Quest Z: The Black Omen
Stat of the Quest:Of the non-boss enemies leading up to this quest, only 35% must be fought. That means most of the enemies in the game can be avoided entirely! Sometimes it’s difficult to do, but it’s possible to fight very infrequently in Chrono Trigger. That trend lasts until the Black Omen. Inside the Omen, 71% of enemies must be fought. It’s another way the designers use gameplay mechanics to embellish the artistic effects of the game. The Omen feels longer, more arduous and more climactic because of the unavoidable battles.
The Black Omen is a final dungeon in the mode of most JRPG final dungeons: it has lots of tough enemies, a few useful end-game items, a handful of bosses, save points aplenty, and an escape route. A lot of these things highlight trends in Chrono Trigger that make the game remarkable. For instance, we expect there to be dozens, if not hundreds of medium-difficulty enemy encounters on the way through a final dungeon. The Black Omen doesn’t disappoint; there are more enemies in it than anywhere else. In every other dungeon in the game, most of those encounters were avoidable. This is a natural product of enemies being on-screen instead of being random encounters; some enemies can be seen and evaded.
In fact, as we noted in the headnote, only a minority of the enemies in the game must be fought, as long as we’re not counting the Black Omen. Again, some of this is programmer error, like the third sequence of battles in Magus Castle, all of which are avoidable even though they clearly shouldn’t be. Most of it is just something that players are allowed to do. It wouldn’t make for a good game on the theme of inevitability if all enemies were uniformly inevitable, would it? The Black Omen, on the other hand, is filled with unavoidable enemies. It’s hard to say whether there’s a message encoded into that, but the player will feel the difference from even the most climactic dungeons of the earlier game.
In the Black Omen, virtually every enemy must be defeated by techs. Throughout the game, the player has been confronted with enemies that must be defeated by techs. Sometimes this means enemies have high defense, sometimes it means they have high evade, and sometimes those enemies have a vulnerability that is triggered by magic. In the Black Omen, enemies must be defeated by techs because they have so much HP. Below level 95, the most damage a normal attack can do is about 1500 (Crono’s frequent critical hits with the Rainbow). Before the Omen, there were only eight enemies with that much HP, and all of them were in Giant’s Claw. In the Black Omen, there are 49 monsters with more than 1500 HP.[18] This means that dual techs (being way more cost effective than single techs, as we’ll see later) will be necessary constantly. There are more than enough save points in the Black Omen, so the player doesn’t have to worry about MP. If the player hasn’t figured out which dual techs are the most powerful by now, the Black Omen will force him or her to figure it out.
Although enemies in the Black Omen have a lot more HP than enemies in other dungeons, the overall difficulty of the game does not rise that much. Underleveled and undergeared players will have a very hard time with the Mega Mutant, but most of bosses in the Black Omen are easy at the appropriate level. The first four of them use the confuse debuff, but there’s a variety of gear that can prevent that, if the player has done the appropriate quests. The second and third bosses are also immune to physical damage, but are not immune to any form of magical damage. Party composition has never been a huge factor in this game, but these two bosses do require the player to rely on magic-users.
We’re going to skip the Lavos Spawn, as it’s not different enough from its earlier version of its forebears with a few additional attacks, and has nothing on the next few bosses, all of whom are bit more interesting.
Queen Zeal’s first form is unusual for Chrono Trigger, but is common for Squaresoft games of the 1990s. Her signature attack, “Hallation,” brings the entire party to 1 HP. This attack is like a jump-scare in a horror film; there’s no real threat behind it. Zeal’s speed stat is low and her AI script is set up so that she can never follow that attack up with a second one. Like so many parts of Chrono Trigger, this fight is an example of the designers using the mechanics to manipulate the player’s state of mind.
The Mammon Machine is another magic-only fight, although it might take players a round or two to figure this out. Because almost every party member will have a high magic defense (the average is 82 at level 50 without any supporting items)[19] it’s not a hard battle, and it’s not very interesting; the Machine gains power from magic attacks and defense from physical attacks. The fight is so strangely easy that I think it must be another artifact of a previous version of the game. The idea of a boss that gets stronger every turn is clever, and exists in several other Squaresoft games. The Opiomorph battle near the end of Xenogears has a similar dynamic, but that fight is much harder. The Mammon Machine seems to have been re-balanced too aggressively during the final revision of Chrono Trigger’s difficulty, although that is an educated guess rather than a statement based on data in the game itself.
Queen Zeal’s second form is a wonderful twist on the player’s recognition of bosses and appropriate strategy. “Hey!” players tell themselves. “A three-part boss! I should kill the hands first.” This is exactly what the game has trained the player to do. In this case, this is a disastrous idea. Both hands respond to damage with powerful attacks that drain both HP and MP.
Want to read more? The rest of this section can be found in the print and eBook versions. In fact, the print version of this book has been significantly expanded and revised.