Roadrunner Twice

[Poll #1105332]

Oh, so Parish's recent Chrono Trigger retrospective inspired me to get a NewGame+ going on my emulator, just for old times' sake. And there were two interesting understandings I came to in the process:

1. Yes, it is still an absolutely brilliant game.
2. While I can still appreciate its brilliance on a playthrough, and I may be more qualified now to explain why it's brilliant, I can't really enjoy it that much anymore.

Now, mostly that's because I've nearly memorized the thing. It's common knowledge that any favorite story has a "good parts" version that plays in one's head, and which is refined and perfected by further re-reads/re-watchings/re-playthroughs. But the process of feeding that "good parts" version will eventually suck a story dry, to the point where one can't really add any more parts that are good. At which point one will instead start noticing bad parts that one found easier to skip over when it was still fresh.

If you ever notice that you've done that to a given story, I humbly suggest that you go ahead and put down the object itself and just give the now-perfect "good parts" version a quick skim. It'll be more enjoyable, it'll be more inspiring, and it won't take nearly as much time, of which you can spend the surplus on something new.

On the other hand, it was definitely pretty fun to cruise through the Black Omen and stomp Lavos by keeping Frog at 250 HP and repeatedly using the secret Grand Dream triple tech.* Never done that before.

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* I'm more appreciative now of the fact that the single hardest-hitting technique requires the crappiest party you can put together.

TANGENT

(Can you tell I'm in a typish mood tonight? Right. So let's talk more about Chrono Trigger.)

You remember the Fiona's Villa subplot from the end of the game? On my first playthrough, after I had revived Robo and done the conversation in the woods, I actually failed on the trip back in time to Lucca's house.

Lucca stepped out of the Gate into her childhood bedroom, and instead of carefully scanning the safe, event-flag-free areas of the house for helpful notes, she tripped straight out onto the balcony. So she was already at a disadvantage when she saw her mom's skirt get caught in the mechanism, and the headlong dash down the stairs didn't do much to enlighten her about how to stop the goddamned thing. So she button-mashed. And she failed. And I swear that scratchy digitized scream left abrasions on my 13-year-old soul.

And you know, I thought that that was the only way it could have gone -- I figured the entry panel was a blind, and wouldn't accept any real password. Damn, I thought. That's one hell of a punishment for trying to do the right thing and fix this forest up.

--

When the camera wakes back up, Lucca is slumped over on her old bed, having cried a salty splotch into her long-since worn-out Star Wars sheets. She's safe from discovery; the whole family's at the hospital. And when she stands up and steps back through the suspiciously-colored Gate, she's suddenly a little darker to us, a little crazier.

Used to be, the three kids from 1000 stood apart from everyone else they recruited. Robo, Frog and Janus do what they do because of grudges and damage and hatred and nowhere else to go; Ayla has testosterone poisoning or something and simply can't back down. But our three Best Friends Forever were supposed to be doing this because it was the right thing to do, and they were the ones in the right place at the right time with the right resources. That's broken now. Lucca has her own reasons.

Did she really get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fix things -- going against all the known rules of time travel, even** -- and blow it? Was it all in her head, the sort of miniature breakdown that's bound to happen once anyone with a certain amount of regret is set loose in the timestream? Who knows. There's no proof either way, and Robo keeps his best friend's secrets -- even from her best friends.

--

In every playthrough since, I've saved Lara; it's a compulsive sort of thing, and to be truthful, I don't really hanker to hear that glitchy scream again. But the Lucca who inhabits my "good parts" version of the game is still suffering the consequences of that failure. You don't just suddenly become less dark and crazy.

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** Seriously. Gates are concurrently-mobile; if you want true point-to-point transit, you need to burn a Chrono Trigger, and there's only one of those.