Crimson Echoes

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"The Dream of Zeal is alive!" —Sargon, to Melchior and Belthasar

Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes is a Fan Sequel to Chrono Trigger, taking place before Chrono Cross. Through a series of fateful events, its formal release to the public in May 2009 after five years of development was thwarted when they reported Square Enix sent them a Cease and Desist letter.

Though the project was cancelled under fear of litigation, the incident led to massive Internet Backdraft in three forms, one consisting of fans of both the series and the project railing on Square Enix for shutting down the project, another consisting of skeptical fans thinking the whole thing is/was a publicity stunt for attention (in particular, noting inconsistencies with actual C&Ds sent by Squeenix and the plethora of non-C&D'd projects based on Squeenix properties), and a third consisting of copyright-anal fans and legal brains railing against the modders for using Square Enix's stuff in the project. It generated significant coverage in high-profile gaming blogs that led to the mod getting notice from Slashdot and Google News, though notably none of these sites ever reported confirming the legitimacy of the C&D or even getting word on the subject from Square.

Eventually, a months-old and seriously-buggy alpha was leaked in late May and spread virally online and in file-sharing, and then a comprehensive playthrough video of the entire 98% complete beta version of the game was uploaded in many 10-minute segments on YouTube. A copy of the 95% beta version (as confirmed by Flames Of Eternity developer "Giro") was leaked to filesharing sites and Reddit on January 17, 2011.

Recently, a different team has started an alternate project consisting in modifying Crimson Echoes, with a different story and events. The project is named Chrono Trigger: Flames of Eternity and has the tagline "The Rage of the Ages burns for Eternity..."

If a Trope already applies to Chrono Trigger proper, it probably shouldn't be duplicated here.

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This ROM hack interactive Fan Fiction provides examples of:

• Accidental Murder: Poor Schala.
• Action Girl: Ayla, again. This time with bigger, badder techs!
• And Now for Someone Completely Different
• Artifact of Doom: The Frozen Flame, obviously. Lots, and lots, and looooots of DOOM.
• Author Tract: KING ALPHARD ZEAL, BITCHES!!!
• Back from the Dead: Schala is revived at the very beginning. At the end, Magus catches King Zeal as he falls out of the Darkness Beyond Time after the Final Boss Battle and heals/revives him.
• Bad Future: Happens multiple times, as time travelers keep screwing with the timeline.
• Badass: Again, Glenn and Magus. King Zeal also counts, considering that, unlike the rest of his family, he's able to control Lavos.
• Badass Army: The Vanguard, started by the equally as Badass Frog Glenn.
• Badass Boast: "Death is nothing to the Reaper!"
• Badass Normal: Sometimes it seems like Agent 12 is getting more done than the player's party.
• Big Bad: Unlike its prequel and sequel, it's not Lavos, but rather King Zeal. Unlike the rest of his family, he's even able to control Lavos.
• Breather Episode: The party in prehistory, which comes after the restoration of the original timeline after its swapping with the Reptite one. However, another Wham! Episode follows...
• Butt Monkey: Dalton.
• But Thou Must!: Most of the time the player is offered a choice of what to do, the end result is the same regardless of what he picks. When asked to save Ayla or attack the Big Bad, the hero will actually refuse one of the choices and pick the other anyway.
  • Subverted in the Mystic-Porre conflict in the Middle Ages -- whichever of the three options Glenn chooses (support the Mystics, support the Porreans, or remain neutral) will have a direct and obvious affect on the game's future.
  • There's also a particular case in a side quest: you have a choice to refuse doing something, but soon after you'll be forced to do something else to achieve the same goal.
• Catch Phrase: If you watch the YouTube videos, whenever something shows up incomplete or erroneous, one of the developers will usually have a note pop up: "Uh... 2%!"
• Character Development: All the main characters, even freaking LAVOS, get this.
• Character Focus: Each playable character gets at least one chapter in the spotlight, during which they are the Hero You Can't Drop. Developer notes indicate that they didn't want anyone to be specifically considered the main character. (In pursuit of that, they even went so far as to avert Crono's Silent Protagonist habits.)
• Determinator: King Zeal. Also, Magus.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to its prequel, this game is MUCH darker. Partly the result of Grey and Gray Morality.
• Deader Than Dead: Anyone sent to the Darkness Beyond Time. Like Schala and Marle's father.
• Deadpan Snarker: In game, many characters, most notably Crono, Lucca, and Magus. In real life, most of the editing team, to the point where it seems like they're almost MST3King FW's playthrough of the beta.
• Designated Monkey: Marle.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose In Life: Kasmir's reason for helping Zeal in the Darkness Beyond Time.

Kasmir: I have no place in time anymore. This feels productive.

• Developer Room: The Crimson Echoes staff from the Chrono Compendium have their own special room, and make individual cameos throughout the game.
• The Dragon: Dalton, again. Later, Kasmir.
  • Dragon with an Agenda: Dalton.
• Fan Sequel: Takes place after Chrono Trigger, but before Chrono Cross.
• Foil: The Xamoltan, a trio of Reptite time-travelers from an alternate timeline, serve as foils to Crono and friends. Especially their desire to only go back in time to observe, study, chronicle, and learn, while Crono's party does so specifically to meddle and attempt to "improve" the future of the timeline.
• Flanderization: Possibly with Magus, whose only purpose in life and in breathing is to find Schala, and even when she's found he won't stop obsessing over her. Subverted with Ayla, as she actually developed a personality.
  • Some people may find Magus's obsession over Schala to have incestuousovertones.
• Foregone Conclusion: If you've played Chrono Cross, you may already be aware of a lot of the plot twists that will eventually come around, such as Guardia's fall or the existence of the Reptite Timeline. The fact that the game manages to bring these events about, and not come off as a rehash, is part of its appeal.
• Generation Xerox: Toma. In Chrono Trigger, there were only two identified Toma characters and they shared the same sprite. But in Crimson Echoes, there are more Tomas in other eras, and it seems evident that every adult Toma seen in any time period looks exactly the same.
• God Save Us From The King: For fuck's sake, Alphard!
  • Marle's Flame Trial shows her future as a terrible monarch obsessed with blaming Porre for her father's death and letting Guardia slip into ruin in the meanwhile. The game is deliberately vague as to whether this is an accurate prediction of Marle's future, or just a Mind Screw by the Frozen Flame.
    • But, in any case, it probably drove Marle to relinquish Guardia's throne without protesting much. She may have thought that, if it was really her future, she was still in time to change it and avoid even worse suffering to her people.
• Good Morning, Crono: What's a Chrono game without this Trope?
• Gray and Gray Morality: The second half of the game is drowning in it. There is a distinct vibe of "nobody is right here, even if we think we're trying to do the right thing". King Zeal calls the PCs on it shortly before the final battles in a long-winded Author Tract, and even the creators admit some of them would have sided with Zeal over Crono and the gang.
  • Aaaaand then there's Dalton...
• Heroic Mime: Averted, as (unlike in Chrono Trigger) the hero Crono does speak in this game. Quite a lot.
• Hot Mom / Action Mom: Ayla.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Once Toma comes to Chronopolis and goes all What Does This Button Do? on everything, most of the staff becomes nowhere to be seen, citing "sudden headaches".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The fate of the unauthorized alpha leak, which has been passed around various torrent sites and underground internet communities since news of the leak first broke. The creators of Crimson Echoes have come out heavily against it. Despite this, the game keeps leaking and getting press coverage with each leak... yet, oddly, no lawsuits from the supposedly protective Squeenix.
  • A modder, Giro, is attempting the Flames Of Eternity project, which is an attempt to remake Crimson Echoes with a different ending, no Multiple Endings, and without all the references to Naruto, Gurren Lagann and Bleach, added due to the bits of ZeaLitY's beliefs that they inspired, but replacing other things with references to Final Fantasy instead, and borrowing music from Final Fantasy and The Black Mages. Status updates can be found at http://metronomeproject.blogspot.com/.
  • For those uncomfortable with the changes made in Flames Of Eternity, there are numerous projects attempting to reconstruct the actual 98% beta, but they're all deep undercover and mired in Development Hell.
• Left for Dead: Marle, when she is captured by the Reptites. Her final moment is never shown. When Crono finds her skeletal remains over 1,000 years later he goes berserk, killing two (innocent!) Reptites in his grieving rage. He and his friends then go back and prevent it all from happening.
• Level Grinding: Kind of a necessity at the beginning, especially during the "Magus Chasing Dalton" arc, as the first boss is surprisingly tough if you don't. Luckily it's only a fifteen-second walk between the Beast Forest and a free HP/MP full restore and an item shop. It Gets Better quickly, though.
• Master of Illusion: Kasmir. Glenn has trouble taking him down because most of the times he's fought him it's been a fake.
• MacGuffin: The Dragon Tooth. The PCs are sent to track it down and steal it to power Chronopolis in place of the weaker Dreamstone and before that, the stolen Frozen Flame, but other than being a power source and "Reptite artifact" it never really does anything. It's even destroyed for a time, due to a temporal mishap, though this gets retconned off-screen shortly after; the developers admit when they wrote the script for its destruction they had forgotten the reason the PCs went after it in the first place was to find a new power source for Chronopolis, and Hand Waved Agent 12 tracking it down and saving it from destruction off-panel.
• Mind Screw: The Flame Trials. They are all deliberately vague, according to the developers, and it's left up to player interpretation as to whether they're accurate portrayals of the various characters' situations or merely illusions of their fears and worries conjured by the Frozen Flame to mess with their heads.
  • Ayla's Flame Trial averts this, as she's the only one in the party with enough clarity of heart/mind to see through the illusions.
• Mood Whiplash: The Fall of Guardia. Also, the Reptite Timeline flips the game's previously upbeat nature upside-down.
• Mr. Exposition: Belthasar and Mother Brain/FATE.
• My Name Is Not Durwood

Glenn: Don't call me that! My name is Glenn!

• The Nothing After Death: The Darkness Beyond Time. Even a Chrono Trigger cannot resurrect those sent there.

King Zeal: To the Darkness Beyond Time. Forever Zero, Eternally Null. Entire possibilities, subsumed into a temporal Netherworld.

• Parental Abandonment: Crono's father is killed in the Fanon backstory. Schala and Janus' father was taken by Belthasar, who also faked the death of the latter as he remembered it in order to prevent undesirable changes in the timeline.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: The first area of Huacan Factory with the Acids and Alkalines. Nerfed quite a bit in the 98% beta, but left intact in the alpha and subsequent rebuilds.
  • Modnar Forest, a side area near the end of the game populated with a unique element to the Chrono series... random encounters. The enemies there aren't too hard and they give on the order of 4000-6500 experience points per battle, a great way to level up for the final dungeon.
• People Jars: Magus, when captured by Dalton.
• Random Encounter: In Modnar Forest only.
  • If you pay attention, you'll notice they aren't really random but triggered by a timer - in fact, you can even stand still after one of these fights and you'll get into another one after a little while. Still, one of the many impressive feats of additional coding in the game.
• Ret-Gone: At one point, all of humanity is driven extinct by the emergence of a new parallel timeline.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: A consequence of Time Traveller Immunity.
• San Dimas Time: Hand Waved by stating that the stationary Time Gates travel forward through time at the speed of the normal passage of time. And if someone goes back in time to a year that the Gates don't "currently" exist in (even if they existed there when the characters were five years younger), Gates cannot be found. This has the effect of ensuring that events in all Gate-connected timelines are happening at a concurrent speed from and equal interval to one another, so that time actually elapses while time travelers are away for the same duration as other people wait for them. This form of San Dimas Time is only averted using a Time Egg (one was originally used to save Crono in Chrono Trigger). Lucca and Belthasar can make imperfect semi-stable Time Eggs, but only Gaspar can make perfectly stable ones.
• Schala Lives: Schala is saved early in the game, seeming to derail the events of Chrono Cross. But derailment is averted. She is later mortally wounded, and sent to the Darkness Beyond Time. In the ending, Magus sees her attached to an apparition of Lavos, but can't remain there long enough to save her. He then saves King Zeal so that he can learn the remaining Zealian arts that he never got to learn because of the (original!) Ocean Palace incident, ending with learning how to open a Gate so that he can go to th Darkness Beyond Time and save Schala. Once he does, he then meets a past version of the party from around the time Lavos was defeated, which then fights the Dream Devourer in his place before everyone is sent away and he wipes his own memory.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: There's controversy as to whether or not the cease-and-desist was a publicity stunt.
• Shout-Out: Early in the game, a woman in Medina Square sings the opening lyrics from "And Forever", the ending music of the anime The Big O. She later belts out (in Japanese) "Kaze wa Mirari ni Fuku", the ending theme to Trigun.
  • In his last moments, Dalton says one of Grimmjow's greatest lines.
  • The chapters regarding the Reptite Timeline, where Lavos was eradicated in Prehistory and humanity never rose to power with magic or technology, thus resulting in a Dinotopian civilization centered around reverence of the power of Nature are appropriately entitled "An Emerald Dream".
• Sudden Interquel Death Syndrome: Kino.
  • Averted in Flames Of Eternity, probably because killing him off was rather pointless. In return, he and Ayla get an extra kid who invents the game of Backgammon.
• Technicolor Science: The Vision Serpent, for one.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Mystic Knights. After a game off having their butts kicked by the heroes, Ozzie, Slash, and Flea pull themselves together and kick a lot of butt in their reappearance.
• Unlucky Childhood Friend: Lucca, shown during the Flame Trial.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: But he was so strong he didn't really need to. King Zeal is fought three times through the game -- a Hopeless Boss Fight at the beginning, a Bonus Boss that doesn't count plotwise later, and phase one of the final battle with the same stats each time. Of course, he gets a One-Winged Angel form, too.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Belthasar. From the point at which the party (plus Schala, minus Ayla) is finally fully collected to Chronopolis, you see the building of the insane Gambit Pileup that is Chrono Cross with his relentless desire to "fix" everything that goes wrong in the timeline, regardless of the consequences. This is Lampshaded both by Melchior in his everyday conversation -- "Keep an eye on him, he's stressed" -- and later when the group meets Gaspar. A case could also be made for King Zeal.
  • In a way, the player party qualifies as well. Unlike their Reptite Timeline counterparts the Xamoltan, who limit themselves to using time travel for learning and observation, Crono's group specifically uses it to change the past, inadvertently dooming every alternate timeline they create and then unmake to the Darkness Beyond Time.
• Wham! Episode: The Fall of Guardia and the Reptite Timeline.
• What Measure Is Another Timeline: The disregard practically everyone has for alternate timelines that are not their own. This is eventually addressed as a serious ethical question.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Your characters get called out quite a few times, whether it be your Foil asking how you can destroy a timeline and the countless people that would not be born because of it or Glenn yelling at Crono for murdering two random (innocent!) Reptites in a fit of rage after finding Marle's corpse.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: King Zeal and Marle.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Averted. Glenn no longer speaks in old-esque English, and his dialogue is closer to his style in the original Japanese Trigger.
  • Completely played straight in Flames of Eternity, however.