Chrono Trigger (SNES) alternative Epoch Crash scene
57An odd alternative scene from Chrono Trigger (SNES, Squaresoft 1995)
Once you get the Epoch, there is always an option to take it to fight Lavos. Later, when you get the wings, it allows you to crash the Epoch into its outer shell, breaking through and bypassing the first phase of the battle. Even later in the game, Lavos' head may already be destroyed, which I think is due to completing the Black Omen areas, but I haven't figured out the exact conditions yet. Under that late game condition, there are two more versions of the scene available!
When Lavos appears there is a brief view of the outer shell with missing head, and someone is saying "Lavos...". If you press A quickly here, you will crash the Epoch, but if you linger on this moment, the music will fade and go silent. The characters will make a few statements observing Lavos, and then instead of crashing the Epoch the characters will descend into the cavern below, and have different things to say. How subtle!
If you'd like to try this, I'd recommend using a save file from Zophar's Domain: https://www.zophar.net/savestates/snes/chrono-trigger.html
Download the save file called "Black Omen destroyed, all quests completed, everything found." by Joakim Hellstrand. It will load at the End of Time where you can board the Epoch by jumping from the right hand side of the area.
A side note: when flying the Epoch toward the crash, the game switches to a rarely used interlaced video output mode of the SNES. In most games, interlacing is either used for 480i high resolution (e.g. RPM Racing), or sometimes by accident, but I think this usage might be intentional to use the inherent jitter of interlacing to slightly highten the turbulence of the flight scene? Very strange!
Chrono Trigger seemed to use a few unusual features of the SNES video hardware, and it feels like the developers were curious to experiment with some of its dark corners.
Sadly, a lot of modern TVs or upscalers will have problems switching to interlaced and back, so the unique crash scene might end up dropping the picture for some players today! For this video I used weave de-interlacing so that you can see two interlaced frames at once in a mesh of horizontal lines.
Further reading: https://snes.nesdev.org/wiki/Uncommon_graphics_mode_games
Thanks go to user Yl Ow who discovered this while pressing fast forward in SNES9x. They thought it might only be accessible via the emulator, but I found that it is really based on waiting on the "Lavos..." screen. Here is their original discovery video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-PxY_43pdM
0:00 Epoch Crash
2:13 Alternative Crash Skip
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