This song, "Lost Pieces," plays when the player, by ocean boat, picks over the ruins of a particularly significant zone of the sea. To me, this sad and beautiful tone has captured the melancholy of being far adrift, of no longer belonging to a world that is otherwise completely familiar to you. As it employs a silent protagonist, Chrono Cross never tilts its hand to any of the emotions Serge might feel in response to such a tragic loss of self. But it's songs like this one, in the spaces where the game lets you alone to take it in, that create that emotion in the player.

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It's why the Chrono Cross soundtrack is my favorite in gaming. Aside from its vivid and beautiful instrumentation, it's keyed to the precise feelings that the game's world wants to create, making it just fine — apt, even — for the characters to remain silent.