Chrono Cross/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Okay, as far as I can tell from in-game content and external sources, the game ends with the Time Devourer having never existed, as the Chrono Cross undoes the Fusion Dance that created it, and it exists outside the normal flow of time. This eliminates the possibility of Serge being absorbed by it, and thus the potential for his nullifying the death of Lavos. So... how does El Nido still exist, as it only comes into existence due to actions by the Time Devourer?
    • Good question. Maybe it doesn't? Maybe the scenes in Other Schala Kid in the modern day are the rewrite of time? Of course, if the Time Devourer never existed, then nobody would have stopped it, and there we have the old Grandfather's Paradox. Let's just say the Doctor did it.
      • But we briefly see Serge in what appears to be El Nido at the end of the game. And the Grandfather Paradox doesn't really apply, here. We're dealing with travel between timelines, not up and down a single timeline. We're dealing with what happens after the Time Devourer was stopped from the perspective of the timelines that are aware of it...but since, depending on how you view it, it exists either at every point in time simultaneously, or no point in time at all, its defeat means not just the cessation of its existence, but the nullification of it having ever existed -- its pocket dimension exists outside the flow of time, so there's only a constant "now" in which it no longer exists.
      • El Nido's existence was due to the Time Crash, which occurred because of FutureTech experiments in a world where Lavos was defeated on a Lavos fragment. While unlikely to be stable, such a world has a non-zero chance of occurring as long as the Balthasar-Future thought the Time Devourer could exist.
    • Chrono compendium has whole articles on this. Basic consensus is that time traveling beings have time travelers immunity (i.e. once a being time travels, they are protected from the effects of future time travel). Which means once the future people stepped into the past, their existence IN the past becomes protected under TTI. So even if the future they come from no longer exists, they will still appear in the past out of nowhere. A related theory says that the versions of them in the future will be sent to the darkness beyond time at the same time the original time traveled. Chrono compendium can explain it better than me :P
      • Isn't that directly contradicted by Marle ceasing to exist early in Chrono Trigger thanks to time travel mucking up history and preventing her from being born in the first place?
      • That particular scenario was written very early in development by someone other than the guy who wrote the rest of the game. It's the only scene that contradicts it.
        • The Entity did that. Probably to make sure Crono would go save Leene.
    • El Nido was created by Chronopolis, not the Time Devourer. After the Time Crash, where it was sent back in time, they knew they had to take steps to avoid causing a paradox by changing history in such a way that they would prevent themselves from ever existing in the future. So they hid Chronopolis in the Sea of Eden, created El Nido and dumped most of Chronopolis' population there (where they were forced to live without Chronopolis' technology, and became El Nido's "natives"), and created the Pyramids of Fate to ensure that Chronopolis would retain control over El Nido's inhabitants if it ever became necessary to use them to maintain history. When Serge & Co eventually kill FATE and destroy Chronopolis, that removes the possibility of a paradox, so, in the future, Chronopolis is eventually built and causes the Time Crash as per the original, unaltered timeline.
  • How did Lynx take out Lucca? She's a DAMN powerful mage and, considering the context, was likely in a Mama Bear situation to boot.
    • During the FMV with Lynx and Harle in the orphanage, you never see Lucca, just her glasses on the floor. Harle or Lynx could've sucked her into a time portal. Or, knowing the Chrono series, a time portal could have just opened up spontaneously. Or someone from another place and time was able to open a portal to bring her to where they are...I think that scene was left as ambiguous as possible. Now if only those glasses were easier to notice (I never noticed them until it was pointed out to me).
    • Cutscene. Cutscene, cutscene, cutscene. Once you accept that a trio of cosmic superheroes were defeated by Dalton, simply by looking the other way at the wrong time, then, well, anybody not currently controlled by the player is fair game no matter how powerful they're supposed to be.
    • Lucca was horrible at using elements and tried to use them to fight off Lynx instead of her magic in a moment of idiocy. Seriously, she may have tried to use magic (the fire could have been from her trying to fight him off), but Lynx could easily take her out because he was FATE's super powered avatar. The real question is "Why CAN Serge defeat Lynx?"
      • You question that when cast from Chrono Trigger beat Lavos, who is still stated to be stronger than any of the bosses in this game.
  • Dalton is so lame he defeated himself. He was a comic relief villain. Now he's the destroyer of an entire kingdom? Good lord, Kato is like a bad fanfic author that got handed the keys to the franchise.
    • Future Badass?
    • Would have worked better if we saw him do it. Fan theory holds he took over Porre and all, but that's just fan theory...
      • Fan theory no more. The DS remake has him basically tell the heroes that he's going to empower Porre to conquer Guardia, before one last surprisingly competent boss fight. I think it's the least subtle jossing I've ever seen.
        • Yes, but that doesn't mean he actually managed it. In fact, he can't have, because if Guardia was conquered that would be stupid.
        • Some fan thinking something is stupid has been an argument against said thing happening since when exactly?
  • Would Serge be cheating on Leena (H) if he and Leena (A) acted on potential UST?
    • Yes. Unless they shared a mind, they have their own individual thoughts and, as such, are technically separate people.
      • They're just different versions of the same person, so it's not cheating.
    • I'd say this is a circumstance where the old standby "It's cheating if his girlfriend thinks it is" would apply best.
    • It doesn't really matter, considering the game goes to extreme lengths to suggest Serge and Kid shack up, whilst completely forgetting Leena even exists. The only time she is mentioned as having dated Serge is in a bonus ending and Kid still appears to witness this before taking off on her own as if being forced to move on.
  • Why's it called the Darkness Beyond Time when it's actually a well-lit Amazing Technicolor Battlefield?
    • I believe that was something the U.S. localization got a little creative with - wasn't it the Tesseract in the Japanese script?
    • Yes, it was. But it is a figurative darkness, not a literal one. It's where a destroyed timeline is "snuffed out", so to say.
      • What American knows what a tesseract is? Well, besides everyone who bothers to Google.
        • Someone who has seen Salvador Dali­'s art work called "Crucifixion" or enjoying thinking about time travel enough to stumble across it in a book called "Hyperspace".
          • Or read A Wrinkle in Time. In any case, Darkness Beyond Time fits better, 'specially since this is a tesseract.
          • Beyond that, what does nationality have to do with knowing or not knowing about an analogous representation of a fourth dimensional object?
  • Actually goes hand-in-hand with the entry about the Abyss Beyond Time above this one. If the Time Devourer cannot be killed by normal means because it can regenerate itself from alternative timelines where it didn't die, then the existence of an Abyss Beyond Time doesn't make sense, as the Time Devourer implies that timelines can branch. That, however, means that people from an "erased" time branch would just live on in a parallel time line, one that wasn't altered, rather than going to said Abyss. Alternative time lines means no Abyss Beyond Time, and an Abyss Beyond Time means no alternative time lines. So, we have two models of time that contradict each other.
    • Timelines can branch, but not because of time travel. Home/Another Worlds split because of Schala's actions (i.e. saving Serge via Kid) from outside of time, rather than from within that timeline. The Abyss Beyond Time is where things negated by paradox go. In CT, the heroes see the bad future and so decide to kill Lavos, which negates the bad future, which means that the heroes never have a reason to kill Lavos, which means Lavos causes the bad future...Paradox. Lavos (and by extension the Lavos/Schala fusion, the Time Devourer) is both "killed by CT cast" and "destroys the world in 1999" simultaneously because of the paradox, which is why it exists in the Abyss Beyond Time. Destroying the Time Devourer from within the Abyss Beyond Time removes the paradox by killing him outside of time, in effect, forcing the "killed by CT cast" side of the paradox to be the "real" outcome. (Of course, simply killing the Time Devourer destroys both Lavos and Schala, which is why you have to go through the Chrono Cross craziness to seperate the two so you can kill Lavos but save Schala.) This means that Lavos is always killed and the good future always results... but the CT crew remember the bad future anyway because of Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. On the flip side, if Serge & Co had pulled Lavos out of the Abyss Beyond Time instead of killing it there, they would have caused the "Lavos destroys the world" half of the paradox to be "real". This is basically what they did to Schala.

      Think of like this: if something is caught in a paradox, it is pulled into the Abyss Beyond Time. If it's destroyed there, then the paradox is resolved by using the version of the timeline where the thing doesn't exist. If it manages to escape from the Abyss Beyond Time without being destroyed, then the paradox is resolved by using the version of the timeline where the thing does exist. The final battle of Chrono Cross destroys Lavos in the Abyss Beyond Time and simultaneously rescues Schala from the Abyss Beyond Time, creating a single paradox-free timeline where Lavos is destroyed and Schala survives. Cue Belthasar announcing "Just As Planned!".


  • This bit of Fridge Logic just hit me while replaying the game the other day: If hydras are extinct in Another World, then how the hell did Lynx get hydra venom to poison his blade with in the first place?!
    • The same place Norris got his Hydra Humour. Wasn't it said that hydras may still exist on the mainland, just not in El Nido?
    • Hydras became extinct because people were hunting them for parts. The Hydras may be gone but parts of them are likely still around as people's possession, waiting for a use.
  • Why exactly are 'Azala's people' said to have evolved closer to the Earth? Last time I checked, THEY were the ones building castles the size of a mountain and robotic dinosaurs. If anything, they were distancing themselves from nature faster and more persistently than the humans ever did!
    • It's said that one key reason why humans evolved further from the Earth was Lavos's influence. Lavos didn't show up in our timeline until moments after the Reptites were defeated. The best conclusion is that pre-Lavos humans were pretty decent about the whole thing and post-Lavos humans did all that Zeal stuff, and the Reptites didn't go nearly as technologically crazy over time...wait. I just thought of something. It kinda looked like Azala sent Lavos crashing to the earth. Maybe in our timeline, Lavos was affecting the Reptites until the humans beat them, and then moved on to them?
      • Considering that Azala accurately predicted both the Ice Age and (possibly) the Day of Lavos, it seems very unlikely she would deliberately cause Lavos to fall. Besides, the DS adaption changes her dialogue to have her cursing the red star's arrival rather than invoking it.
    • If you look at things, Lavos is directly responsible for the existence of humanity. Had the Ice Age not wiped out the Reptites, humans would probably have been subjugated or driven to extinction. The reason the Reptites are viewed as closer to earth is because they don't have a giant space tick to thank for their continual existence.
      • To add to that, in Trigger, you can find evidence that Lavos engineered humans to be strong so it could destroy them and become stronger itself. Humans didn't evolve naturally, they had a monster standing behind them pulling the strings, and so now they've overrun the world and become the dominant species.
  • How on Earth could Lucca's house burn down?? What did Taban put in Lucca's armor in the previous game that he couldn't line the house with?
    • Something very heavy and/or existing in small enough quantities that an entire building would be prohibitively expensive.
  • What's the deal with the ghost workers in Chronopolis? Some of them seem to be some sort of imprint of the original staff in the past/future/whatever, preparing for the experiment that caused the Time Crash, while others clearly exist in the present, as they refer to the split timelines, the terraforming of El Nido, etc.
  • I thought the Big Bad was Lynx and then FATE, but apparently they were keeping the Dragon God from reforming. So, it's the Dragon God, right? No, they were going off instinct to eliminate the bits of Lavos present in all the humans. So that means Time Devourer/Lavos is the villain? It's just distorted and took advantage of Schala's Heroic BSOD and used that to set up this whole situation with dimensions and dragons and Dinopolis and whatever? What I'm getting at is, does this mean that Lavos is still the Big Bad? I feel I can enjoy the story more if I can identify just who the villain is.
    • The Dragon God is the villian the game builds up the most, and it is working under the Time Devourer's control (one of its phases being renamed the Time Devourer in the North American version for some reason). You spend the first part of the game fighting FATE so you can reform the Dragon God and defeat it so you have a chance at destroying the Time Devourer. So, in the end, it is, in fact, Lavos who is behind everything. (I don't blame you for missing that, it's explained in one of the info dumps near the end.)
  • Here's one that confuses me: the presence of Lynx (and Harle for that matter) in Home World's Dead Sea. If I understand the timeline correctly, Serge is healed by the Flame, becomes the Arbiter, and FATE loses control. She then corrupts Wazuki and presumably turns him into Lynx (based off the panther demon Schala/the Time Devourer sent), and he then tries to drown Serge, believing that killing the Arbiter would reset the Flame back to her control. Then, Schala sends Kid to save Serge from the drowning and this act splits the world, thus creating two Kids and two Lynxes. (Harle must have been created before this by the Dragon Gods so as to bring down FATE.)

    Okay, all well and good so far, but then...he travels to the Dead Sea to find the Flame? Why? (And we know he did--when you learn what happened to Home World's Viper and the Acacia Dragoons, it's revealed they all went to the Dead Sea with Lynx to find the Flame.) Since he failed to kill Serge in Home World, the Flame would still be linked to him, so there'd be no point in Lynx going after it. Did he think he succeeded in killing Serge and didn't know Kid had saved him? Or...was he just trying to return home to FATE to tell her what had happened and start planning again (though why would he need to, when he's her avatar and could also speak to her through the Records?), used the dragoons and the general's desire for the Flame as an incentive to get them to come along (either to eliminate them and throw El Nido into chaos or to make them serve FATE), and then accidentally got caught in the Time Crash?

    For that matter, where did the Time Crash come from? Presumably, it was originally the Sea of Eden (in fact, when Serge talks to Marge about the night of the storm, she says the Dead Sea used to be called that), which explains how Wazuki and Miguel were able to bring Serge to Chronopolis and he touched the Flame. But then, when/how did it change into the Dead Sea? Was it because of the storm (which was sent by Schala too, wasn't it?)? Did breaking FATE's link with the Flame, and therefore Lavos/the Time Devourer, cause the Crash? Or did it happen in the future, after Wazuki and Miguel's visit? In which case, wouldn't FATE have warned Lynx not to come? Or did the Crash happen right as Lynx and the dragoons were arriving?
    • The night of the storm was the day Serge was attacked by the panther demon. Serge was taken to the Frozen Flame and healed, but FATE came back online, trapped Miguel, and got its hooks in Wazuki. Four years later, when Lynx attempted to drown Serge and Schala interfered, the timeline split; in Another World, Lynx was successful and Chronopolis remained. In Home World, however, Schala saved Serge, and the Bad Future attempted to reassert itself over Chronopolis, resulting in the Time Crash.
      • All right, that sensibly explains the Time Crash. But that still doesn't explain why Home World's Lynx went to the Dead Sea with the dragoons, when he would have known Serge didn't drown and thus was still locked onto the Flame. I can only see three options: he didn't know Serge wasn't dead; the Time Crash happened right as he was going to FATE to report; or he planned to have the dragoons all get killed in the Dead Sea, thus allowing El Nido to fall to Porre, only he got caught by accident too. I think the third option is most likely, and even based a WMG on it, but I don't know if it logically holds up.
  • On a related note...in Another World, after he succeeded in drowning Serge but the other version of him showed up, Lynx/FATE decided to try subterfuge, luring Serge in so he could switch bodies with him. Presumably, before the world split and the Time Crash happened, there was nothing barring people from entering the Sea of Eden beyond FATE/Chronopolis' defenses, and it was only after the split that the Dragon Gods set up their gambit with the relics to enable only Serge to make it through as the Arbiter so he could eliminate FATE for them. But how did that world's Lynx know not to try what his counterpart did? Was it a moot point, since the Time Crash only created the Dead Sea in one dimension and not the other? (And why did that happen--was that time's way of having both the version where Chronopolis was okay and the version where it wasn't exist to avoid the paradox?) Why did he not need the relics to get to the Sea of Eden while Serge did--because he was now the Arbiter? Did FATE warn him not to go to the Dead Sea until he was Serge? But how would she know what happened in Home World? I was under the impression the two worlds' FAT Es did not have any connection to each other or any ability to share what happened in their worlds. And until Serge crossed over through the distortion and gained the Astral Amulet, there was no way to cross over between the worlds. I'm pretty sure Lynx never stole it from Kid so as to cross over (surely she would have mentioned him stealing it, her stealing it back, or him giving it back (so that she could bring Serge to him) when Serge first asked about the amulet or was given it). And it must have been Schala who sent the dream, to warn him of the future, and not FATE, just as it was Kid who called him over (so he could help her get the Flame and get revenge on Lynx). So...did FATE have a connection with her counterpart, so as to warn Lynx to try a different plan in Another World? Or could she read everything her counterpart knew from Serge's memories when he touched a Record there? Otherwise, I am very puzzled as to why that world's version of him didn't do what Home's did, and how he even knew there was another world in which Serge survived and could be manipulated...
  • What the flying duckies is wrong with those fairies? We save their lives and they start ranting that all humans are evil? Okay the dwarves wouldn't have started the genocide of the fairies if the humans hadn't poisoned the marshes. Fair enough. But the humans had no way of knowing the dwarves would do that, and it's not like they told the dwarves to go kill the fairies. The dwarves crossed the ocean to get to Water Dragon Isle, surely they could've reached a different location. The fact that they got to Water Dragon Isle was nothing more than bad luck. Humans may have indirectly harmed the fairies, but the dwarves harmed them directly and your human party helped directly. And with all their tanks and mining, it's not like the dwarves were Planeteers themselves. What gives?
    • It's a serious case of Moral Dissonance; the dwarves are supposed to be in the right to seek out a new land since 'those evil humans' destroyed Hydra Marshes, but when you consider that they effectively committed genocide, you lose a lot of sympathy for the dwarves. The fairies see humans as responsible for this, but the logic of their beliefs is hazy at best.
  • What did Lynx hope to accomplish by drowning Serge? Doesn't he need Serge alive to access the Frozen Flame (either directly or via body swap)?
    • When did he try to drown him? If it was during the night of the storm, then that was before Serge was important to him.
      • It was four years after the storm. Serge had become the Arbiter of the Frozen Flame by touching it when FATE's power was out, and the Prometheus Lock kept FATE out of the Flame's containment. Presumably, Lynx was trying to shut down the lock, but his attempt failed.
  • Where the hell is the game taking place? It's supposed to be set in the same world as Chrono Trigger, but you explored every inch of the globe in that game and there's no signs of any of the places you see in this one.
    • El Nido came into existence because of the events of Trigger. Chronopolis is built in the new good (Lavos-free) future, gets sent back 10,000 years in the Time Crash, FATE builds El Nido as a new home for the people from Chronopolis, after wiping their memories and using the Records of Fate to keep them from interacting too much with the rest of the world (which might prevent FATE from being built in the future).
    • And where did the nation of Porre come from?
      • You did play Chrono Trigger, right? It's that town on the landmass to the south of Guardia. I think it can be safely assumed that there's a lot of Space Compression going on and the locations are a lot bigger than they appear in-game, otherwise the world would be populated by only a few dozen people.
  • Robo tells you to settle the conflict between FATE and the dragons, but why does he think you should do that when it doesn't seem like there's any reasoning with either of them?
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