But eye-candy isn't all this game is about. The battle system is also a neat little addition to the game. Instead of holding down the action button waiting for your characters to strike, then jump back, you need to figure out some pretty nifty combos.

The plot constantly has so many twists in it, it's remarkable. You're off doing one job and then suddenly...*CREAK!*, there's a twist! Something that's surprising, no doubt. However, the twists in the plot can often get confusing, as the players may begin to wonder why they're doing what they're doing in the game.

And if there's anything that completely blew me off the chair, it's the music. Yasunori Mitsuda tells Nobuo Uematsu (composer of the Final Fantasy series) to go and take a hike, because the music is by far the best in any video game that I have ever experienced. If you experience this game for just one reason, it can be the music alone. Hey, I don't hate Nobuo Uematsu, he's a genius, but let's let Yasunori Mitsuda hog the spotlight for just a minute ^_^;;.

With so many playable characters in the game, you'll find yourself constantly replaying it just to see how the dialogue works differently with the plot.

This game is pretty much perfect. I don't sense any flaws in anything, but with so many characters, I can understand how it took Squaresoft a good, solid 10 months to translate!

Once again, Square has created characters that are instantly likable (albeit with tremendous speech problems) and thrust them into a story that spans two worlds, both of which rely on a young boy to save them from an evil threat.

The battle system is a departure from the Final Fantasy standard. Your characters depend on stamina points for attacks, both physical and magical. Instead of purchasing or drawing spells, you buy elements. Elements act the same as spells, and come in one of six colors. Each character also has an innate color attached to them. For example: Serge, the main character, has an innate element color of white. Therefore, when he uses white elements, such as Meteorite, the attack will be a little more powerful. Additionally, when attacks a Black elemental character, his white magic causes extra damage, and vice versa. As your character grows in experience, he or she will be able to carry more Elements, making them stronger in battle.

All this adds a huge amount of strategy to the battles. Plus, you see all of the enemies before you're forced to battle them, so you can avoid unwanted encounters. That's a nice change from standard RPGs.

The graphics are outstanding. The colors are bright, and the onscreen character models are finely detailed. The battle screens are impressive as well, with amazing special effects.

One of the best things about this game is the music. Most of the tracks sound like they were recorded with a full orchestra, and the music runs the entire emotional spectrum. For the first week or so I owned the game, I watched the full opening cinema just to hear the great intro theme.

A thousand-word review doesn't begin to do this game justice. With hours of gameplay, 45 possible party members, an engaging and exiting storyline and a great battle system, Chrono Cross is truly a masterpiece. Run along and buy the game, now.

Chrono Cross picks up 10 years after Chrono Trigger ends, at a series of islands too small to use in Chrono Trigger (but I have heard they are there). It has innumerable playable characters, which makes the game interesting, but has many issues which Squaresoft should have seen.

First of all, with the multitude of playable characters, you lose plot. Some of the characters of the story fit into it in many ways, these are the main characters such as Serge and Kid. However there are many characters who just appear. Starky, Van, and others have no point in the story, only a side quest which sticks to the story like an old, wet bandage.

Also, with that many characters, they couldn't give them many techs, so therefore another of Squaresoft's great innovations from Chrono Trigger was lost. Some history: in Chrono Trigger you have abilities called techs. You learn these as you gain AP (gained like EXP, only slower). Monsters, who moved about on the screen, would be targeted by techs in different ways. Some techs would only hit one monster, some would hit monsters in a certain radius from the character, or from the target monster, and some would hit all monsters. Since the monsters were constantly moving, this made placement of the characters and monsters essential to how techs were cast. Also each character had three double techs with each other character, and each combination of characters which included the main character had a triple tech. Not so in Chrono Cross. I believe there were about 12 to 20 double and triple techs, and three techs per character (there were about 10 or more in Chrono Trigger). This meant that you would have to go through the game more than once possibly to discover who had them. Sometimes these characters couldn't even be gotten together in one game, so you may have to go through three times to find a certain move. Also with all the side quests to get many of the items, I recomend the strategy guide for this game also.

The game's plot also had some gaps. There are certain places where you are expected to do something, but either don't know which world to do it in, or can't find where to do it. Sometimes you will have a suggested opportunity to get new characters which you won't know about because it never suggests exploring certain places. There is one point where it is essential to find characters, but it doesn't tell you they are available. Another annoying plot point is that any character will suddenly join the party with the knowledge of every event that has occured in the story, there is no explaination scene, a fact which annoys me when a new character in the group starts talking in detail about an event which happened before they joined the group.