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Chrono Trigger Days#18, 19, and 20: Islands in the Sky

I’ve played Chrono Trigger a lot and haven’t had time to post, so look forward to six days in quick succession. The first three days grow my party, see more weird narrative, and take me to an all new time period. The new era is nothing  I would have expected and that’s a quite cool surprise.  But the best in these three days are the fights. The enemies just keep showing new and innovative forms — they keep coming up with cool puzzles with their great combinations. Oh, and a genuinely creepy prophecy. Spoilers within.

We left off with the screen fading out, and we come back with Chrono in bed, just like the very beginning of the game.  Marle enters and talks to Chrono as if she was his wife, telling him he can’t keep asking her father for work and that he has to wake up. We fade to black on this scene. Very weird. I wonder what meaning that had.

We then wake in Ayla’s hut, now with the party together again. She tells us that she found us in the Mystic Mountains, but there was no Magus there and also no Lavos. Ayla tells us not to worry about Lavos and we rest. When we wake, Ayla is gone and Kino tells us that she went to the Laruba tribe (the villagers who hide) to get everyone together for a  final fight with the reptites. Someone else enters to tell us about a fire in the north, Kino leaves to investigate, and I get control back and decide to follow that clue. I go north on the map and there’s a new location of ruins up there. I stop in to see what’s going on.  When I zoom in, the screen is covered with smoke and the Laruba village has been destroyed.  The remaining Laruba tell us that the reptites came and kidnapped Kino, and that the arrival of the reptites was Ayla’s fault.  There’s an argument between Ayla and the Laruba elder where he says that we should hide, and where Ayla apologizes about what happened to the village but wants to fight. She wants dactyls, and he agrees to let her have them. Ayla runs off to get them, and when I get control, I try to follow.

We leave to go get the dactyls, which of course are pterodactyls, at the dactyl nest location in the far north. That location is a great use of 3D in this game with a top-down map with tunnels running under platforms in the foreground. We fight some  and explore some, and then find Ayla at the top of the map as a dactyl lands in front of her. Marle insists that we go with her to fight in the Tyranno Lair. More dactyls come and some quick party selection leaves me with Ayla, Chrono, and Marle. There’s an anime CS where we see Chrono and Ayla take off on the dactyls, and then when I regain control, I get on the dactyls and we fly back to the map.  Now that I can fly, I decide to explore a little bit, and I find a Sun Shrine on an island on the far east of the map. There’s nothing there when I enter. I then decide to get back on track and go to Tyranno Lair.

The Lair itself is a series of rooms with some fairly easy fights; Ayla does a LOT of physical damage. We find and free Kino, and Ayla tells him to take the Laruba back to the village. She also tells him that he’ll have to become chief if she dies, but she must keep fighting.  Kino leaves and we head to the other side of the lair through a weird maze of teleporters. Fights along the way feature nicely designed enemies including dinos that you have to stun with magic to damage effectively and volcano enemies who will attack their own side when hit. These fights conclude with a somewhat randomly appearing sub-boss fight against Nizbel II, which is quite fun.  This is followed by one final teleporter maze that I stumble out of purely by accident to come face to face with Azala, reptite chief, for a second time.

Azala talks about the war between the reptites and humans for the world, but he runs before we can fight. We chase him down a long open-air hallway to catch him at a giant dragon statue. He pleads to the heavens that the red star crush the humans. Then the statue comes to life to fight us. It’s a BIG fight, and I get through it by taking down Azala first and then slowly whittling down the dragon to victory. Azala appears and (can I say distraughtly) says that the gods have sided with the apes, but that at least the reptites fought to the end. Ayla agrees and gives Azala that respect. Azala then predicts that the red star will fall to earth, starting horrible fire and an ice age. There’s a CS of a meteor (the “red star”) falling to earth.  Post-CS, Ayla explains the La-vos is the way her people say Fire-Big.

Kino brings the dactyls to rescue us. Ayla tries to save Azala, but he refuses to come. He instead simply asks us to take care of the world. In CS, we see the Lavos meteor hit the Tyranno lair and obliterate it. We zoom out to see our party on the mountain as little dots moving away from the newly formed crater. Back on the dactyls now, we first go back to the village to buy some stuff. We go back to Tyranno lair (now a crater) to see what’s there. Lavos isn’t and apparently was buried under the earth.  A gate appears before us, and we realize that Lavos is the cause of the gates through time.  We go through the gate to head out of this time period.

However, instead of going back to the end of time, we end up in another cave. I leave the cave to return to the map, and it’s an ice age outside with almost no civilization.  I wander a bit and find something that looks like a base from the future, only functional. It’s called a skyway when I click on it, and I enter it.  It’s a small room with a symbol in the middle and when I go in the symbol, a purple light surrounds me and the party is shot up into the sky.  We land on a ziggurat in a green field. When we exit that area, we appear to be on flying rocks hanging in the sky. There’s a city on this island so I decide to visit.

It’s a heavily populated city in a land called Zeal, and this building is a city of dreams where people sleep for illumination. Seems a little counterproductive to me, but who am I to judge?  I get a bunch of gossip from the city of dream: there’s a Queen Zeal in charge, the whole aerial city is based on magic, and there are special weapons in a shrine to the north.  Someone asks me if I believe in fate and I choose to say yes, which leads him to agree. I run into a little boy with a cat who gives us a creepy prophesy that one among my group will perish. This game has been too solid for that to be untrue, and it casts a pall over the rest of this session.  I also switch Ayla out for Lucca; I just think Lucca will handle the encounters of a magic place better.

I head out of the city and to another landbridge (ziggurat) on the map. When I enter, the party is sucked into a beam of light and I end up back on the ground.  Walking across this icy map takes me to another sky bridge on a different sky island. This one has a castle on it, so that seems like a good place to head. There are a series of small caves that teleport you slowly up the mountain on which the castle resides and navigating those caves gets me to the Zeal Palace.  More people in the palace and thus more information. There’s some Ocean Palace somewhere that’s a big deal. I meet a creature called a nu and I scratch its back. I hear about something called the Mammon Machine that uses the glorious(?) energy of Lavos to power Zeal.  I actually find the machine in one far wing of the Palace and learn that Melchoir made it. Boy does Melchoir get around — looks like I’ll be talking to him again.

I finally end up in a noble looking room and meet a new person named Schala. Schala also senses dark winds coming. Janos (the boy from before) comes in and Schala gives him an amulet to protect him. The Queen requests Schala’s presence so she and Janus depart.  I try to follow, but I can’t find them, and instead start investigating the other things on this island. The first thing is the other city on this island, Kajar, the city of magic.  I talk to a bunch of people there and learn that Zeal is using Lavos for power rather than the sun, because the sun stone is out of power. It can be restored, but only if it sits out in the sun for aeons. If only they had a time-traveler to insure that could happen…

I leave the city and head over to an airship called the Blackbird docked at the far end of the island. When I get there, I walk down a long pier to the ship, but my path is blocked by two guards.  I talk to them and they say nothing, but when I finish, a character named Dalton shows up. He says that we were prophesied to show up and to interfere in the Queen’s plans.  He decides to keep an eye on us, and leaves. I can’t get past the guards on to the ships, so I decide to leave as well.  The Sun Shrine seems like a good place to check out on the map, but I don’t see any location named Sun Shrine, so I decide to go back to the End of Time to save and call it a subway ride.

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