As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Against the Masamune, Guardia never stood a chance...
Lavos is an inconceivable monster looking to spread his influence across the world before devouring the planet, and as shown through these situations, the Kingdom of Guardia suffers big time as a result of his malice.
- A lot of aspects about Lavos are quite creepy to the many kids who grew up playing the game. To start off, it looks like a giant, grotesque spiky tick, but that's just its outer shell. Inside is a more humanoid body, along with two pods. One of these pods, not the humanoid body, is the real Lavos. Not to mention the sound it makes and its killing of Crono.
- That noise
that Lavos makes. It's like the audible equivalent of the spelling of "Cthulhu" — if it were real, it would be a Sound That Man Was Not Meant To Hear, and you should be glad this is the best your TV/Nintendo DS speakers can do to replicate it.- If you take the time gate to 1999 AD, you don't hear the normal time gate ambient track. Instead, you get a heartbeat that starts slow and gets quicker every few seconds.
- The version in the prototype is even creepier: it throws in the same laughing/crying noise from Strains of Insanity.
- If you go for the Programmer's Ending in a New Game + (using the right Telepad immediately when seeing Lucca's device), the inner section of Lavos not only features the heartbeat but an even more disturbing scream that just gets louder and louder until everything else is muffled by it.
- Remember that moment when Marle disappears in 600 AD? She didn't simply "go away" to somewhere "normal" if what she says after she returns is any indication, she most likely temporarily ended up in a place even worse than Hell itself. Where exactly? Oh, just the Darkness Beyond Time. Thank goodness Crono, Lucca and Frog got her out of there before insanity may have taken her forever.Marle: It was awful... I can't recall it all... I was somewhere cold, dark... and lonely.
- The Geno Dome has a conveyor belt where a person enters a machine, screams, and what implies to be a Tab emerges from the other end. Even worse in the Japanese version, where it's called the Genocidome, an obvious portmanteau of Genocide and Dome, implying that the machine was specifically built for that purpose.
- Magus' Lair in 600 AD.
- Let's start with the background music, called "Strains of Insanity" — a creepy chord that never lets up, with a sound that could be laughter, crying, or screaming repeating every couple of seconds. Note that this is a step up from the first phase, where you wander around a castle filled with Obviously Evil children, random civilians who just giggle or say nothing, and people you know Queen Leene, Crono's mother, and Lucca/King Guardia/Lucca's father who slowly walk up to you, in complete silence.
- Add some people you know, whom you know shouldn't be there. They say some relatively innocuous things the first time you see them... then again later after you encounter Ozzie, they add a sinister second phrase before revealing their true forms. Instead of the normal battle music, "Strains of Insanity" continues to play while you fight them.
- Those skeleton Mooks you've fought at various points in this era? At one point in Magus' castle a group of them attacks you while begging you to kill them to free them from the spell controlling them. There are even some that are attacking each other in an attempt to end their own misery (the monster controlling them sadistically notes that it's useless, since they're already dead). Worse still, in that castle you meet a bunch of kids and teenagers who also turn into skeletons. Magus wasn't above using child corpses. (And, yes, Stains of Insanity is still playing. Getting to the bosses is worth it just to hear a different song)
- Let's start with the background music
- The Day of Lavos. Chrono Trigger was originally released in 1995. Back then, a video game showing The End of the World as We Know It happening in 1999 was a very scary thing (even if it did inspire more than a few Prince jokes), especially considering that the Y2K apocalypse prophecy was still very relevant back when this game first came out. And seeing it in action is nightmare fuel itself in the "bad ending". You see the earth slowly get destroyed from the perspective of its inhabitants at the Day of Lavos, then, followed by that hideous Lavos sound: "In the end, the future refused to change."
- 2300 AD can be pretty scary.
- A ruined and broken world with no hope, monsters everywhere, and robots set out to scrape the jar's sides, in terms of humans who haven't already succumbed to Lavos or the weather. And if you wait long enough, many a player has stated that the lightning flash, followed by a low rumbling sound, was a rather unnerving surprise.
- A new player exiting Bangor Dome onto the 2300 AD world map for the first time is in for a shock in general. A barren wasteland, ruins and craters everywhere... but the cherry on top is the freaking world map music, entitled "Ruined World". It socks you in the gut immediately with a low piano note, and while the winds are playing a hopeless melody, the percussion lags behind the song's tempo considerably, sounding like broken chimes or the pulley of a lonely flagpole beating against the metal. Or the pendulum of a clock winding down to the last few hours before even what little non-Lavos life remaining on the planet goes extinct.
- After the events at the Ocean Palace, with Crono using a technique that kills him but temporarily stuns Lavos, which allows his friends to escape after failing to destroy Lavos. The group eventually returns to 2300 AD in order to begin the process of saving Crono, and as they gradually scale Death Peak, they encounter Lavos Spawns; basically baby versions of Lavos which were created to spread to other worlds to repeat the very same cycle Lavos itself is doing to doom the world, only on other worlds as well. Oh, and about Death Peak? If you overlap 1999 AD and 2300 AD's maps together, that's Lavos. It's the final stage of their life cycle.
- How about the events at the end of the Ocean Palace where Lavos disintegrates Crono! Sure, you can save him later, but still. It's surprisingly brutal and was a completely unexpected Player Punch at the time.
- If you go to the Northern Ruins in 1000 AD, you will find the ghost of Cyrus, a hero of Guardia who was very popular with the people around the kingdom only to get killed by Magus. He's haunting the halls of the ruins, aggressive and angry, muttering for Glenn. If Glenn never put his soul to rest, Cyrus will haunt the halls for eternity, continuing to strike fears at the heart of villagers nearby. Just put yourself in the villagers' shoes, you will see just how jarring it could be.
- The end of the sidequest for Fiona's forest. Lucca wakes up as the rest of the party sleeps and wanders into a clearing to find a red time gate that takes her to the day her mother Lara's legs become crippled. If you fail to free her from Taban's machine, Lara cries out for one last time before the screen goes black. Two seconds later, you hear Lara scream. The rest of the sidequest (failure or success) is in complete silence, aside from sound effects.
- The DS version allows you to Earn Your Bad Ending. From defeating the Dream Devourer, players are treated to the lovely sight of "The Fall of Guardia", wherein Dalton's army wages war on the Kingdom of Guardia, successfully kills Crono and Marle, causes the Masamune to go missing, and results in the kingdom's ultimate downfall, setting up for the events of Chrono Cross.
