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queenlua(in the spirit of that famous Kanye line)
SO i just finished reading To The Lighthouse
around the time that an Actual Honest-To-Goodness IRL Friend posted that he's rereading The Waves and he really loves Woolf
i informed him of two things:
1) hi i just read my first Woolf novel it was fun!
2) did you know it's an awful lot like Chrono Cross and i'm a huge nerd
said friend fatefully replied, "i would like to hear this comparison," and then
this happened. i'd like to say "i didn't know i could nerd about chrono cross for 2k words" but. of course i knew that. i fucking knew that.
anyway i dropped this in his inbox but i figured fandom nerds may dig it more. (did i mention said friend is an honest to goodness phd student in literature? p sure i'm just here to drag down his level of discourse ayooooo)
okay, but i'm warning you i score like a -5 on Culture :P
OK SO
first, recall that Chrono Cross was ostensibly a sequel to Chrono Trigger, and it managed to piss off just about everyone who loved Chrono Trigger. see, Chrono Trigger, while it's very fun, is also at its heart just a Good Rollicking Fun Plot-y Time Travel Adventure, much like Back to the Future or something.
now imagine that Back to the Future 2 were like, some weird arthouse film with garish lighting, and also none of the original cast came back at all, and also they kill Marty McFly off-screen, and there's lots of somber violin music, and it has very artsy special effects but no real plot.
that's what Chrono Cross is!!! :DDDD
kinda. i mean, the game has a plot, but it's somewhat beside the point. that plot is extremely thin, and it diverges into Complete And Total Nonsense somewhere around the third act. (granted, lots of JRPGs of this era diverged into Complete And Total Nonsense at some point, but most had a much stronger plot in the beginning, and fell apart only much later in the story.)
also, there are literally dozens of recruitable characters—which means none of the characters actually get that much development outside of the main duo. there are lots of irritating one-note mascots. (also, there are no characters from the original game, the *travesty*—remember, they kill Marty McFly off-screen.)
but: i played chrono cross waaaay before i played chrono trigger and i *loved* it, very thoroughly and immediately. it was like no game i'd ever played before (or since!). it was so bold and striking with its use of color and sound—in an era where everyone was busy trying to out-grunge each other, and blasting crappy synthesized MIDI guitar in your face, Chrono Cross chose to go with the brightest Caribbean colors the system could handle, and lots and lots of Celtic and acoustic guitar tunes. rather than trying to draw me in immediately by, idk, burning down my beloved peasant village (see #2 on http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html ), or putting me in the role of a gritty mercenary, or whatever—it puts you in the shoes of a silent protagonist, which of course forces you to project a lot of your own feelings onto him—and you slip by mistake from your home village to a new world, where no one knows you, no one remembers you, and you're very lost and alone and not-magical or powerful or badass. and then: you go forward.
what i'm saying is, Chrono Cross's weird meandering plot isn't *bad*—it's just that the game is way, way more about feeling, and motif, and letting you experience a lot of intense emotion through a lot of subtle manipulation of your scenery and scenarios. (more on that last bit later.) suffice to say that that game's Dead Sea sequence is perhaps one of the most eerie and affecting things i've experienced in any media ever—and that whole sequence is way more about unsettling resurgences of older motifs and skillful manipulation of scenery/music/etc than it is about anything to do with a plot.
OKAY SO. that's Chrono Cross. onto To The Lighthouse:
recall, i went into To The Lighthouse knowing nothing about Woolf. so i felt like i was kind of groping in the dark for the first fifty pages, reading it like i would most other novels—what's going on, what's the point, what's this about. someone interrupted me around page 40, asking what i was reading, and i really didn't know how to answer beyond "uhhh, they would like to go to the lighthouse but the weather is bad, and also everyone has a lot of feelings i guess?"
somewhere around page 60ish or so—two things happened. i think i started getting the hang of Woolf's sentences (they are very beautiful, but very ornate, and i kept halting along trying to figure out if i was supposed to read it more like prose, or poetry, or what—eventually it fell into this really lovely breezy rhythm), and also, i realized i didn't really care about the plot anymore, not really, i just wanted to spend more time in the heads of all these people. (i typed "characters" and then that felt wrong so i replaced it with "people." is that weird?)
so: To The Lighthouse has a plot but it's somewhat beside the point, as far as i can tell. like (i believe?) other modernist novels at the time it was trying to experiment with using all this PoV and trippy sentence structure stuff to tell its story, much like Chrono Cross diverged from its predecessor. there's your first parallel.
the next parallel: the way Woolf uses language, wow. it was so striking to me, the way she would effortlessly weave in the same symbols and images and little phrases—the urns, the shawl, the "thing you could ruffle with your breath," the *table*!—over and over, and yet somehow it never grows repetitive or dull; each time a symbol comes back a little more is illuminated. even if very little has changed; even if the only thing that has happened in the interim is Mr. Ramsay Having A Lot Of Broody Dude!Thoughts. similarly Chrono Cross is built mostly on thematic and rhythmic elements: bold colors, eerie parallels between various settings in the game (more on that later), vague brooding in the form of poems scattered throughout the game, and silences. (god i love the use of silence in that game. they really let the quiet moments be quiet.)
and, spending time in the heads of all these people: it's impressive how many shades of being Woolf manages to portray over the course of like... two days? you see into the head of Mr. & Mrs. Ramsay and Lily and Charles and etc—you see so much, so directly, that it's sometimes hard to pin down what sort of person they *are*, especially at first—we see Charles's nastiest thoughts, which are really tremendously nasty, but now and again he'll have a sweet moment that forces you to re-evaluate—is he nasty, or just horribly awkward? and so on. and by the end i felt both like i knew these people intimately, and that it would be impossible to ever know anyone: they each "contain multitudes" or whatnot.
chrono cross may seem *wholly opposite* in this respect, but i'd argue that the *effect* is very similar. recall that Chrono Cross has a huge cast of mostly underdeveloped characters, and you do *not* spend much time at all in their heads.
something i found weirdly appealing about Chrono Cross was puzzling out *why* these characters joined you. often, their stated motivation has very little to do with your Main Quest (though, recall, your main quest is a little... vague). they have agendas that are weird and hard to understand and not about you. usually you *do* get context—their home village, or you can make a guess of some motivations based on their species, or whatever. i would make up stories about them in my head but frustratingly i never really *knew*.
i mean, that's stretching it a bit. virginia woolf is using positive space to convince you that people are mysterious and changeable and hard to understand; i'm asserting that Chrono Cross is using negative space to the same effect. but it's a bit of a tenuous thing to assert, and i'm pretty certain the creators didn't *intend* that effect in Chrono Cross whatsoever, i think they just ran out of time to implement their fullest vision (apparently the original concept was "literally every single person you meet can be recruited to join your party," which is hilariously absurd). but—well, that's what i got out of it.
actually, now that i think of it: the stark division between the sections separated by "Time Passes" is *actually* a strong parallel, and *eerily* reminiscent of Chrono Cross.
the entire conceit of Chrono Cross is this: you stumble accidentally into an alternate dimension. this alternate dimension looks very much like your home dimension, except—your mom doesn't recognize you. the village music has changed, subtly. and, you discover at the beautiful conclusion to the game's opening act, an old gravestone: with your name on it. in this universe you drowned at age 12. you don't exist.
the *entire game* rests on the contrast between the two dimensions. you travel back and forth between them—first, just because you want to get home. then, again, because the antidote for the poison that's killing your not!girlfriend only exists in the other dimension. and so on.
(this, of course, is the "more on that later" that i referenced twice prior. it's a wonderful framing for the story.)
and your heart aches with each transition between dimensions because—both worlds are ruined in different ways. in one world you lived; in the other you died. the hydras have all gone extinct in one world. the military occupation of a hostile foreign nation is further underway in another. in one dimension an adorable dragon hatches from its egg; in the other the egg is crushed. in one dimension a son his disappointed in his artist father because he's impractical and chasing daydreams and has trouble keeping a roof over their head; in the other dimension, that father chose a stable career and became a blacksmith to provide for his son, but *now* the son's disappointed because his father's so dour and stern and sad all the time.
you traverse literally the same map, from two different perspectives, over and over, and always there's some new fresh little detail you pick up on: oh. oh god, that is different now.
and it makes me think of how the house fills with rats during "Time Passes", and the swallow's nest getting built up, all the dust and cobwebs that creep into the place—and, though the housekeeper does her best to restore it, at the very beginning of the third section of the novel, Lily's keen eye continues to show us what has changed and what has not changed.
...but see, when i lay it all out like that, it sounds like the reason for my comparison between CC and TTL is very Logical and Structural and based on Actual Analysis.
but nah, the moment the comparison first rose to my mind was just a gut reflex. i was halfway through the last section of To The Lighthouse, when Lily Briscoe was staring out upon the ocean, comparing her brush-strokes to the moment between waves, and looking out for that little sailboat, suddenly i thought—i felt—that this was *the same ocean* that Chrono Cross had.
because the ocean is a *huge* motif in Chrono Cross. unlike most JRPGs, the game's setting is not a vast EuroFantasy continent but a modest little archipelago; most the villages you visit are full of fishermen and boats and huts. and the ocean pervades the whole game: it looms in a huge wave in the opening credits, it's where you first cross dimensions and where you face the final challenge, and *you are made to feel small by it, always*. all the other JRPGs i played had you *conquer* the world map, eventually—you'd get an airship or a car, and zip super-fast between all these grand pseudo-industrial cities. but in chrono cross you're always traveling by foot, or in a tiny sad-looking rowboat, and the ocean takes up the majority of the overworld screen. even when i was slaying literal dragons, at the height of my in-game power, a part of me was always a little terrified of being swallowed up in that ocean.
in To The Lighthouse, there's this sense of the ocean as this huge and relentless force, the constant beating of the waves making one think constantly of time, time passing passing passing—well, i had that feeling in Chrono Cross, too. it's a game mostly about feeling lost and alone and lonely. it begins and ends on a beach, in perfect silence. time passes.
fin
p.s. yes chrono cross is my favorite video game as a matter of fact whatever might give you that crazy idea
SO i just finished reading To The Lighthouse
around the time that an Actual Honest-To-Goodness IRL Friend posted that he's rereading The Waves and he really loves Woolf
i informed him of two things:
1) hi i just read my first Woolf novel it was fun!
2) did you know it's an awful lot like Chrono Cross and i'm a huge nerd
said friend fatefully replied, "i would like to hear this comparison," and then
this happened. i'd like to say "i didn't know i could nerd about chrono cross for 2k words" but. of course i knew that. i fucking knew that.
anyway i dropped this in his inbox but i figured fandom nerds may dig it more. (did i mention said friend is an honest to goodness phd student in literature? p sure i'm just here to drag down his level of discourse ayooooo)
okay, but i'm warning you i score like a -5 on Culture :P
OK SO
first, recall that Chrono Cross was ostensibly a sequel to Chrono Trigger, and it managed to piss off just about everyone who loved Chrono Trigger. see, Chrono Trigger, while it's very fun, is also at its heart just a Good Rollicking Fun Plot-y Time Travel Adventure, much like Back to the Future or something.
now imagine that Back to the Future 2 were like, some weird arthouse film with garish lighting, and also none of the original cast came back at all, and also they kill Marty McFly off-screen, and there's lots of somber violin music, and it has very artsy special effects but no real plot.
that's what Chrono Cross is!!! :DDDD
kinda. i mean, the game has a plot, but it's somewhat beside the point. that plot is extremely thin, and it diverges into Complete And Total Nonsense somewhere around the third act. (granted, lots of JRPGs of this era diverged into Complete And Total Nonsense at some point, but most had a much stronger plot in the beginning, and fell apart only much later in the story.)
also, there are literally dozens of recruitable characters—which means none of the characters actually get that much development outside of the main duo. there are lots of irritating one-note mascots. (also, there are no characters from the original game, the *travesty*—remember, they kill Marty McFly off-screen.)
but: i played chrono cross waaaay before i played chrono trigger and i *loved* it, very thoroughly and immediately. it was like no game i'd ever played before (or since!). it was so bold and striking with its use of color and sound—in an era where everyone was busy trying to out-grunge each other, and blasting crappy synthesized MIDI guitar in your face, Chrono Cross chose to go with the brightest Caribbean colors the system could handle, and lots and lots of Celtic and acoustic guitar tunes. rather than trying to draw me in immediately by, idk, burning down my beloved peasant village (see #2 on http://project-apollo.net/text/rpg.html ), or putting me in the role of a gritty mercenary, or whatever—it puts you in the shoes of a silent protagonist, which of course forces you to project a lot of your own feelings onto him—and you slip by mistake from your home village to a new world, where no one knows you, no one remembers you, and you're very lost and alone and not-magical or powerful or badass. and then: you go forward.
what i'm saying is, Chrono Cross's weird meandering plot isn't *bad*—it's just that the game is way, way more about feeling, and motif, and letting you experience a lot of intense emotion through a lot of subtle manipulation of your scenery and scenarios. (more on that last bit later.) suffice to say that that game's Dead Sea sequence is perhaps one of the most eerie and affecting things i've experienced in any media ever—and that whole sequence is way more about unsettling resurgences of older motifs and skillful manipulation of scenery/music/etc than it is about anything to do with a plot.
OKAY SO. that's Chrono Cross. onto To The Lighthouse:
recall, i went into To The Lighthouse knowing nothing about Woolf. so i felt like i was kind of groping in the dark for the first fifty pages, reading it like i would most other novels—what's going on, what's the point, what's this about. someone interrupted me around page 40, asking what i was reading, and i really didn't know how to answer beyond "uhhh, they would like to go to the lighthouse but the weather is bad, and also everyone has a lot of feelings i guess?"
somewhere around page 60ish or so—two things happened. i think i started getting the hang of Woolf's sentences (they are very beautiful, but very ornate, and i kept halting along trying to figure out if i was supposed to read it more like prose, or poetry, or what—eventually it fell into this really lovely breezy rhythm), and also, i realized i didn't really care about the plot anymore, not really, i just wanted to spend more time in the heads of all these people. (i typed "characters" and then that felt wrong so i replaced it with "people." is that weird?)
so: To The Lighthouse has a plot but it's somewhat beside the point, as far as i can tell. like (i believe?) other modernist novels at the time it was trying to experiment with using all this PoV and trippy sentence structure stuff to tell its story, much like Chrono Cross diverged from its predecessor. there's your first parallel.
the next parallel: the way Woolf uses language, wow. it was so striking to me, the way she would effortlessly weave in the same symbols and images and little phrases—the urns, the shawl, the "thing you could ruffle with your breath," the *table*!—over and over, and yet somehow it never grows repetitive or dull; each time a symbol comes back a little more is illuminated. even if very little has changed; even if the only thing that has happened in the interim is Mr. Ramsay Having A Lot Of Broody Dude!Thoughts. similarly Chrono Cross is built mostly on thematic and rhythmic elements: bold colors, eerie parallels between various settings in the game (more on that later), vague brooding in the form of poems scattered throughout the game, and silences. (god i love the use of silence in that game. they really let the quiet moments be quiet.)
and, spending time in the heads of all these people: it's impressive how many shades of being Woolf manages to portray over the course of like... two days? you see into the head of Mr. & Mrs. Ramsay and Lily and Charles and etc—you see so much, so directly, that it's sometimes hard to pin down what sort of person they *are*, especially at first—we see Charles's nastiest thoughts, which are really tremendously nasty, but now and again he'll have a sweet moment that forces you to re-evaluate—is he nasty, or just horribly awkward? and so on. and by the end i felt both like i knew these people intimately, and that it would be impossible to ever know anyone: they each "contain multitudes" or whatnot.
chrono cross may seem *wholly opposite* in this respect, but i'd argue that the *effect* is very similar. recall that Chrono Cross has a huge cast of mostly underdeveloped characters, and you do *not* spend much time at all in their heads.
something i found weirdly appealing about Chrono Cross was puzzling out *why* these characters joined you. often, their stated motivation has very little to do with your Main Quest (though, recall, your main quest is a little... vague). they have agendas that are weird and hard to understand and not about you. usually you *do* get context—their home village, or you can make a guess of some motivations based on their species, or whatever. i would make up stories about them in my head but frustratingly i never really *knew*.
i mean, that's stretching it a bit. virginia woolf is using positive space to convince you that people are mysterious and changeable and hard to understand; i'm asserting that Chrono Cross is using negative space to the same effect. but it's a bit of a tenuous thing to assert, and i'm pretty certain the creators didn't *intend* that effect in Chrono Cross whatsoever, i think they just ran out of time to implement their fullest vision (apparently the original concept was "literally every single person you meet can be recruited to join your party," which is hilariously absurd). but—well, that's what i got out of it.
actually, now that i think of it: the stark division between the sections separated by "Time Passes" is *actually* a strong parallel, and *eerily* reminiscent of Chrono Cross.
the entire conceit of Chrono Cross is this: you stumble accidentally into an alternate dimension. this alternate dimension looks very much like your home dimension, except—your mom doesn't recognize you. the village music has changed, subtly. and, you discover at the beautiful conclusion to the game's opening act, an old gravestone: with your name on it. in this universe you drowned at age 12. you don't exist.
the *entire game* rests on the contrast between the two dimensions. you travel back and forth between them—first, just because you want to get home. then, again, because the antidote for the poison that's killing your not!girlfriend only exists in the other dimension. and so on.
(this, of course, is the "more on that later" that i referenced twice prior. it's a wonderful framing for the story.)
and your heart aches with each transition between dimensions because—both worlds are ruined in different ways. in one world you lived; in the other you died. the hydras have all gone extinct in one world. the military occupation of a hostile foreign nation is further underway in another. in one dimension an adorable dragon hatches from its egg; in the other the egg is crushed. in one dimension a son his disappointed in his artist father because he's impractical and chasing daydreams and has trouble keeping a roof over their head; in the other dimension, that father chose a stable career and became a blacksmith to provide for his son, but *now* the son's disappointed because his father's so dour and stern and sad all the time.
you traverse literally the same map, from two different perspectives, over and over, and always there's some new fresh little detail you pick up on: oh. oh god, that is different now.
and it makes me think of how the house fills with rats during "Time Passes", and the swallow's nest getting built up, all the dust and cobwebs that creep into the place—and, though the housekeeper does her best to restore it, at the very beginning of the third section of the novel, Lily's keen eye continues to show us what has changed and what has not changed.
...but see, when i lay it all out like that, it sounds like the reason for my comparison between CC and TTL is very Logical and Structural and based on Actual Analysis.
but nah, the moment the comparison first rose to my mind was just a gut reflex. i was halfway through the last section of To The Lighthouse, when Lily Briscoe was staring out upon the ocean, comparing her brush-strokes to the moment between waves, and looking out for that little sailboat, suddenly i thought—i felt—that this was *the same ocean* that Chrono Cross had.
because the ocean is a *huge* motif in Chrono Cross. unlike most JRPGs, the game's setting is not a vast EuroFantasy continent but a modest little archipelago; most the villages you visit are full of fishermen and boats and huts. and the ocean pervades the whole game: it looms in a huge wave in the opening credits, it's where you first cross dimensions and where you face the final challenge, and *you are made to feel small by it, always*. all the other JRPGs i played had you *conquer* the world map, eventually—you'd get an airship or a car, and zip super-fast between all these grand pseudo-industrial cities. but in chrono cross you're always traveling by foot, or in a tiny sad-looking rowboat, and the ocean takes up the majority of the overworld screen. even when i was slaying literal dragons, at the height of my in-game power, a part of me was always a little terrified of being swallowed up in that ocean.
in To The Lighthouse, there's this sense of the ocean as this huge and relentless force, the constant beating of the waves making one think constantly of time, time passing passing passing—well, i had that feeling in Chrono Cross, too. it's a game mostly about feeling lost and alone and lonely. it begins and ends on a beach, in perfect silence. time passes.
fin
p.s. yes chrono cross is my favorite video game as a matter of fact whatever might give you that crazy idea
no subject
Date: 2018-04-18 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-18 09:25 pm (UTC)chrono cross is a PS1 game, actually, so that's the emulator you'll want :P
i actually haven't played the game recently at all—maybe not since freshman year of college or so—and though i've been feeling the urge to replay building inside me for the past six months or so, i'm always a little afraid it won't be as wonderful as i remember, you know?
and it does suffer from the common 90's/00's JRPG ailment of "must make game take 40hrs to beat, must enforce tedious turn-based combat upon our players"—probably easily remedied with a save state or whatever emulator hacks there are these days—because it's just very hard for me to enjoy that style of combat system anymore even if i love everything else in the game (wandering through villages and exploring and whatnot).
but it's very much a game i played at that Extremely Perfect Time in your life where you're young enough that stuff is still dazzlingly new but old enough to really appreciate it (preteens/early teens). i mean, there's still stuff all the time that's dazzlingly new to me, but not in quite the same way as Chrono Cross was, and i'm afraid without that preteen glitter maybe i'll get too distracted by the game's flaws!
(but i am probably replaying it again soon anyway. the soundtrack and art alone, i could listen to / look at for hours and hours.)