the monster switches perspectives to a battle screen, where players physically attack, use Elements, defend, or run away from the enemy. Battles are turn-based, allowing the player infinite time to select an action from the available menu. For both the playable characters and the CPU-controlled enemies, each attack reduces their number of hit points (a numerically based life bar), which can be restored through Elements and Consumable Elements. When a playable character loses all hit points, he or she faints. If all the player's characters fall in battle, the game ends and must be restored from a previously saved chapter—except for specific storyline-related battles that allow the player to lose.