Comedy of the Sages - 5 Quests
Quest B: Ozzie's Short Fort
Stat of the Quest:Although enemies can drop a variety of consumable items at the end of a battle, there are no enemies that drop equippable items. (Some enemies do immediately precede an item that is given to the player, or placed on the map just behind.) On the other hand, it is possible to steal equippable items, but almost all of them are items you can get elsewhere, and you can usually buy before they�re stealable. Only 14% of all stealable items are unique, almost all of which come from this quest.
Ozzie�s Fort is probably the fastest and most straightfoward quest in the second game. It�s actually a fun, quick quest: it�s all boss fights. Every single encounter is a boss encounter (even if some of them are underwhelming), culminating in a big boss battle at the end. It�s actually kind of nice the way it punctuates some of the longer content available at the end. There�s not an enormous amount to say about this dungeon, however, because it�s so short; there�s basically only the climactic fight.
The 3-boss fight isn�t too special. They do use a triple tech as a counterattack, but there�s no real strategy to avoiding it except to focus all attacks on one enemy at a time. It�s kind of the sore thumb of Chrono Trigger boss fights as far as battle design goes--although that�s not to say it�s not fun; it is fairly entertaining. The real idea behind the fight is to allow the player a chance to steal from each enemy. The problem is that of all the available items, only the Flea Vest is any good. (The Slasher 2 is powerful, but the Swallow is very close in power and has a much better secondary perk. The Ozzie Pants are an insult.)
Quest B: The Sun Stone
Stat of the Quest: Elemental defenses are about as common in Chrono Trigger as they are in most 90s JRPGs. Chrono Trigger is a little lopsided in how it uses those elemental defenses, however, and it�s a strange design decision. In a game where each character (except Magus) can use only one element, party composition becomes harder: 25% of elemental defenses are for fire, 19% are for Lightning, 32% are for Shadow, and 11% are for either water or all elements completely. Shadow being so high is more or less inexplicable; does the game hate Robo that much? That only 11% are for water makes more sense: there are two water characters, and it would be hard to leave both of them out more often.
Veterans of Chrono Trigger probably remember the Sun Stone quest as being short and easy. To newbies--especially those brave enough not to use a walkthrough--it can be very complicated, but in a really satisfying way. This is a case of so many people knowing the secret to doing the quest, and so many FAQs spelling it out online, that we overlook the design decisions that make it clever. Let�s break it down point by point.
(1) Defeat Son of Sun
What�s interesting about the design of the Son of Sun encounter is the fact that the battle is almost completely dependent on pre-battle preparation rather than in-battle execution. After Son of Sun�s Flare spells wipe the party out a few times, the player will begin to wonder how it�s possible to survive. After all, the party has been close to max HP for a while now, but that Flare hits like a truck. Magic or elemental defenses are key to surviving the fight, but neither of those things has been readily available. This forces the player to begin exploring and acquiring gear, but not necessarily doing dungeons. Of their options, there are the Red Vest and Red Mail (pendant gear) and the Ruby Armor which is in Prehistoria, a time period that seems like it has become obsolete.
One nice design touch is that doing the other optional quests will inevitably yield a bunch of gear that will make this quest possible. Whereas many other JRPGs might make the player grind singularly for the purpose of defeating one specific challenge, Chrono Trigger does not. The Cyrus/Frog quest will yield Moon armor (+10 magic defense), the Rainbow Shell will yield the Prism Helms (+9) and the Ozzie quest yields the Flea Vest (+12). The multiplicity of methods to beating Son of Sun ensures that players will be able to get the Sun Stone without having to grind in the Black Omen. On the other hand, clever and resourceful players will be able to beat him really early, which is an incredibly satisfying feeling.
(2) Batteries Not Included
The next step is to charge the Sunstone up, and deal with a bunch of time-hopping puzzles. Even if the player doesn�t remember the NPC in Zeal talking about how �it would take aeons� for the rock to get its glow back, someone in the party will mention charging it up again. It�s not hard to put together that this means taking it back as far as possible into the past--i.e. 65,000,000--and letting it warm up. The puzzle of the quest is finding out who stole the stone, and how to get it back from them.
Even assuming that the player is able to spot the glowing house, tucked away in Porre, immediately, the puzzle takes some thinking. This guy obviously has the stone, and his kids all say he�s a jerk who would never hand it back over, so what do you do? There�s not even so much as a small hint as to what to do, but I think that Squaresoft deserves some kudos for making players put on their thinking caps here. There�s only ever been one option for the players: travel through time.
As most of us know by now, there's a Matron in 600 who is the key, located in the same building 400 years earlier. But the puzzle has one last twist in store: if you charge her for the Jerky, you�re still out of luck! That�s a big task for some newbie RPG intuition. This is probably the one case in which the designers stood their ground and simply said �let them figure it out.� It�s the only case in the game where this is really true.
(3) Profit
The Sun Stone quest continues to be interesting, from a design perspective, in the way it implements quest rewards. Lucca�s best weapon and some mediocre eyewear are poor rewards for all the effort that went into figuring out this quest. The real reward--and the moment where the player will be impressed--is in the fact that the Sun Stone is necessary to activate all the rewards from the next quest. Again, this is somewhat atypical for a JRPG: some other games have interconnected, quasi-non-linear quests, but usually one quest results in access to another quest, whereas in this case one quest results in (exceptionally high quality) bonus spoils from another.
Quest D: The Rainbow Shell
Stat of the Quest:There are more than 50 types of non-boss enemies if you�re counting sprites (although it does depend on how you count combinations and uses as boss components). About 12% of those sprites are used only once, while the rest get recolored at least one time. Part of the way that Squaresoft gets around so much recoloring is that most of the recolors happen only in the same time period. Only 21% of recolors happen across more than one time period. The effect is that the recolors seem like different species in a genus in a single time, or different levels of hierarchy among an order of monster in an era.
The quest for the Rainbow Shell is another example of some time-hopping exploration, although it�s much simpler than the Sun Stone quest. Talking to Toma in 600 AD will lead the player to 1000 AD, where he�ll identify Giant�s Claw. It�s pretty simple, but it does have the additional benefit of introducing the continent of Choras, which will lead to the Cyrus quest--or will be picked up after the Cyrus quest depending on the order the player chooses. Overall the designers did a pretty good job of putting the Comedy quests close enough to one another that it�s no struggle to find most of them. It could be argued that artistry in non-linear design results from making all of the non-linear quests (or the cues to find them) overlap to a degree that the player will always have the beginning of a new quest in front of them when they finish the one they�re on. Some of the need for this artistry is obviated by Balthasar�s directions on how to find quests, but because some quests take place in new locations, the overlap is a good design decision.
Giant�s Claw, or the sunken Tyrano Lair is really the only �vanilla� dungeon in the second part of Chrono Trigger. There are no real puzzles, there aren�t many enemies, and there�s only one boss. The monsters within are mostly powered-up versions of enemies seen at the original Tyrano Lair. (The Lizardactyl gains some elemental resistance, a change from its ancestor.) What�s more, there are only 26 enemies to fight at all! The best feature of the dungeon is its boss, the Rust Tyrano.
With more HP than any boss except Lavos, the Rust Tyrano is really a kind of joyride. It does hit hard with its countdown/fire breath attack--although if you�ve bested Son of Sun it shouldn�t hurt--but if that attack doesn�t kill the party, they will have plenty of time to heal and continue attacking. It can be kind of satisfying to just pound the Tyrano with triple techs over and over again. It doesn�t change phases or activate a triggered vulnerability; it doesn�t counterattack. The Tyrano just sort of sits there, occasionally blasting the party for a large amount of damage. This damage does go up each round, although not by much. Either the party dies, or they wail on a giant dinosaur with spectacularly animated attacks for 25,000 points worth of damage. Videogames are supposed to be about fun, after all, aren�t they?
(2)
The Comedy�s ongoing theme of actually changing history continues in part two of the Rainbow Shell quest; this time it�s Marle�s father who has been affected. (I�m not sure why the selling of a national treasure counts as treason for a monarch, but hey.) The battles in Guardia�s basement are all pretty easy; the point is not to create another dungeon but to create an appropriate build-up for the battle with Yakra in the courtroom. Yakra XIII is no slouch either; whereas the Rust Tyrano was a boss easily handled, Yakra will use confuse debuffs and lots of wipeout attacks. He�s got less HP than the Rust Tyrano, but he�s probably the most dangerous boss outside the Black Omen. In fact, he�s a great spot check for the Black Omen bosses, having similar power and debuff techniques.
This quest also marks Melchior�s contribution to the sages� effort: he makes several of the best items in the game for the party. What�s interesting about this--and frankly, just plain nice--is that Melchior doesn�t send you on another quest. Too often NPCs who offer to �help� the player/party in an RPG are complete mercenaries about it; they�ll help your combat at cost. Melchior doesn�t do this, choosing instead to just help the party. This is thematically appropriate, because a comedy of intervention wouldn�t make sense if the intervening force (the Gurus) were extracting some kind of payment. Melchior will create the best armor/helm, the best weapon in the game, and one of the best accessories. The Prism Helms alone, if acquired, make the endgame content and bosses much, much easier.
Quest E: The Geno Dome
Stat of the Quest:There are a lot of three-piece boss battles in the game, but there are only two bosses with more parts than that. Interestingly, both those boss battles occur in factories in the future. The R-Series Battle is six enemies in the Factory Ruins, and the Mother Brain is four enemies in the Geno Dome manufacturing center. (Let�s hear it for mass production!) As a function of having so many parts, each part of these bosses have conspicuously low HP for the level at which they take place.
The Geno Dome is the third largest dungeon in the game and the largest of the optional quests not counting the Black Omen (there are a lot of reasons to ignore the Omen, statistically, but we�ll get to them soon). This dungeon also highlights the one real problem with the back-end of Chrono Trigger�s design, in addition to having a few other quirks. Despite being the largest optional quest outside the Omen, it offers the fewest pieces of gear. Also, despite being made up of some 53 higher-HP enemies, a single, full clear of the Geno Dome will still offer less total experience than a single, full clear of the Ocean Palace. The problem is that if players have avoided a lot of combat in the first half of the game, it�s going to be kind of tough to make it back up in the second half of the game. It�s not really possible to farm Fiona�s quest or the Black Omen, because the former has a limited number of encounters and the latter is guarded by a noob-slaying boss. Ozzie�s fort has no standard enemies, nor does the Sun Palace. The Geno Dome, once beaten, cannot be re-entered; so it may catch new players unaware of their need to farm EXP.
So, the Geno Dome could be a little more rewarding, in a single pass, for players who aren�t using Robo in their main party. (For Robo it�s a bonanza.) There�s a large, EXP-rich sequence of battles on a conveyor belt to begin the dungeon. The dungeon could have done with another one of those, or even a boss fight that involved this kind of sequence. Conveyor belts in the Factory were the way the player originally learned about the sequence of battles, and it�s really a shame that the designers didn�t decide to go with a more spectacular pinnacle to a design idea that worked fairly well throughout the game.
The Geno Dome also features a couple of puzzles that work well with the �enemies on screen� design that Chrono Trigger has used so well to this point.
The puzzle and map layout aren�t clever enough to warrant special attention except where they perform one neat trick. While Robo is charged, he must run past a patrolling Debuggest, and then must do the same again while the Proto drone is following him back to the Pyozo doll. At either time, contact with the Debuggest will result in a battle, and consequently having to restart that step of the puzzle. It�s kind of a shame that this wasn�t a more challenging puzzle; the player can simply kill the Debuggest on an earlier pass without any further difficulty. Having to evade monsters is a skill that many players will have developed over time, and it really could have been used more deeply, since this quest is close to the end of the game.
Quest F: Cyrus' Tomb (Northern Ruins)
Stat of the Quest: Price check! MP are cheap in Chrono Trigger--very cheap in fact; it�s a driving reason why many experienced JRPG players will think the game too easy. There�s basically never a time the player is out of MP with no way to fix that problem. Ethers, the item that supplies MP, can be purchased for not much money, and can be purchased almost anywhere. A regular Ether costs 800--or about 80 gold per point of MP restored. The Full Ether and Hyperether both offer significantly more MP (60, 99) but at a cost of about 100 gold per MP restored. Interestingly, the Mid Ether is a better deal than either of these. For 2000 gold, it offers 30 MP, or a rate of about 66 gold per MP. Whether this is a math error on the designers part or not, Mid Ethers are the bread-and-butter of recovering MP away from a savepoint.
The interesting (or annoying, depending on your perspective) thing about Cyrus' Tomb is that it inverts the normal course of Chrono Trigger dungeon gameplay. Most of the time, players will either be forced to fight an enemy that is in their path, or able to sneak around it. In the Tomb, players have to actually run around seeking out fights, to make sure that the area is clear for the carpenters who will come in to fix it. There are a couple of other structural oddities. For one thing, many of the enemies are vulnerable only to magic damage, which is not too abnormal, but the Sentry enemy will frequently counterattack with a wipeout attack for the party's MP. The other strange idea built into the dungeon is that the party has to make frequent trips out of it to hire the carpenters who repair the path to continue onward. These trips out do make the loss of MP a little less onerous, as a quick use of a Shelter on the world map will bring it all back. Ultimately, though, the Tomb puzzle is as simple as the rest of the game�s puzzles are.
Refreshingly, there�s no boss, despite the fact that the player is able to get two great pieces of armor (Moon Armor, Nova Armor), as well as final weapons for Frog and Marle. The other weapon on location is another Katana for Crono. Why does Crono have so many Katanas in the second half of the game? The Swallow is better than almost all of them because of its speed perk, and then the Rainbow outpaces everything else in the game, damage-wise. No amount of data seems to be able to answer this.
Next - The End of the Comedy, plus CT's Strengths and Weakenesses