Masato Kato directed and wrote the main story, leaving sub-plots and minor character events to other staff. The event team sometimes struggled to mesh their work on the plot due to the complexity of the parallel worlds concept. Masato Kato confirmed that "Cross" featured a central theme of parallel worlds, as well as the fate of Schala, which he was previously unable to expound upon in "Chrono Trigger". Concerning the ending sequences showing Kid searching for someone in a modern city, he hoped to make players realize that alternate futures and possibilities may exist in their own lives, and that this realization would "not ... stop with the game". He later added, "Paraphrasing one novelist's favorite words, what's important is not the message or theme, but how it is portrayed as a game. Even in Cross, it was intentionally made so that the most important question was left unanswered." Kato described the finished story as "ole' boy-meets-girl type of story" with sometimes-shocking twists. Kato rode his motorcycle to relieve the stress of the game's release schedule. He continued refining event data during the final stages of development while the rest of the team undertook debugging and quality control work. Square advertised the game by releasing a short demo of the first chapter with purchases of "Legend of Mana". The North American version of "Cross" required three months of translation and two months of debugging before release. Richard Honeywood translated, working with Kato to rewrite certain dialogue for ease of comprehension in English. He also added instances of wordplay and alliteration to compensate for difficult Japanese jokes. To streamline translation for all 45 playable characters, Honeywood created his own version of the accent generator which needed to be more robust than the simple verbal tics of the Japanese cast. Although the trademark "Chrono Cross" was registered in the European Union, the game was not released in Europe.