Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge 2023 Part I

[freshfeeling]

In Fall 2023, RevenantKioku (the same fella from the Four Job Fiesta and many other such events) came up with a series of charity events for a humanitarian cause in response to an ongoing-but-recently-escalating conflict that left a lot of children and other civilians as victims. The only one that time and access really allowed me to do was his Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge, active for the month of December 2023.

The Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge previously ran in 2017 but this is my first time trying it. The idea is that you're assigned three random characters from the seven playable characters in the game, and you need to use your assigned three characters at all points where you've got the option to use them. (I don't know the details of the randomization process but it seems like people disproportionately frequently draw Crono... and disproportionately rarely draw the final character.) Adhering to specific characters is a bit hard to do, or at least rather awkward, with the constraints of the game when it's unmodified.

I decided to... not do it unmodified. I mean, the game itself is unmodified, but I made a script to run on top of it. I conceptualized it in November, posted about it with some friends on a private board, and then put it together right before the holiday challenge began. It's posted here on my GitHub.
The jist of how this script works is that it looks at one byte that indicates whether you're in battle or not. If you're in battle, but you weren't in battle on the previous frame, then set the current party equal to the assigned party. If you are not in battle, but you were on the previous frame, then set the current party equal to whatever the party was before the battle. I did some limited testing and decided to jump right in!

As we'll see here... that may have been a mistake.

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My party was assigned as Marle, Lucca and Robo. This is a fine group, and I'm glad it won't feel normal, although frankly any combination with Frog, Ayla or Magus would've been more interesting to me. One particular problem I foresee with this team is Nizbel II, for whom you normally depend on Crono's lightning attacks to battle. I hope I won't have to grind until Robo learns Shock before that point!

Although it took a bit of setup, I was actually quite confident in this script from my testing! And the game started out normally enough.


It went a bit wrong when I made a typo that mis-assigned one of the party members, and then I tried to correct it, but with some values already set my attempted fixes broke everything a bit worse.

I re-started and there were other problems. I didn't manage to identify the problems while I was playing, although I had some inklings and I was able to fix the script really quickly immediately after. By the time I settled into some legitimate game progress, I was just manually editing the game's memory when any important scene was happening outside of battle.

Because I was playing the start of the game repeatedly, I wasn't exploring every single thing or interacting with a ton of NPCs. I was pretty minimalist going through the Millenial Fair. After the fair, we got into real battles, which looked kind of like this:

It was pretty cool. The palettes were bad, and Robo was participating from the top-left corner, just off the edge of the screen, but it worked nicely and was quite novel.

The problem was, well, the script's problem... where I realized the party changes that were being forced by the game's normal behaviour were going to be ignored by my script. That resulted in scenes like this one:

"Oh my God, so that's why Marle disappeared from the timeline! ... She's standing right behind me, isn't she?"

As I played, I wasn't sure how easy it would be to fix my script so I decided to keep going and just manually changed values as things went awry. That said, it was funny observing which parts worked and which parts didn't. I was surprised I could proceed right through having Frog join the team while Marle was following me around. As I did this, I tried Laser Spin which looked really neat in a battle that has no third character position.


Then, inside the cathedral, I was surprised that the scene where the party slides down the booby-trapped stairs was a hardlock if you don't have three characters in your out-of-battle party. That seemed so ordinary, but it breaks the game! With these issues, I was considering being done but I thought I'd at least finish the cathedral.

Battles were interesting; with Robo never having been in the party and Marle and/or Lucca not officially in the out-of-battle party, we had pretty close to no ability to heal outside of battle. This meant I had to use Aura and/or Aura Beam a few times to keep the hitpoints up, especially with Marle and Lucca's low levels. Marle and Lucca also have poor offense, especially pre-Spekkio, which drew out the battles considerably. All three characters are pretty slow, too. By the time we got to the end, our TP was feeling a bit lean.

These same factors made the battle with Yakra the hardest I've ever had, even despite Robo's somewhat advanced level. The characters are slower, we were lacking offense compared to a normal party with Crono and Frog, and needing more individual strikes prompted a higher number of counter attacks. I've never had a Yakra battle like this.


Even though I had previously tested my script through this part in the game, it froze when Frog was leaving the party in the Guardia Castle throne room. I decided I'd fix the script before the next session and finish up the cathedral an additional time but hopefully with better results.

I did fix the script pretty much immediately after wrapping up. Again, it's only very lightly tested... but when has that stopped me?

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