Chrono Cross is an achievment in Role-Playing Games that has yet to be surpassed, despite superior technology available.
User Rating: 10 | Chrono Cross (PSOne Books) PS
Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) is known for their terrific RPGs and Chrono Cross is argueably their greatest achievment, that despite the superior hardware of PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube, still has, in many ways, not been surpassed. Chrono Cross's battle system is a unique mixture of several gameplay elements featured in other games. Each character has seven blocks of endurance which they can use to attack, defend, or cast magic through the power of elements. Attacks have a hit or miss percentage based on power and endurance they take up. Weak attacks take one bar and will normally strike their target. Medium attacks take up two bars and hit for more damage and connect more often than not. Strong attacks absorb three bars, have pretty low accuracy, but deal more damage. Defend can be used to recover endurance and lower damage taken on that turn. Elements don't use MP, but have to be charged up by landing attacks. The battle system is pretty complex, but in-game tutorials do a good job of letting you know what to do in battle, but leave you to use what you've learned. The battle system manages to be fun and normally that is a necessity in RPGs to plod through countless random encounters... but not in Chrono Cross. There are no random encounters... hold on, let me repeat this one... NO RANDOM ENCOUNTERS. Enemies are shown on-screen and can be avoided, and you can run from every non-essential battle (though this isn't recommended, because the bosses at the end get pretty hard). You can even run from Boss battles. If the battle isn't going your way, you can run, heal and properly equip your party and return with no penalty. Graphically, the game has aged, but at its release was one of the best looking games on the PSOne, and still holds up well in comparison to some next-gen games. It goes without saying that a story in a Square game is good, and Chrono Cross's delivers the goods. The game can be considered a sequel to the SNES's Chrono Trigger, but previous experience in that game is not neccessary, though I do recommend it to understand some of the references and give some events a more emotional impact. Chrono Cross is truly an achievement in the storied history of SquareEnix's long history of RPGs. This game delivers in every aspect that it attempts, which is something very few games manage. 
