Fanart: Janus and Schala from Chrono Trigger

[brendala]

[WARNING: Don't read if you don't want to hear Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross spoilers!!!]



I was playing Chrono Trigger DS and suddenly had the urge to draw these two. I don't know why. Perhaps its due to the frustration over the fact that neither Schala's story nor Janus'/Magus' story ever gets resolved and the siblings never get to reunite after Lavos wastes their home.

Or sure, there was a sequel called Chrono Cross, but that game was pure sh*t. It made no sense and it killed off the former leads in the most ridiculous and implausable ways. Worst of all, Shala (a.k.a Chrono Trigger's big, dangling plot thread) was brought back in the form of a 12-year-old blonde kid for some reason (in Trigger, she had blue hair and appeared to be a teenager or adult) and Janus/Magus wasn't even mentioned at any point in the game! When you "free" Schala by killing Lavos, she ends up in modern day Japan somehow (seriously, WTF!?).

I could forgive Cross if the gameplay were at least decent. But the battle system was a complicated, confusing mess. And they didn't do anything with the "crossing alternate dimensions" gimmick because the two dimensions you bounce between have no significant differences.
And, BTW, the only way you get to see the ending is if you kill Lavos/BlondBabySchala by casting specific spells in a specific order. If you don't, you just get credits and a blank screen after killing the final boss. And you can only figure the order out if you decode some bizarre poem you get late in the game. I'm dead serious.

...so yeah, sorry about the rant. But reliving the awesomeness of Chrono Trigger just reminded me of my bitter hatred for the horrible sequel Square puked out. Now, onto the scribbles!

[End Spoilers]




....

Comments

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

So I guess it's a good thing I never had a Playstation when the sequel came out. I always felt cheated by the Janus/Magus/Schala thing in the original game, too, in fact when I was able to play the DS game (having played the SNES game forever ago) I decided I couldn't bring myself to kill him off....so sorry for Frog, but oh well...

I really like your drawings of Schala especially! Little Janus is so adorable.

[brendala.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it is a good thing you never had the chance to play Chrono Cross. It takes everything that made Trigger appealing (the small and likable cast, the fun yet simple story, and the deep and easy to master battle system) and replaces it all with awful modern RPG cliches (a HUGE interchangeable cast of playable characters, an over-complicated & pretentious story, and a confusing mess of a battle system).
I wouldn't have been so hard on Cross if it had been its own game instead of a direct sequel to Trigger. It came across that way until halfway through the game when you find out that Chrono, Marle, and Lucca met grisly fates not long after the happy, fairy tale ending in Trigger. :(


Schala was a lot of fun to draw. Since there doesn't seem to be any official art of her (aside from the game sprites) I had the freedom to make her look however I wanted. So I thought it would be fun to make her and Queen Zeal look Jewish. ^_^

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

Oh my gosh, no thank you! That reminds me of the Breath of Fire games. I loved the original SNES game to pieces (even with the poor translation and scant storytelling, I loved the characters and battle system), the second was also pretty cool even though I'm still working on beating it (courtesy of Wii's Virtual Console), but the later Playstation games... I played one, but it just didn't even feel like the same series anymore! I got an art book a year or so back with artwork from all of the games, which is awesome, but I could tell from how later game characters looked that the game series I adored had been...no, I won't use the word, but utterly destroyed! Plus, everyone looked so anorexic.. Annoying!

Sometimes I don't think it's always good to make direct sequels anyway. I'm suddenly reminded of Wind Waker, the 'spiritual' sequel to Ocarina of Time. From the intro itself it briefly chronicles the exploits of Link from OoT, but then it mentions that again when evil took over the land, everyone awaited his return...but he never came. It left me feeling really depressed, but at the same time it never said why he never came to the rescue, but I figure now it's because so much time had passed from OoT to the not too distant past that he died of old age. Even heroes are subject to natural laws. (It did make for a cool setup, but still! One nice thing was later finding Hyrule Castle frozen in time with a statue to OoT Link in the courtyard. It really made me want to play the first game again..)

Whee, tangents! I do hate when video games rob me of the ending I played through an entire game to get.

Hmm, Jewish sans the pointy ears, right? ^_- I've always been a fan of stronger features anyway. (Darn my little snub nose!) Makes a person more distinguished looking, for one thing..

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Link is apparently reincarnated whenever Hyrule needs him, yet I don't know of any of the characters who met more than one Link saying that the new one looked familiar.

[ichiban-victory.livejournal.com]

He's not reincarnated. From what Shigeru Miyamoto, the game's creator, has said, whenever the land is in danger a youth will rise to become the hero. The only common element in all of the games is Ganondorf (except in games where he's not the villain, usually the Gameboy games and now DS games). Not even Princess Zelda is the same Zelda, but of the same royal line. I think it's just easier for them to always name the main character Link, but even with that you always have the option to rename him so Bob could be the hero of Hyrule.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Kind of odd that all the Links look so similar, then.

[lunaoh.livejournal.com]

Januuus....T_T And poor Schala, I always liked her. Stupid queen Zeal.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Cool pictures! Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite video games, and I think Schala's fate deserves a better treatment than Chrono Cross gave it. I tried playing that game, and I couldn't make it past the fortress with the dragons. I hate RPGs where you can get stuck somewhere.

For what it's worth, I saw a mention on the Internet that the Japanese version of Trigger mentioned that the royals of Zeal dye their hair purple. I guess her roots grew out by the time of Cross.

[brendala.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the compliment!
It boggles my mind that Chrono Cross is seen as a great game by so many JRPG fans. Even if you ignore the fact that it takes a pretentious piss all over Chrono Trigger's story and characters; the gameplay and battle system are just terrible! I could never figure out exactly how the battle system was supposed to work.


For what it's worth, I saw a mention on the Internet that the Japanese version of Trigger mentioned that the royals of Zeal dye their hair purple. I guess her roots grew out by the time of Cross.

LOL, really? I've never heard that before! I suppose it would make sense for Schala. But it wouldn't make sense for Magus in Chrono Trigger. I just don't see Magus as the type to concern himself with regularly dying his massive amount of hair. And where would young, post-Zeal Janus get hair dye? From the monsters who raised him?
....I'm totally over-thinking this aren't I? ^_^;

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the compliment!

You're welcome.

I just don't see Magus as the type to concern himself with regularly dying his massive amount of hair. And where would young, post-Zeal Janus get hair dye? From the monsters who raised him?

Well, if he was a human trying to take advantage of anti-human prejudice, he'd need some way to differentiate himself from other people, right? Maybe he used magic to maintain his hair color.