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freshfeelingI played RevenantKioku's Chrono Trigger Holiday Challenge for my first time in 2023 and had a great time. I also played using a Lua script called PartyOn that forced my battle party to match my required characters at all time while leaving the "field party" intact, allowing me to do what I consider to be a very purist form of the run. The script was a little buggy at the start of my 2023 playthrough, and the characters in 2023 (Marle, Lucca and Robo) were a little mundane... so, despite the limited differences, I decided to opt in for 2024.
I found myself with time to play on the first day of the challenge as prescribed: December 1st.
My characters for this year are Crono, Lucca, and Ayla. This will feel a little on the dry side for the middle 1/3rd of the game, especially since Crono and Ayla are almost always in my party when I play vanilla. It will be nice, however, to have such powerful characters, and the only real drawback is that I have none of the game's three best healers: Frog, Marle and Robo.
Also fun is that, due to the PartyOn script at work, Ayla who is normally recruited a good 20% of the way into the game will be available early and sort of carry the team a bit. She starts with her normal level and with her normal equipment. Her equipment can't be changed until she joins for realsies.
For now, Ayla looks like this:
or sometimes like this:
There are some funny palette behaviours because the game's in-battle character palettes are inherited from the field party's character palettes and (apparently) stored separately from the in-battle character instance and stats. Thus, during parts where Crono is supposed to be alone, the additional characters appear in very unusual colours.
You may also notice that Lucca's name is "Frog " with a space at the end. This unfortunate choice was requested by my oldest child who has some experience with the game and, disappointed that Frog wasn't one of my characters specifically asked that Lucca be named "Frog". I don't know why the space is there. Whatever, I'll cope. It's awkward but I enjoy silliness anyway so whatever.
As predicted, Ayla makes the early game pretty easy with her advanced level.
That said, she starts with no techs. It took a while for her just to learn Kiss - which would be basically my only healing tech in the entire game.
Once Frog (the one that's actually a frog) is recruited, Ayla's colour palette normalizes, uh, somewhat.
Her She-Hulk-ish-ness is maybe actually pretty suitable. I got the Naga-ette bromide here.
I mentioned Kiss being our only healing tech. It's also odd having a character in battle who we won't be able to access out of battle for such a long time. We are unable to cure Ayla out of battle (by most means), meaning if she needs a heal that has to be done during battle, including if she were to require an MP refill.
Yakra was really easy, although some healing was actually required.
After wrapping up what we needed to do in 600AD, we re-recruited Marle to head back home. This allowed me to see what Ayla looked like with Marle's palette, and it was actually awesome.
I realized there's a funny sort of presentation/story unification scenario here where Crono's inability to speak contributed to his sentence after his trial. A lot of trouble could've been avoided if he just talked.
Like in 2023, I greatly enjoyed the prison escape sequence because using my three-person party in a chunk of the game that's intended for Crono on his own gets really funky.
I also snapped a screenshot of the enemy called Yodu De because people weren't aware of it on the Chrono Trigger Riddle Topic on GameFAQs a while ago.
Dragon Tank was really easy. With Ayla's brawn I didn't even really consider the order of attacking its components.
We escaped into an unknown time and navigated Lab 16. Crono hadn't actually learned Slash yet, so I tried using my OP friend Ayla's attacks against the Shadows but this is just as useless as usual, so the battles were slow at times.
Ayla's presence paid off once again against the Guardian, though. We managed to one-cycle it.
We crossed Lab 32 without touching the Sewer Access, and went into the factory. Our palettes were pretty screwed up again: my field team was now Crono, Robo, Lucca and my battle team is Crono, Lucca, Ayla, and the order matters somewhat. Consequently, Lucca has changed colour.
This area was quick and easy, really, though perhaps not as quick as when we have Robo and Laser Spin. The AoE attacks we have available just aren't that strong so some of the fights were a bit on the slow side.
The R-series, however, were very quick to beat. Crono and Lucca used Fire Whirl on one group of them while Ayla one-shotted the others with Rollo Kick.
The final robot actually had some nasty counters - I'm not really sure what provokes this - resulting in LuccaFrog ending the fight with 1 HP. 1 is enough!
We met and fought Spekkio and given we were right at the threshold of him advancing between frog form and kiwala form, it was a tough fight! Kiss helped a lot. I managed to get quite an odd screenshot in the wake of that fight.
We then proceeded through Medina and the Heckran Cave. I tried out Ayla with Robo's palette and it actually also looks really neat.
Heckran was a tough fight. I think in my early-game config I set the speeds to really high and consequently timing attacks against his counter phases and breaks was tough. Heckran did counter my attack once. We required quite a bit of healing to get through, but we won.
We got the Taban Vest and blew through to 600AD to investigate Magus and Lavos. We quickly ended up facing Zombor. It was a bit of a clumsy fight where I wasn't mindful of some of his stronger AoE attacks and counters. There were good aspects, though: Fire Kick was quite strong against his lower body.
We won, but I did have to revive Lucca partway through. Ayla got MP Buster'd at the end, which is a bit of a hassle. As noted earlier, it's pretty hard to recover her MP right now.
We explored Porre and the area, and then I saved outside of the Denadoro Mountains.
Huh. It took three gameplay sessions to get this far last year.
Index | Next >
I found myself with time to play on the first day of the challenge as prescribed: December 1st.
My characters for this year are Crono, Lucca, and Ayla. This will feel a little on the dry side for the middle 1/3rd of the game, especially since Crono and Ayla are almost always in my party when I play vanilla. It will be nice, however, to have such powerful characters, and the only real drawback is that I have none of the game's three best healers: Frog, Marle and Robo.
Also fun is that, due to the PartyOn script at work, Ayla who is normally recruited a good 20% of the way into the game will be available early and sort of carry the team a bit. She starts with her normal level and with her normal equipment. Her equipment can't be changed until she joins for realsies.
For now, Ayla looks like this:
or sometimes like this:
There are some funny palette behaviours because the game's in-battle character palettes are inherited from the field party's character palettes and (apparently) stored separately from the in-battle character instance and stats. Thus, during parts where Crono is supposed to be alone, the additional characters appear in very unusual colours.
You may also notice that Lucca's name is "Frog " with a space at the end. This unfortunate choice was requested by my oldest child who has some experience with the game and, disappointed that Frog wasn't one of my characters specifically asked that Lucca be named "Frog". I don't know why the space is there. Whatever, I'll cope. It's awkward but I enjoy silliness anyway so whatever.
As predicted, Ayla makes the early game pretty easy with her advanced level.
That said, she starts with no techs. It took a while for her just to learn Kiss - which would be basically my only healing tech in the entire game.
Once Frog (the one that's actually a frog) is recruited, Ayla's colour palette normalizes, uh, somewhat.
Her She-Hulk-ish-ness is maybe actually pretty suitable. I got the Naga-ette bromide here.
I mentioned Kiss being our only healing tech. It's also odd having a character in battle who we won't be able to access out of battle for such a long time. We are unable to cure Ayla out of battle (by most means), meaning if she needs a heal that has to be done during battle, including if she were to require an MP refill.
Yakra was really easy, although some healing was actually required.
I realized there's a funny sort of presentation/story unification scenario here where Crono's inability to speak contributed to his sentence after his trial. A lot of trouble could've been avoided if he just talked.
Like in 2023, I greatly enjoyed the prison escape sequence because using my three-person party in a chunk of the game that's intended for Crono on his own gets really funky.
I also snapped a screenshot of the enemy called Yodu De because people weren't aware of it on the Chrono Trigger Riddle Topic on GameFAQs a while ago.
Dragon Tank was really easy. With Ayla's brawn I didn't even really consider the order of attacking its components.
We escaped into an unknown time and navigated Lab 16. Crono hadn't actually learned Slash yet, so I tried using my OP friend Ayla's attacks against the Shadows but this is just as useless as usual, so the battles were slow at times.
Ayla's presence paid off once again against the Guardian, though. We managed to one-cycle it.
We crossed Lab 32 without touching the Sewer Access, and went into the factory. Our palettes were pretty screwed up again: my field team was now Crono, Robo, Lucca and my battle team is Crono, Lucca, Ayla, and the order matters somewhat. Consequently, Lucca has changed colour.
This area was quick and easy, really, though perhaps not as quick as when we have Robo and Laser Spin. The AoE attacks we have available just aren't that strong so some of the fights were a bit on the slow side.
The R-series, however, were very quick to beat. Crono and Lucca used Fire Whirl on one group of them while Ayla one-shotted the others with Rollo Kick.
The final robot actually had some nasty counters - I'm not really sure what provokes this - resulting in LuccaFrog ending the fight with 1 HP. 1 is enough!
We met and fought Spekkio and given we were right at the threshold of him advancing between frog form and kiwala form, it was a tough fight! Kiss helped a lot. I managed to get quite an odd screenshot in the wake of that fight.
We then proceeded through Medina and the Heckran Cave. I tried out Ayla with Robo's palette and it actually also looks really neat.
Heckran was a tough fight. I think in my early-game config I set the speeds to really high and consequently timing attacks against his counter phases and breaks was tough. Heckran did counter my attack once. We required quite a bit of healing to get through, but we won.
We got the Taban Vest and blew through to 600AD to investigate Magus and Lavos. We quickly ended up facing Zombor. It was a bit of a clumsy fight where I wasn't mindful of some of his stronger AoE attacks and counters. There were good aspects, though: Fire Kick was quite strong against his lower body.
We won, but I did have to revive Lucca partway through. Ayla got MP Buster'd at the end, which is a bit of a hassle. As noted earlier, it's pretty hard to recover her MP right now.
We explored Porre and the area, and then I saved outside of the Denadoro Mountains.
Huh. It took three gameplay sessions to get this far last year.
Index | Next >
