One common lament I often hear wailing from the insincere lips of our species, Homo Obliviosa, criticizes books, literature, television, and within five years, I guarantee those game-show infomercials that play on the pumps at gas stations, for being too predictable and not having a shred of originality that they didn’t pick up at a yard sale somewhere. Still, if we’ve learned anything from seven Saw films, twelve Friday the 13th movies, The Land Before Time 14, the entire James Bond series, and 27 years of watching Debbie gyrating her aging pelvis across Texas until she files her bones into a fine powder, we’ve learned that Americans have a serious problem when it comes to sequels. And sequels don’t even do it for us anymore; our problem has spread like a raging yeast infection to cover things like adaptations, novelizations, novelizations of adaptations, and fan fiction. Personally, I’ve never finished a story and thought, “I need to fix this so Hermione marries Malfoy and Hagrid ends up with Dumbledore!” or felt that I couldn’t really judge Star Wars until I read about how some 35-year-old McDonald’s assistant shift manager would have destroyed the Sith, brought balance to the Force, and made passionate love to Queen Amidala. But a fan-made adaptation has come along once or twice (no wait…twice. Exactly twice) that makes me take note, and so with a heavy heart, I introduce you to Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes.

 

A team of devoted fans produced Crimson Echoes after compiling everything they knew about Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, hacking the SNES rom for six years, and presumably smoking so much weed that they felt implying a romance between Frog and Ayla wouldn’t come across as weird and out-of-character as Gollum shacking up with Galadriel. The story weaves together several plots, including a war between Porre and Guardia, Magus’ search for Schala, Dalton’s quest to find new and more creative ways of being a major douche while demonstrating all the power of crystal therapy after a viking raid, and some weird jazz about alternate timelines. King Zeal emerges from the shadows as the primary antagonist, who aims to resurrect the kingdom after his ex-wife gained custody of it and ran it into the ground (literally) in the first game.

 

Chrono Trigger rocks, and I can understand wanting more of it, but a game with a setting that spans “all of history” leaves about as much room for more as a fat guy with a lifetime pass to Old Country Buffet. Writing a sequel to a time-travel game has to carefully weave in the events of the previous game–a la Back to the Future Part II–or it looks like the heroes spent the whole quest to fight the god of hedgehogs oblivious to all the other action going on. “Fuck you, fans of the first game,” it says. “You should have been paying attention!” For better or worse, though, it works, as the developers understand the literary mechanics of time travel about as well as a teenage boy with Asperger’s Syndrome understands a speed-dating event. “Marty!” I hear doc Brown’s voice saying, “You’re not thinking fourth-dimensionally!” They get points for trying new ideas, but their idea of extra timelines gives the impression that time flows normally, centered around Crono, and these other timelines are just tacked on in weird succession, like a video editor with ADHD (God, I’m being just brutal to people with disabilities in this paragraph.) Time Travel feels more geographical than fourth dimensional, as if 65,000,000 B.C. lies just past the Wisconsin border.

 

I’ve played through Chrono Trigger probably fifty times in my life and seen the Back to the Future trilogy probably into the triple digits. The thing that gets me stuck in an ever-repeating loop of irony is this sense of how time stacks on itself, about how, like a good party, billions of years worth of events can happen in one place (and how as the guy who shows up the next morning to pick up his drunk friends, I seem to miss all the exciting parts.) Crimson Echoes doesn’t give me the feeling of the vastness of time, or how it connects with each other. Whereas Lavos was eternal, living his life content to move down time like a one-way street, meeting up with our heroes whenever they felt like visiting him, King Zeal pops up in random time-periods as Crono et al. do the same, in a cosmic game of whack-a-mole. Furthermore, the three gurus somehow watching all the changes Crono makes from some point in the distant future makes about as much sense as learning about the life span development of a chicken by studying an omelette mcmuffin. Near the end of the game, the gurus dish out a list of side quests, but while in the original game, these added to the enormity of time and centered on the seven playable characters, the Crimson Echoes sidequests have little to do with anyone or any-when. Most of them are damn near impossible to even find without help, and the ones I did felt so fetch-questy that the only way they’d develop character is if you happened to be a labrador retriever.

 

In adding to my swelling list of grievances, the designers cranked up the difficulty setting like crazy. For whatever reason, the general video game fan community interprets the quality of a game as directly proportional to how hard it is. God knows if you want to find a version of Castlevania that’s been hacked to remove life limits, you’ll inevitably stare down lists of hacks for people who thought the original NES game felt too simple, then another list of hacks for people who thought the first list of hacks didn’t successfully raise their blood pressure enough to burst from their veins like an anime blood-geyser. But when it comes to simple ideas to maintain challenge without tedious repetition of hours worth of gameplay, game hackers dry up like the Sahara desert as described by Henry David Thoreau and read by Al Gore. But even if challenge did implicitly make a game better, how exactly does one make an RPG harder? You can raise monster stats all you want, but the only thing a player can do in response is level grind which only challenges them to stay awake long enough to build up their stats. Most bosses don’t especially put a good fight, but rather wind up like a college drinking game, with the player slamming back as many potions and ethers as possible, hoping the other guy passes out first. For a while, I actually appreciated that the astronomically high enemy HP forced me to dig into my otherwise unused techniques, but by the end of the game, most enemies could absorb at least three of the four styles of magic (and Magus apparently has suffered a stroke in the intervening years, rendering him unable to cast anything but shadow magic), leaving me to tape down the A button and go scoop the cat box.

 

This isn’t to say, of course, that the developers simply chewed up the ROM and spit it back out into whatever arrangement the physics of projectile vomiting so decided. They added some interplay between Magus and Frog (who they renamed Glenn and completely abandoned his formal, pseudo-Middle-English style of speech), and the residual animosity actually approached something feeling organic. None of the characters are hidden, although Ayla doesn’t join until nearly the final dungeon. In another bold and senseless act of violence against the original game, the designers re-imagined the artwork, replacing Akira Toriyama’s  character portraits with new, updated ones supposedly reflecting the five-year time difference. Sorry, guys, but if you want to infringe on copyright, at least keep the stuff worth infringing upon.