Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers

[radiofloyd]

I’m about two hours into this on the Switch. I’ve been playing the main game, haven’t tried the visual novel prequel thing yet. But I’ll probably play them concurrently. The game takes a few twists and turns early on, but nothing overly dramatic. So far, typical jrpg opening (as jrpg stories go).

 

The combat is quite unique though. Enemies have elemental types and during battles there is an elemental field, which, depending on the elemental spells used causes certain elements to get stronger and the opposite type weaker. For example blue and red (water and fire) are opposites. If you use a blue elemental spell, the blue area of the elemental field (this is shown on the screen) will grow larger, and blue spells will become stronger and red spells weaker. One interesting tactic connected to this is when fighting enemies of different element types, their spells can antagonise each other, which can affect the order in which you might want to take them down.

 

In addition to that, when you do a normal attack, you can choose between weak, medium and strong. Weak attacks have high accuracy and strong attacks low accuracy. Every hit that connects raises the accuracy of subsequent attacks. It’s up to you how you choose to string combos together.

 

There’s more to combat than that but those are just a couple of interesting points.

[radiofloyd]

Heads up, you can die in the visual novel Radical Dreamers. I had assumed if anything like that happened the game would just put you back at the start of the battle but no, it’s game over. You have to reload your save. I’ll retrace my steps but probably in small 5 minute bursts.