I know this is specifically the original SNES version and all, but fun fact; the DS port of this game (which is a decent port and doesn't have the same painfully lengthened load times as the PS1 port) features a map on the bottom screen for all areas in the game. This included 1999 AD, even though, just as in the original, you never actually see more than the areas in the "Day of Lavos" scenes. It makes me wonder if they added those for placeholder/debug purposes or perhaps there were plans to make 1999 AD a fully fleshed out area in the DS port as a means of, say, tying into Chrono Cross.
Honestly, I think that should have been done in the game, and that the new character could have either been Johnnie, or an ancestor of Johnnie, and this is how things would have happened. This character is trying to warn a super advanced Guardia, as well other nearby areas, of the 1999 time period, of an impending level of doom, but people think that the person is off their rocker, a religious nutter, a doomsayer, etc., but the person is kind of trying to warn people and it is kind of going like the people that ignored the prophets in the Holy Scriptures at their own peril, as well as the way that the pseudo-scientist morons ignored the warnings about Krypton going to explode in the Superman franchise. Moreover, the main villain for this time era is some sort of sick person that has some sort of mindset akin to the people that want to off all of humankind in a variety of manners, like an equivalent of those people that exist in our real world that promote environmentalism, veganism, the LGBT movement, racism of all sorts, male sexism, female sexism, masculinism/chauvinism, feminism, MGTOW/FGTOW/red pill ideologies, United Nations Agenda 21, The Georgia Guide Stones, the Zero Growth Population Movement, assisted suicide, and the culling of the elderly, the unborn, and the mentally, developmentally, and physically disabled people, and, as it turns out, he, meaning the villain, created a super powerful gynoid that is, for all intents and purposes, is human, and is his "lover", but she soon saw how useless, sick, and demented that he was, and she was also tired of a physical body that had too many limits, so she became a computer, and said computer was revealed to be Mother Brain, and she thought that waking up Lavos would fix the problems of society, so she went in a mode that was across between a Satanic ritual and the whole SkyNet, as well as other related computer/android/artificial life form type rebellions, and she wanted to summon Lavos to destroy all of the annoying humans, as well as the remaining monsters. Yes, that might have been a bit complex, as well as dark, for this sort of game, but a boss like Lavos honestly is quite dark as well. So, what do you think about that brief attempt at a backstory for the hypothetical 1999 A.D. scenario for this game, @Alucardworshipper? Please let me know your thoughts on the matter. Thank you.
10:58 That building is the Sun Keep from 2300 AD. There is a NPC in one of the cities that tells this, then the scene moves from the inside of the city to the over world, and pans over to it.
He Shesez, great video. I just wanted you to know, there's a prototype version of this game, and that warp leads to an entire cut dungeon in that build. When they cut the dungeon, they must have forgotten to remove the warp.
Regarding the exit behind the bookcase in Schala's room: In the prototype, this led to what I guess could be called a mini-dungeon of sorts. It feels very unfinished, but if you walk through walls, there's a doorway at the top of it that leads to Queen Zeal's throne room. The theory is that Schala originally helped you via having you go through this dungeon to get to the throne room, but in the end they went another route. Zeal in general feels unfinished in the prototype, leading one to assume it was one of the last areas worked into the game. As to why the bookcase in Schala's room leads to a specific part of a specific ending in the final game, no idea.
I'm pretty sure the Arabian palace-like building in Zeal is the Sun Palace, holding a moonstone/sunstone. I vaguely recall a npc shedding light on it - no pun intended.
The 57342G is likely a Japanese phrase encoded in the numbers. "5" can be transliterated as "GO" or "KO", "7" would be "NA", "3" would be "MI" or "SA" or "SAN", "4" would be "YO" or "SHI" or "YON", and "2" would be "NI" or "FU". Not sure what they combine to, although the first three digits seem like "KONAMI"...
dollphinwing doubtful. "shi" is much more common than "shini" when describing the concept of death. more likely 57342 means: 1.) konami(42), just adding the extra two digits at the end so it's enough money for debugging purposes 2.) "konamisshitsu" a portmanteau of "konami" and "misshitsu" (meaning inaccessible or secret room)
In the Giant's Claw, using Walk Through Walls codes lets you see dark green versions of extra rooms not used in that location. They all came from the Tyrano Lair as well. For instsnce yoy can find the large tiled room that has several teleporting points and a couple of invisible enemy triggers. But in the unused Giant's Claw version, there are no teleporting points, no enemy triggers, and the doors don't work. They wanted to use more of the Tyrano Lair locations in the Giant's Claw initially, but they axed some of these rooms in favor of caves. There's even an unused room containing fully animated green flickering torches.
There's lots of stuff that's common in SNES games including auto scrolling backgrounds. But because you already have an auto parallax feature built in you dont need to develop a new animation sequence for the perimeter of the time gate. You can use the existing cloud JPG resource to create an illusion of animation using a 100% transparency on the perimeter of the time gate
Okay you've done Chrono Trigger, one of the greatest SNES games ever. I think it's time you did the other 2: Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore. I wanna know all those sweet little secrets I know you can find.
Man those chests and those buildings in Zeal always drove me nuts! Not sure if the software you use is compatible with DS games, but would love to see a boundary break on the extra zones in the DS Chrono Trigger.
Hey, awesome episode, bro! Just a thought that came to me in the part about Magus' Castle. I think a lot of the unseeable details are partly to blame on Akira Toriyama, since he did a lot of the concept art and character design for the game. If you see some of Toriyama's work you can see he's a man that pays a lot of respect for details and cohesiveness of the worlds he draws, Dragon Ball being what anyone can relate to. So maybe Toriyama did a lot of the work on paper and once the artists from the development studio passed it onto the game, they tried to cram all the details that Toriyama did on the original art, so a lot of it had to be worked into the game and we lost some of the details, and with your work we can now see it for what it is! So, again, thank you for shedding some light on this.
Well, I guess it's time to play Chrono Trigger again. But jeez, you got every ending for this video? I commend you for your dedication Shesez. Also seeing 1999 AD is something I've been wanting to see for so many years so you fulfilled a childhood dream of mine as well!
10:08 - This is incorrect. That "unused mass of land" in the upper-left corner of the map is actually _two_ chunks of land -- both used at different points in the game. The grassy forest is actually the land for the Laruba Ruins when the northern woods burn and the rocky ground leading into lava replaces the Reptite Lair after Lavos crashes into it. As for the water? Well... that's exactly what it looks like; water. All of the water on the map, if I remember correctly. It just gets placed under the land. But why water isn't the "default land" for that area, I'll never know. Also, regarding the hand maiden and Queen Leene hiding behind the Zeal Sealed Door? Queen Leene is the "activation" object for the pendant events, not unlike the objects hiding behind counters and whatnot in shops that let you talk to NPCs across the counter. Any door you have to knock open, as well as certain other objects, have these. (Guardia Castle's courtroom uses a *very* creepy-colored Frog/Glenn, for example.) Queen Leene, on the other hand, is the "go to this screen on touch" event, since you never actually touch the extreme edge of the screen. Again, these exist in certain areas of the game and can be literally any active object. The fact that they chose Leene, though, makes me think the developers were just having fun, considering the Leene lineage and all.
I really like this series. You really go in depth to find some of the secrets, like testing out every combination of characters for the bookcase trigger, and trying out every chest until you found one that actually contained an item hahaha! One question though, I recall in the past I used a SNES Emulator for my Nintendo DS which had the ability to remove/ change layer orders. Is this just the same thing you're using? Or does Chrono Trigger have a debug feature that removes layers? Because the boxes shown when you're removing layers has the same style and font as Chrono Trigger itself! Would be good to know, just to put my mind at rest hahaha! Thanks man :)
its a feature of zsnes, its nice for games where overlay effects don't work right, I recall having issues with the areas with fog in chrono trigger on a different emulator because the fog was rendering opaque...which is a major issue in the medival era in particular. The fog renders correctly on zsnes anyways, but if it didn't, I could have turned off that layer.
King Jae I'd just be happy enough to have a remastered version for Steam. Or at the very least the PS1 version or DS version ported to Steam, as well as Chrono Cross. Square Enix keeps saying that they won't revisit the series because sales arent that good, but then they don't make the games readily available to buy in the current market.
nostalgia makes it way better, hearing all the songs and seeing the gameplay. thinking about my friends and family that i have played that game with, how many times i had to restart the game, or the first time i completed the game as an adult.
Fun Fact. I had to use the walk through walls code on my very first playthrough of Chrono Trigger because the game somehow glitched out and wouldn't open a door that I unlocked. I know it was glitched, because my second playthrough worked fine, but I didn't do anything different.
I have an incredible Walk Through Walls Discovery in Janus' room in Zeal in 12000BC--figured it out in the 90s. You can kill Magus and keep him in your party with this trick. You'll need to have cleared the Ocean Palace up to the second to last room for this to work--Lavos Beckons Save Title. If you have a Walk Through Walls code turned on and enter one of the bookcases in Janus' room (as if something was behind it), you suddenly are playing as Magus going down the elevator in the Ocean Palace. You needed to have gone through the Ocean Palace, so you can exit the elevator. If you hit Y you can add your party back in, or you can fight with Magus alone and lose to Lavos. Anyway when you have the option to fight Magus with Frog, you can win the battle, but you also still have Magus in the party. Try it!
6:15, thats 0xdffe in hexadecimal, looks like a chest or value for the QA. Something like, if that number shows up you found a chest with no proper entry into the loot table.
I always wondered if there was some secret way to get into that blue prism and fancy sultan-y building in Zeal. Keep in mind, this was pretty much the dawn of the internet. We were convinced that there was some secret way to either enter those while at zeal or it was hidden away for a side quest after you resurrect Chrono, since almost every time period has a special side quest related to a character.
If you can get it I recommend the DS version, some people have gripes with parts of the retranslation but since it has every previous addition and more, it should be the one you go for first if you have no nostalgia for the original.
The layer thing is actually a technique called parallax mapping. it's used by devs to decorate exactly how they want. I actually started learning to use it in RPG Maker to make better maps.
I always thought it was weird how they changed Schala's hair color in Cross, after pondering why they would do that, I eventually came up with a crazy theory, which I wrote down on the Chrono Compendium. While Schala was at the Darkness Beyond Time, she witnesses all of the events that have unfolded in the past, as well as alternate timelines, and after Kid merges with Schala at the end of Cross, she travels back in time to assume the identity of Queen Leene, so that the pendant will be passed down to her descendant Marle, making Chrono Cross a prequel. Considering how they used Queen Leene's sprite at the doorway, I can't help but wonder if they actually did have something like that in mind.
*Brilliant theory.* I'm certain there's a connection there too, which was originally intended to be explained -- if not made pivital to the story's late-game. Considering it's never really touched on how Guardia comes into possession of this magical, world-changing pendant (kind of an important thing, right?)... I'm no doubt it was something they would've visited if not for time constraints etc.
Alternatively, it could be equally possible that Schala had fallen in love with, and, later, married, a man that had the genetic characteristics of Marle, yet was male, and that they kept having children and the children would also keep meeting mates that were of the opposite gender as themselves, and thus keep passing down the pendant down the line until the Kingdom of Guardia was established in 0 A.D./B.C., and then it was the royalty that kept passing down the line that did the same thing until we get to Marle/Princess Nadia in the year 1000 A.D.
Now...those are 2 games (trigger and cross)that have a really special place in my heart. What a nostalgia of the enjoyment of playing them for the first time this video brought
yeah, the queen leene sprite in the doorways in zeal always freaked me out when i did my own out-of bounds and layer explorations in the game lol nice add-on at the end with the sprites of crono, lucca and marle too; i always wondered what the looked like upclose. great video!
Nice Radical Dreamers nod at the start, also super thrilled you did CT finally, definitely my top RPG as a child and brought back great memories watching this, thanks!
Wow Shesez, you are actually helping me out here dude, these secrets you kerp finding will actually help me with the game I'm working on with RPG Maker, thanks for relighting my motivation!!
Awesome video, truly an amazing piece for lifelong fans of CT such as myself. Although I want to point out that you stated "Gil" when it's actually Gold. Just a minor confusion with Final Fantasy games, but had to say something :D
Man, I really want to watch this episode, but I still haven't played Chrono Trigger yet, and I really want to avoid spoilers. After I finish Chrono Trigger, I will watch this video immediately. I do know that Chrono Trigger has loads of unused content, because of TCRF.
I'm going to take a guess and say that that Queen Leene sprite that appeared behind the Pendant Door was a remnant of some lost or deleted cut scene that explained how the Pendant went from the Zeal royal family to the Guardia royal family.
About the lamppost at the end of time (6:50)...The reason its on a separate sprite layer because it is a sprite you can walk behind. Notice that the bush on the left loses its top half for the same reason.
Really great work! Keep this stuff coming, I really enjoy it as something new in the realm of retro gaming youtube content! Do you have a FF3 project done or in the works?
Best episode so far! great work on explaining that door trigger and the cutscene that follows I would have never guessed it was part of one of the endings. I just assumed when i first saw it, that it was a scrapped idea for a confrontation with perhaps Queen Zeal (the music playing made this thought make sense in my head lol )
Why didn't Squaresoft allow us to go to the era 1999 AD and go into those domes and such they could have added some sidequests there and then a boss battle that would thus trigger Lavos to rise and destroy the world and turn it into what we see in the era 3000AD would have been cool I think but ohwell the game is still brilliant no matter what
I'd like to clarify some things... the nicknacks layer is not simply for customization of areas, (and also why the lamp post is on it) but also to save tilespace in the ROM. Every tile takes up 8x8 pixels, which in turn takes up 32 bytes on the cartridge. This would mean you'd need a separate tile for every 8x8 section of every nicknack, lamp, or flag on top of every kind of floor or counter that it would ever show up on.... so, if you wanted a plate (two tiles wide) to be able to show up on three different kinds of terrain. (Two counters and maybe the floor or a table or something) that turns into 6 tiles, and 192 bytes. If you make the plate occupy its own layer, you cut that down to 2 tiles, 64 bytes, and if you do what a lot of stuff on SNES did, and indeed this game does in places, and have the plate mirror, you cut that once again down to 1 tile, at only 32 bytes. As for the ending warp tile in Janus' room... its simply a debug feature. Every scene in the game occupies a unique room, while ironically, not every _actual location room_ occupies its own scene room (as you covered.) There are a few places where these debug doors exist. (By the way there are a complete suite of tools designed around recoding the game using its own normal internal scripting functions, and redesigning rooms, which is how I know what I do.) As for the copies of doorways and such (and also most kinds of chests if you hadn't noticed) being located somewhere in the scene/room, this is done much like the sprites being in the background. These tiles can't simply be loaded and replaced quickly on the fly, however, tiles that are already in RAM can by copied and pasted easily and freely. This means every door you open, is actually a second of the map somewhere you can't see, getting copied, and pasted over (replacing) the old closed door, with the new open one. This is why there are both closed and open versions of doors most of the time. If a scene required a door to be closed, after you had opened it, it would have no way to do that if there was not a special copy reserved somewhere safely tucked away. This becomes particularly important when you have multiple linked rooms all joined on one map. Since some doors are closed every time you first enter the room, but the room you left is in the same scenespace as the room you're entering, the closed door would be open still. The game has to copy the closed door over it during the fake transition fade. I realize this video is more about things you can see inside the game during gameplay, but if you are ever interested, I'd recommend you take a walk toward the chronocompendium and see if you can't find the modding tools, as you can find all kinds of interesting things in the game just by opening it up for the first time.
You won't ever be able to Boundary Break Chrono Cross? I take that as a confirmation of a future episode. (You've stated that before and proved yourself wrong, so...) Besides that: Great episode, initially I thought "boundary breaking" 2D games was a bit lackluster but thanks to layers it's pretty interesting.
Theory about the hidden objects under shopkeeper desks; at some point the dialogue system became capable of letting the player talk to shopkeepers from further away. Shops from before that point in development had the trigger object and they were never removed, and shops after that point didn't need it.
or use an emulator, srsly there are some situations and places you really want to speed up... Lost Sanctum, Arena, a lot of same last Boss Fights for the endings, rushing thourgh finished dungeons... just to mention some :/
Is it a design issue? I know PS1 games do a lot of weird loading tricks to stream properly off the disk. Or is it just that no one has made the software to do it?
I'm assuming the problem is with draw distance in the PS1 era. The draw distance for objects in those games are awful, just look at Gex as an example. Although, this is pure speculation, I might be wrong, but that's what comes to mind instantly as to why they might not be doable.
In modern games, the graphics card handles perspective projection so it can be possible to make a hack that works for every game. For PS1 games, the hardware could draw polygons based on their 2D position on the screen, but all of the 3D projection was done in software. This means you'd have to hack each game separately to move the camera, which requires reverse-engineering the game engine.
three minutes in and my mind is blown by the outer ring effect for the warp portals, it's astounding some of the lengths devs would go to in order to achieve a desired effect.
hell yessss was i looking forward to this and hell it was so damn worth it. are u using a new mic? your voice sounds insanely different, or its just my to go headphones since i listen to u in the subway atm but usually at home.
I think the reason there’s a trigger behind Janus’ bookcase is that it’s a leftover from an earlier point in development. In the Prototype, there’s unused maps for a secret passage in Zeal Palace that’s accessed by a Trigger in the same place as the one in the final game.
11:40 I'm fairly certain you can go in those doors (or at least in the DS version you can). It involves solving pretty vague puzzles in the antiquity buildings that open the doors when you're done and inside you can get a misc item that gives you a special triple tech that only works while said item is equipped.
The contents of those background chests/boxes that turned out to be dummy props have plagued me since my childhood. God bless you, Shesez.
im not just saying this because i did the intro for this video, but its my favorite one so far!
Str8Jeffin I was thinking the same thing. I fucking love this game
the only thing it's missing is Fire 2, the attack that burns your skin!
Str8Jeffin lmao I can't believe you remember that. I almost said it.
Str8Jeffin Crono looks a bit weird though.
You need more subscribers man
4:09 It's because the NPCs "without an extra object" do have an extra object but the sprite being used is invisible or non-existant.
I know this is specifically the original SNES version and all, but fun fact; the DS port of this game (which is a decent port and doesn't have the same painfully lengthened load times as the PS1 port) features a map on the bottom screen for all areas in the game. This included 1999 AD, even though, just as in the original, you never actually see more than the areas in the "Day of Lavos" scenes. It makes me wonder if they added those for placeholder/debug purposes or perhaps there were plans to make 1999 AD a fully fleshed out area in the DS port as a means of, say, tying into Chrono Cross.
Honestly, I think that should have been done in the game, and that the new character could have either been Johnnie, or an ancestor of Johnnie, and this is how things would have happened. This character is trying to warn a super advanced Guardia, as well other nearby areas, of the 1999 time period, of an impending level of doom, but people think that the person is off their rocker, a religious nutter, a doomsayer, etc., but the person is kind of trying to warn people and it is kind of going like the people that ignored the prophets in the Holy Scriptures at their own peril, as well as the way that the pseudo-scientist morons ignored the warnings about Krypton going to explode in the Superman franchise. Moreover, the main villain for this time era is some sort of sick person that has some sort of mindset akin to the people that want to off all of humankind in a variety of manners, like an equivalent of those people that exist in our real world that promote environmentalism, veganism, the LGBT movement, racism of all sorts, male sexism, female sexism, masculinism/chauvinism, feminism, MGTOW/FGTOW/red pill ideologies, United Nations Agenda 21, The Georgia Guide Stones, the Zero Growth Population Movement, assisted suicide, and the culling of the elderly, the unborn, and the mentally, developmentally, and physically disabled people, and, as it turns out, he, meaning the villain, created a super powerful gynoid that is, for all intents and purposes, is human, and is his "lover", but she soon saw how useless, sick, and demented that he was, and she was also tired of a physical body that had too many limits, so she became a computer, and said computer was revealed to be Mother Brain, and she thought that waking up Lavos would fix the problems of society, so she went in a mode that was across between a Satanic ritual and the whole SkyNet, as well as other related computer/android/artificial life form type rebellions, and she wanted to summon Lavos to destroy all of the annoying humans, as well as the remaining monsters. Yes, that might have been a bit complex, as well as dark, for this sort of game, but a boss like Lavos honestly is quite dark as well. So, what do you think about that brief attempt at a backstory for the hypothetical 1999 A.D. scenario for this game, @Alucardworshipper? Please let me know your thoughts on the matter. Thank you.
What a word salad
@@paxhumana2015 How's that mental illness treating you?
10:58 That building is the Sun Keep from 2300 AD. There is a NPC in one of the cities that tells this, then the scene moves from the inside of the city to the over world, and pans over to it.
Awesome job cracking the case on that weird ending. Always great to see truly original research.
thanks Jack!
He Shesez, great video. I just wanted you to know, there's a prototype version of this game, and that warp leads to an entire cut dungeon in that build. When they cut the dungeon, they must have forgotten to remove the warp.
There are also more hidden landmasses in 65,000,000 BC, and you can land on some of them. A few cause the music to fade out in certain sections.
Oh, it seems you've heard of the prototype. I'm still in the process of watching this video.
@@alexmayo3753 , I think that the dungeon was restored in the versions of the game that went from the DS port onward, am I right?
Regarding the exit behind the bookcase in Schala's room: In the prototype, this led to what I guess could be called a mini-dungeon of sorts. It feels very unfinished, but if you walk through walls, there's a doorway at the top of it that leads to Queen Zeal's throne room. The theory is that Schala originally helped you via having you go through this dungeon to get to the throne room, but in the end they went another route.
Zeal in general feels unfinished in the prototype, leading one to assume it was one of the last areas worked into the game. As to why the bookcase in Schala's room leads to a specific part of a specific ending in the final game, no idea.
My guess as to why that ending area shows up is because the room ID that was originally used for this "mini-dungeon" was reused for that ending room.
I'm pretty sure the Arabian palace-like building in Zeal is the Sun Palace, holding a moonstone/sunstone. I vaguely recall a npc shedding light on it - no pun intended.
That intro was noice
glad you like it!
That ending gave me feels.
The 57342G is likely a Japanese phrase encoded in the numbers. "5" can be transliterated as "GO" or "KO", "7" would be "NA", "3" would be "MI" or "SA" or "SAN", "4" would be "YO" or "SHI" or "YON", and "2" would be "NI" or "FU". Not sure what they combine to, although the first three digits seem like "KONAMI"...
Nice!
Could be "shini" which means "die" so.. die konami? o_O
Chrono Trigger predicted konami's death, huh?
shitch
dollphinwing doubtful. "shi" is much more common than "shini" when describing the concept of death.
more likely 57342 means:
1.) konami(42), just adding the extra two digits at the end so it's enough money for debugging purposes
2.) "konamisshitsu" a portmanteau of "konami" and "misshitsu" (meaning inaccessible or secret room)
In the Giant's Claw, using Walk Through Walls codes lets you see dark green versions of extra rooms not used in that location. They all came from the Tyrano Lair as well. For instsnce yoy can find the large tiled room that has several teleporting points and a couple of invisible enemy triggers. But in the unused Giant's Claw version, there are no teleporting points, no enemy triggers, and the doors don't work.
They wanted to use more of the Tyrano Lair locations in the Giant's Claw initially, but they axed some of these rooms in favor of caves.
There's even an unused room containing fully animated green flickering torches.
damn i've beaten this game so many times on SNES and DS and the music still makes me tear up. Can't thumbs up enough!!!
There's lots of stuff that's common in SNES games including auto scrolling backgrounds. But because you already have an auto parallax feature built in you dont need to develop a new animation sequence for the perimeter of the time gate. You can use the existing cloud JPG resource to create an illusion of animation using a 100% transparency on the perimeter of the time gate
Can we talk about SNES animation programming all day plz :D
One of my favorite RPGs of all time, and I can indeed say I always wanted to walk through 1999 A.D and this has satiated my desire.
Dude i am so glad. Trust me, the feeling was visceral when i actually got there
Shesez is the only one who can stop Lavos. By taking him out of bounds and killing him there!
New ending confirmed!
I was really hoping that reaching the star in prehistoric era would cause an engage xD.
Well, it sounds like the Darkness Beyond Time.
The 10th dimension can be explained as a black void, although it's appearance can not be defined outside of branching paths
When I was a kid, I had to turn off a layer on zsnes when i was in the future, because transparency didn't work properly back then.
Okay you've done Chrono Trigger, one of the greatest SNES games ever. I think it's time you did the other 2: Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore. I wanna know all those sweet little secrets I know you can find.
you forgot soul blazer/illusion of gaia/terranigma ;)
Secret of Evermore? Now that's a great game I haven't heard anyone talk about.
Secret of Mana is pretty overrated as well, the sequel was twice as good.
Don't forget Final Fantasy 6
the sequel was twice as buggy...yeah...(i am not speaking of the japanese version of secret of mana :D )
ZSNES might be thought of as obsolete but the layer toggle is a very useful tool.
Man those chests and those buildings in Zeal always drove me nuts! Not sure if the software you use is compatible with DS games, but would love to see a boundary break on the extra zones in the DS Chrono Trigger.
Hey, awesome episode, bro!
Just a thought that came to me in the part about Magus' Castle.
I think a lot of the unseeable details are partly to blame on Akira Toriyama, since he did a lot of the concept art and character design for the game. If you see some of Toriyama's work you can see he's a man that pays a lot of respect for details and cohesiveness of the worlds he draws, Dragon Ball being what anyone can relate to. So maybe Toriyama did a lot of the work on paper and once the artists from the development studio passed it onto the game, they tried to cram all the details that Toriyama did on the original art, so a lot of it had to be worked into the game and we lost some of the details, and with your work we can now see it for what it is!
So, again, thank you for shedding some light on this.
Well, I guess it's time to play Chrono Trigger again.
But jeez, you got every ending for this video? I commend you for your dedication Shesez.
Also seeing 1999 AD is something I've been wanting to see for so many years so you fulfilled a childhood dream of mine as well!
10:08 - This is incorrect. That "unused mass of land" in the upper-left corner of the map is actually _two_ chunks of land -- both used at different points in the game. The grassy forest is actually the land for the Laruba Ruins when the northern woods burn and the rocky ground leading into lava replaces the Reptite Lair after Lavos crashes into it.
As for the water? Well... that's exactly what it looks like; water. All of the water on the map, if I remember correctly. It just gets placed under the land. But why water isn't the "default land" for that area, I'll never know.
Also, regarding the hand maiden and Queen Leene hiding behind the Zeal Sealed Door? Queen Leene is the "activation" object for the pendant events, not unlike the objects hiding behind counters and whatnot in shops that let you talk to NPCs across the counter. Any door you have to knock open, as well as certain other objects, have these. (Guardia Castle's courtroom uses a *very* creepy-colored Frog/Glenn, for example.)
Queen Leene, on the other hand, is the "go to this screen on touch" event, since you never actually touch the extreme edge of the screen. Again, these exist in certain areas of the game and can be literally any active object. The fact that they chose Leene, though, makes me think the developers were just having fun, considering the Leene lineage and all.
7:17 it also saves memory as you don't need to store a prerendered image for each room but just use a tile set.
And also saves palette slots
I really like this series. You really go in depth to find some of the secrets, like testing out every combination of characters for the bookcase trigger, and trying out every chest until you found one that actually contained an item hahaha!
One question though, I recall in the past I used a SNES Emulator for my Nintendo DS which had the ability to remove/ change layer orders. Is this just the same thing you're using? Or does Chrono Trigger have a debug feature that removes layers? Because the boxes shown when you're removing layers has the same style and font as Chrono Trigger itself!
Would be good to know, just to put my mind at rest hahaha! Thanks man :)
It's an emulator to remove layers, I always did the same with zsnes
pretty sure it IS zsnes, the text that pops up when he toggles them is identical to what it uses.
its a feature of zsnes, its nice for games where overlay effects don't work right, I recall having issues with the areas with fog in chrono trigger on a different emulator because the fog was rendering opaque...which is a major issue in the medival era in particular. The fog renders correctly on zsnes anyways, but if it didn't, I could have turned off that layer.
Agreed, I figured it was zsnes when I heard the low quality sound of the enemy trigger
They need to remake Chrono Trigger!
King Jae I'd just be happy enough to have a remastered version for Steam. Or at the very least the PS1 version or DS version ported to Steam, as well as Chrono Cross. Square Enix keeps saying that they won't revisit the series because sales arent that good, but then they don't make the games readily available to buy in the current market.
This game is on steam??
King Jae don't until they fix the stupid filter effect on the graphics. It's the graphics equivalent of comic sans
At this point id settle with a chrono trigger inspired quest or event in ff14.
Search out Chrono Trigger Resurrection. An independant group DID and SquareEnix shut them down just before they were to release it.
Best RPG of all time. I just recently beat it so I'm not influenced by nostalgia at all.
it really is just that great
My heart melted when I read that. People like YOU are gonna be the reason it gets a "remake"
nostalgia makes it way better, hearing all the songs and seeing the gameplay.
thinking about my friends and family that i have played that game with, how many times i had to restart the game, or the first time i completed the game as an adult.
Why does it need a remake? Its great the way it is
Fun Fact. I had to use the walk through walls code on my very first playthrough of Chrono Trigger because the game somehow glitched out and wouldn't open a door that I unlocked. I know it was glitched, because my second playthrough worked fine, but I didn't do anything different.
5:47 YES! I was that kid!! I was told that they contained 1G somewhere, a long time ago. Well...
Chrono Trigger makes me so intensely emotional. It really is one of the greatest games out there, and I'm not even that much into RPGs.
Cool story, you like Chrono Trigger too? Wow what a hot take.
@@fredspofford bad day?
I have an incredible Walk Through Walls Discovery in Janus' room in Zeal in 12000BC--figured it out in the 90s. You can kill Magus and keep him in your party with this trick. You'll need to have cleared the Ocean Palace up to the second to last room for this to work--Lavos Beckons Save Title. If you have a Walk Through Walls code turned on and enter one of the bookcases in Janus' room (as if something was behind it), you suddenly are playing as Magus going down the elevator in the Ocean Palace. You needed to have gone through the Ocean Palace, so you can exit the elevator. If you hit Y you can add your party back in, or you can fight with Magus alone and lose to Lavos. Anyway when you have the option to fight Magus with Frog, you can win the battle, but you also still have Magus in the party. Try it!
6:15, thats 0xdffe in hexadecimal, looks like a chest or value for the QA. Something like, if that number shows up you found a chest with no proper entry into the loot table.
Very cool! This game has a lot of details already, but pulling back the curtain reveals even more.
This is AWESOME! New favorite episode.
Also, now I'm gonna play Chrono Trigger again.
I always wondered if there was some secret way to get into that blue prism and fancy sultan-y building in Zeal. Keep in mind, this was pretty much the dawn of the internet. We were convinced that there was some secret way to either enter those while at zeal or it was hidden away for a side quest after you resurrect Chrono, since almost every time period has a special side quest related to a character.
That treasure chest actually contained the inn keeper's life savings. Bet you feel like a jerk now.
I played waaay too much CT as a kid. I remembered that scene immediately from one of the endings.
Just finished this game for the first time yesterday. Already replaying it!
Thats perfect timing for you man!
Similar timing with Xenoblade. Coincidence?
better be! i definitely dont have the cash to hire PIs to find out what games you beat XD
super informative video on how they placed pixels and layered things for older games.
It's weird that I've never played this game but always see people talk about this and have the game at my house. Maybe I should give it a shot.
Blacktoast1234 you should!
Do you have the original one (from SNES)?
just enjoy it. it's a beautiful game.
Blacktoast1234 I didn't play it until the first time like three years ago. Even without nostalgia, the game is amazing.
If you can get it I recommend the DS version, some people have gripes with parts of the retranslation
but since it has every previous addition and more, it should be the one you go for first if you have no nostalgia for the original.
The layer thing is actually a technique called parallax mapping. it's used by devs to decorate exactly how they want. I actually started learning to use it in RPG Maker to make better maps.
I would like to see a Boundary Break for Ōkami and Ōkamiden. Ōkamiden, specifically has a lot of invisible walls blocking certain parts of areas.
This Chrono Trigger video earned you my subscriptions. Well done, sir! *chrono trigger fanfare*
I always thought it was weird how they changed Schala's hair color in Cross, after pondering why they would do that, I eventually came up with a crazy theory, which I wrote down on the Chrono Compendium. While Schala was at the Darkness Beyond Time, she witnesses all of the events that have unfolded in the past, as well as alternate timelines, and after Kid merges with Schala at the end of Cross, she travels back in time to assume the identity of Queen Leene, so that the pendant will be passed down to her descendant Marle, making Chrono Cross a prequel.
Considering how they used Queen Leene's sprite at the doorway, I can't help but wonder if they actually did have something like that in mind.
*Brilliant theory.* I'm certain there's a connection there too, which was originally intended to be explained -- if not made pivital to the story's late-game. Considering it's never really touched on how Guardia comes into possession of this magical, world-changing pendant (kind of an important thing, right?)... I'm no doubt it was something they would've visited if not for time constraints etc.
Alternatively, it could be equally possible that Schala had fallen in love with, and, later, married, a man that had the genetic characteristics of Marle, yet was male, and that they kept having children and the children would also keep meeting mates that were of the opposite gender as themselves, and thus keep passing down the pendant down the line until the Kingdom of Guardia was established in 0 A.D./B.C., and then it was the royalty that kept passing down the line that did the same thing until we get to Marle/Princess Nadia in the year 1000 A.D.
Now...those are 2 games (trigger and cross)that have a really special place in my heart. What a nostalgia of the enjoyment of playing them for the first time this video brought
The chests behind some merchants in Dragon quest 8 have me feeling like this too
If you could boundary break DQ8 I'd smash that like button
"ANYWHERE WE WANT" could very well become the best soundbyte of this channel. I'd honestly love it on a shirt!
interesting proposal!
My favorite game of all time. I play this at least once a year.
Me too a fucking classic in the midst of doing a play through on ios
yeah, the queen leene sprite in the doorways in zeal always freaked me out when i did my own out-of bounds and layer explorations in the game lol nice add-on at the end with the sprites of crono, lucca and marle too; i always wondered what the looked like upclose. great video!
The first time I played Chrono Trigger was on the Nintendo DS port. amazing game!
Nice Radical Dreamers nod at the start, also super thrilled you did CT finally, definitely my top RPG as a child and brought back great memories watching this, thanks!
Ayla didn't shock the man. Robo took his head off.
Wow Shesez, you are actually helping me out here dude, these secrets you kerp finding will actually help me with the game I'm working on with RPG Maker, thanks for relighting my motivation!!
Awesome video, truly an amazing piece for lifelong fans of CT such as myself.
Although I want to point out that you stated "Gil" when it's actually Gold. Just a minor confusion with Final Fantasy games, but had to say something :D
I love that I actually recognized the scene with Ayla dancing.
I got every ending multiple times.
even though i havent watched the video i know its going to be good.
One of the few channels I like the vids before I watch them. helps me also remember which I've watched. Such good content.
that box behind the counter was surprising. congrats for finding it!
Man, I really want to watch this episode, but I still haven't played Chrono Trigger yet, and I really want to avoid spoilers. After I finish Chrono Trigger, I will watch this video immediately. I do know that Chrono Trigger has loads of unused content, because of TCRF.
This video is rather spoiler free. minus one part that is about 1/3rd into the game
still worth watching AFTER finishing the game ^^
I can confirm that the video is mostly devoid of major spoilers but it would be easier to follow if you played it first yeah
I'm going to take a guess and say that that Queen Leene sprite that appeared behind the Pendant Door was a remnant of some lost or deleted cut scene that explained how the Pendant went from the Zeal royal family to the Guardia royal family.
Keep up the good work dawg
About the lamppost at the end of time (6:50)...The reason its on a separate sprite layer because it is a sprite you can walk behind. Notice that the bush on the left loses its top half for the same reason.
Really great work! Keep this stuff coming, I really enjoy it as something new in the realm of retro gaming youtube content! Do you have a FF3 project done or in the works?
Best episode so far! great work on explaining that door trigger and the cutscene that follows I would have never guessed it was part of one of the endings. I just assumed when i first saw it, that it was a scrapped idea for a confrontation with perhaps Queen Zeal (the music playing made this thought make sense in my head lol )
3D Chrono Trigger remake. R.I.P.
That song should be your outro from now on. I absolutely love it and it is one of my favorites from Chrono Trigger
Once again, Shesez has wonderful taste in games. This channel is awesome.
This was so cool to watch, and I love that you added those models at the end of the video. Cross is so underrated. You have my likes and subscription.
I always wanted to play cross but I didn’t own the ps1 🥲
Can we break Golden Sun? One of these episodes? The series as a whole has a whole lot off screen, I think it'd be a good few episodes. :)
I have to thank you wholeheartedly for finally giving me closure on the chests behind the storekeepers. I have been wondering that mystery for years
Why didn't Squaresoft allow us to go to the era 1999 AD and go into those domes and such they could have added some sidequests there and then a boss battle that would thus trigger Lavos to rise and destroy the world and turn it into what we see in the era 3000AD would have been cool I think but ohwell the game is still brilliant no matter what
TheOfficialDJSuperRaveman Wow this would’ve been an Amazing idea!
Would have been nice,always wondered what that would be like
I'd like to clarify some things... the nicknacks layer is not simply for customization of areas, (and also why the lamp post is on it) but also to save tilespace in the ROM. Every tile takes up 8x8 pixels, which in turn takes up 32 bytes on the cartridge. This would mean you'd need a separate tile for every 8x8 section of every nicknack, lamp, or flag on top of every kind of floor or counter that it would ever show up on.... so, if you wanted a plate (two tiles wide) to be able to show up on three different kinds of terrain. (Two counters and maybe the floor or a table or something) that turns into 6 tiles, and 192 bytes. If you make the plate occupy its own layer, you cut that down to 2 tiles, 64 bytes, and if you do what a lot of stuff on SNES did, and indeed this game does in places, and have the plate mirror, you cut that once again down to 1 tile, at only 32 bytes.
As for the ending warp tile in Janus' room... its simply a debug feature. Every scene in the game occupies a unique room, while ironically, not every _actual location room_ occupies its own scene room (as you covered.) There are a few places where these debug doors exist. (By the way there are a complete suite of tools designed around recoding the game using its own normal internal scripting functions, and redesigning rooms, which is how I know what I do.)
As for the copies of doorways and such (and also most kinds of chests if you hadn't noticed) being located somewhere in the scene/room, this is done much like the sprites being in the background. These tiles can't simply be loaded and replaced quickly on the fly, however, tiles that are already in RAM can by copied and pasted easily and freely. This means every door you open, is actually a second of the map somewhere you can't see, getting copied, and pasted over (replacing) the old closed door, with the new open one. This is why there are both closed and open versions of doors most of the time. If a scene required a door to be closed, after you had opened it, it would have no way to do that if there was not a special copy reserved somewhere safely tucked away.
This becomes particularly important when you have multiple linked rooms all joined on one map. Since some doors are closed every time you first enter the room, but the room you left is in the same scenespace as the room you're entering, the closed door would be open still. The game has to copy the closed door over it during the fake transition fade.
I realize this video is more about things you can see inside the game during gameplay, but if you are ever interested, I'd recommend you take a walk toward the chronocompendium and see if you can't find the modding tools, as you can find all kinds of interesting things in the game just by opening it up for the first time.
You won't ever be able to Boundary Break Chrono Cross?
I take that as a confirmation of a future episode.
(You've stated that before and proved yourself wrong, so...)
Besides that: Great episode, initially I thought "boundary breaking" 2D games was a bit lackluster but thanks to layers it's pretty interesting.
Theory about the hidden objects under shopkeeper desks; at some point the dialogue system became capable of letting the player talk to shopkeepers from further away. Shops from before that point in development had the trigger object and they were never removed, and shops after that point didn't need it.
*_Still didn't play the game but it looks great 😎_*
play it.
Play it! You won't regret it! ;)
SS4KirinKutie *sure, sometime soon*
dexter1981 *It looks fun i am sure i won't regret it 😄*
Greatest game of all time IMO.
All the personalized decorations are the type of things that really give games personality. Shows how much the devs love their game.
Now I know what snes game to get 👍💯
Worth any price. I promise you that
The DS version is pretty sweet and not as expensive as the SNES version.
or use an emulator, srsly there are some situations and places you really want to speed up...
Lost Sanctum, Arena, a lot of same last Boss Fights for the endings, rushing thourgh finished dungeons... just to mention some :/
I'd rather get a real copy if I can't I would just use a emulator
yeah I'am also someone who buy real games in general, but some games are just too expensive or rare.
This video made me happy. Specially for the little extra at the end. Thanks!
Curious, why CAN'T you do Chrono Cross?
PS1 games unboundary breakable
this demands fixing. maybe someone out there will figure out how to mess with things
Is it a design issue? I know PS1 games do a lot of weird loading tricks to stream properly off the disk. Or is it just that no one has made the software to do it?
I'm assuming the problem is with draw distance in the PS1 era.
The draw distance for objects in those games are awful, just look at Gex as an example.
Although, this is pure speculation, I might be wrong, but that's what comes to mind instantly as to why they might not be doable.
In modern games, the graphics card handles perspective projection so it can be possible to make a hack that works for every game. For PS1 games, the hardware could draw polygons based on their 2D position on the screen, but all of the 3D projection was done in software. This means you'd have to hack each game separately to move the camera, which requires reverse-engineering the game engine.
Chrono trigger is my favorite game. Glad to see you decided to do an episode on it.
Everytime you hear Robo's theme, you are just getting rick roll'd.
This is correct
;-;
Robo? do you mean Gato?
three minutes in and my mind is blown by the outer ring effect for the warp portals, it's astounding some of the lengths devs would go to in order to achieve a desired effect.
Ayy do Kingdom Hearts Boundary Break.
Nice job Boundary Breaking the soundtrack, with the unused song in the 1999 segment, and the unused Frog's Theme intro!
hell yessss was i looking forward to this and hell it was so damn worth it.
are u using a new mic? your voice sounds insanely different, or its just my to go headphones since i listen to u in the subway atm but usually at home.
better or worse?
id say before was better.
I tried dampening the area i record in but i agree. I think it made it all sound more muffled. I'll be doing normal recordings next week
Chrono Trigger one of the greatest RPG's out there.
What to know another great RPG?...
Skies of Arcadia Legends.
Please for the love of god do SECRET OF MANA SNES NEXT PLEASE
0:33
Counter lady: oh it's just that kid with a frog and a vampire walking through walls again
Boundary break StarTropics? ;)
June in honor of Genyo Takedas retirement
Startropics 2 as well?
I'm glad a randomly looked up Chrono Trigger info on youtube. This was a really great insight to stuff I didn't know. SUBSCRIBED!
Sheez would you ever do a Dragon Quest 8 Episode?
SOHGuy mebbe
Maybe to celebrate DQ11? ;)
I think the reason there’s a trigger behind Janus’ bookcase is that it’s a leftover from an earlier point in development. In the Prototype, there’s unused maps for a secret passage in Zeal Palace that’s accessed by a Trigger in the same place as the one in the final game.
Shesez can you please do an off camera secrets of final fantasy 5?
クラウザーバッツ yes
wow that schala animation at the end brought back so many memories.
Dark Cloud or Chronicles. PLEASE.
*Tension rises* I know you want too ;)
Seconded
This show never ceases to surprise me, even if I've never played the game yet. That's the mark of something great.
please bayonetta for the next one
11:40 I'm fairly certain you can go in those doors (or at least in the DS version you can). It involves solving pretty vague puzzles in the antiquity buildings that open the doors when you're done and inside you can get a misc item that gives you a special triple tech that only works while said item is equipped.
holy shit.... dude u r the shit lol
castlevania 64 plz
You still blow me away with your amazing content. I love this series so much.
Thanks Mr. Fangle!