/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9945301
>that makes sense, the spirit of the planet scheming to help chrono and gang remove the space parasite makes sense. like with ff7 and the planet/the lifestream
I actually think that the one who opened the gates is future Schala, not the spirit of the planet. Robo's speculation in the forest contains some problems and contradictions with the events of the game, and there's no real evidence that the planet is alive. FF7 was very, very explicit about the life stream, it's not the same situation.

My tinfoil hat theory is that this was discussed in the writing room of Trigger as something that would lay the seeds for the sequel, and Kato took the idea and completely fumbled the execution with his own "genius" ideas.

>it just seems like a copout to avoid explaining stuff
Either that, or he really, genuinely thought that this was a great explanation that made sense.

>i can buy the frozen flame retcon as the reason queen zeal is crazy/the thing that powers the mammon machine. that makes sense
It could be made to make sense. Just as you said, explain that Melchior built the Mammon Machine after finding the Frozen Flame. Boom, done. It's a retcon, but not a terrible one. My main problem is that Kato didn't even bother to expend the minimum effort to tie his retcons over at the plot of trigger. The Frozen Flame has always been what corrupted the Kingdom of Zeal. The Mammon Machine? What's that? Shit, he could have said that Schala was the first Arbiter or something, and have her actually be mentioned in the plot earlier than literally five minutes before the ending, but he didn't even want to do that much. It's a problem that I have with a bunch of other small, meaningless retcons that were made for no apparent reason (The appearance of Schala's pendant is different now, Serge is the Chrono Trigger, the Masamune is the only thing can let you time travel and change the past, Lucca made the Time Egg, humans did not exist before Lavos, etc, etc).

What does it tell us about Kato? The entire city of dreamers fits with the pseudophilosophical meandering he's fond of, and is also entirely disconnected from the rest of the game. I'm sure this was entirely his. He has said that he came up with the plot of Zeal, but we have to remember that he did not think of Crono's death, so he can't have written everything about Zeal. He definitely had a hand in Schala's story, but he can't have written everything about her either or he wouldn't have felt the need to retcon so much about her in Cross (even her hair is different!) and he definitely would not have written her brother out of the sequel when he was so central to her.

For other sections that you seem to have attributed to Kato, I'm also confident in saying that he did NOT write Fiona's forest and the camp scene (goes against Cross's message of "humans bad for environment" and the campfire scene is contradicted in Cross), he did not write anything about prehistory (Cross even says that humans did not exist before Lavos arrived, retconning Ayla into a neanderthal), etc, he did not write any of the happy endings (he hated happy endings and retconned them into tragedies with his sequel) and he did not write any of the whimsical scenes of Trigger (too many to list).

Now, you may come and say that this means nothing, we can't actually compare the writing like that and he's responsible for more than I give him credit for, but then we need the answer to a simple question: If Kato wrote all that, why the hell did he feel the need to retcon, contradict or alter so much of it in the sequel? If Kato really is responsible for most of Trigger, as crossfags keep asserting, why the hell are the two games NOT mostly similar in theme, tone, or most of anything, really? Is your answer going to be that the games are actually very similar and the audience is just too dumb to understand Kato's genius, as I have heard in the past?