Funny, I very much prefer Legend of Mana and SaGa Frontier (specially the first, has more robots).

The atmosphere in Cross is really good yeah, but the plot and gameplay issues really hold it back. I can forgive it being a bad sequel (mean-spirited towards Trigger at times for some odd reason) or having a silly plot, but I can't forgive the wasted potential. Feels like the director lost interest once the Radical Dreamers portion was remade.

> It was also very slow by contemporary standards. That 10 second camera wag before every fight gave them time to load assets etc., but it is very frustrating to watch every time.

I used to call that the "Sony-mandated camera spin" because I half-seriously thought that spinning the camera over the field and characters was a prerequisite for getting a PlayStation devkit in the first place. It's in so many JRPGs, it was in Bust-A-Move (Bust-A-Groove), the dancing game, when one character solos, etc.

Sony actually had policies like this; for example, sprite-based PlayStation games were popular in Japan but near-forbidden in North America, because SCEA's marketing strategy was to emphasize 3D polygon graphics and convey a sense that the world had moved on from sprites. Of course, much like modern mobile policies, if you were big enough the rules could be bent for you. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and other tentpoles could thus release sprite-based games.