Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition Remaster Is Real, Adventures to PS4 in April

I was wondering what to play after Forbidden West - not anymore. Day one for me

‘Refined’ music? This is one of the finest game soundtracks ever conceived. It needs no refining! 😀

Question is, which version to get? PS5 or switch .. ??

Looks janky. All this time and they couldn't make it look any better?

I played the original on an PSX emulator back in ‘99. It’s a pretty good game

This remaster doesn’t look all that great though!

Worth it for Radical Dreamers alone.

Sorry but this looks awful.

@LiamCroft I’ve seen so many people say it looks awful but it looks just as good as the Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX ports. It’s a PS1 game and a stone cold classic at that. It’s perfectly fine.

@LiamCroft They've redone all of the prerendered backgrounds unlike the FF remasters. All character models redone. It looks beautiful compared to the original. "Awful" for a remaster it looks like the best SE has put out.

Game looks beautiful and the best it has ever looked. The fact they've redone the background art in HD unlike the FF remasters is fantastic to me.

Lol I knew it was just going to be an "HD" port. You can make the game look the same with emulation using your grandmas potato PC. I'll still buy it because it's one of my favorite games of all time, but was really expecting more.

@Voltan They've redone ALL of the background art into HD. That's way more than they've done for the other remasters.

Noice 😁 iam very happy

@mucc They redid all of the background art and they redid all of the character models. That's way more than a simple HD port. Get your glasses on.

Kinda wish this got the full remake treatment like Live a Live, but whatever.

@jmac1686 Guess the various rumors made me expect more. I might still play it, I really liked it back in the day.

@Ralizah It’s a much more complicated game than Live A Live. Plus they’ve already got the HD-2D engine for that game whereas they’ve already got the PS1 HD stuff for this one from the FF ports. It’s always going to be a niche game and a remake would be an awful lot of money.

@nessisonett @kyleforrester87 Apologies friends but you're both wrong. Awful!

"Adventures to PS4 in April"

Would be cool if the PS4 could play my PS1 discs. 😁

This game never came to the EU? How did that happen? It's Square, and it's a sequel to a Chrono Trigger - I like this one more personally, but it's still a sequel.

I think this one looks just like it did, which is fine by me, I'm not a big retro guy but Square worked some magic on PS1.

Music was good enough to warrant it's own CD w/ the game, good stuff.

Down for this for sure! Amazing game even if it couldn't quite hit the heights of Chrono Trigger.

@nessisonett Trials of Mana was also thoroughly niche, and that got a full-blown modern-gen remake.

It's a lazy remaster, and will likely have the same uneven presentation as the PS1 FF remasters. That's all there is to it.

It's better than nothing, though. Why we don't have Chrono Trigger on modern consoles I'll never understand.

EDIT: I'll take that back partially. The backgrounds don't look horrendous like in the FF games.

Has everyone forgotten about square enix's statements on nft's & what not now then 😂

Also, what's up with the framerate?

It looks like they just used janky AI to batch upscale the backgrounds with no additional human touch ups or quality assurance.

@Pleasance Better than what they did with the PS1 FF games, lol.

@Ralizah The thing about Chrono Cross is that it’s the most ambitious game for the time period Square Enix have ever attempted. It ran like ass on the PS1 but it was absolutely worth pushing through because it frequently hits ‘masterpiece’ levels of good. This remaster is the best the game has ever looked, which is all we can really ask for, especially when it looks like they’ve put quite a bit of effort into many areas of the process such as actually upscaled backgrounds unlike FF and the soundtrack being touched up too.

Hang on, where's my Vita? Yep, still looks great.

@Ralizah Oof really? I haven't had the, er, pleasure.

@iStarkill here is my suggestion.

Wait for reviews. See the reviews for both PS and Switch.

Then find out which ones runs better

@nessisonett its $19.99 too which imo isn't bad for a remaster tbh

@nessisonett I concur with Liam, game looks dreadful.

Why couldn't this be a Remake instead? Or at least a nicer looking remaster...?

I played this way back but didn't understand the story. Awesome soundtrack

@iStarkill my problem with playing ps1 classics on Switch is I just don’t like seeing abxy inputs. I’m so used to seeing my PS shapes.

I tried playing ffviii on my Switch and it just felt like it lost some of the nostalgia because of that.

Just my 2 cents.

Jesus, these shameless remasters.....
Just becoming such a let down.

Kindo of disappointed. Everybody was going on about it like it was supposedly some big-budget remake with the rumors about songs being recorded by an iirc Irish singer and SE working on it in secret big times. But it turns out to be just a remaster with a somewhat rearranged soundtrack and still running at 18 fps in a 4:3 screen ratio. I wish they remastered my beloved Xenogears too. T_T

First time ever releasing in PAL regions, not bad!

I prefer SE remake the first game, the second one is good but the first game is legendary.

The only thing I don't like is the mobile phone port style font. FFIX HD had it too, since it was a port of the mobile version, but at least on PC you could use the excellent fan patch to revert it to the original style as well as upscale the backgrounds.

But yeah, don't really get the complaints. It's objectively better than the FFVII and IX remasters since they've upscaled the backgrounds. The FFVII remaster also only runs at 30fps in battle whereas the PS1 original was 60fps. And the FFIX battles were 15fps like the original. Don't remember people complaining about that. The FFVIII remaster also didn't have analogue movement like the original and censored a few things. This CC remaster doesn't appear to be taking anything away and is doing more to improve the game without the need for mods.

Will the game run at 30fps or 60fps??

Great for those who want to play it. But for games this old, I only consider remakes. I would rather see a new game or at least a remake but I'm guessing this remaster takes much less resources and time and clearly has its dedicated audience/fans happy to play this.

One question do we get a physical release? Yes its important especially when i saw someones disc copy on here for preservation.

Honestly this is a pretty low effort remaster.

Day one for me, one of my favorite all time JRPGS, the story, the soundtrack, the battle system they're all top notch, super excited for this one!

I'm IN. Only thing they can do to screw this up is not release it in PAL territories...again. I'll be playing through for the first time, since as I said previously my PSX (NTSC-U copy) playthrough setup is garbage.

@rjejr "This game never came to the EU? How did that happen?" Chrono Trigger didn't either until the DS rerelease in 2008 - nor Xenogears, at all. Publishers tend to think we in the PAL region are only interested in FIFA, which is patently untrue. A LOT of very good games are limited run here (especially RPGs) and don't get me started on what Namco did to Xenosaga here. >(

Yes!!! Favorite JRPG of all time and the best one of the SquareSoft "golden era" of games outside of FF Tactics to me.

Jealous of anyone that could experience it for the first time. Story and music still hold up.

Coincidentally, I just bought a PS1 copy a few days ago.

@GravyThief Yes but I think they mean they've made it shinier than the PSX soundtrack, maybe we're getting like Blake-Robinson-Chrono-Trigger levels of remastered soundtrack.

@shadow2k I do have Blake Robinson’s Synthetic Orchestra Chrono Trigger soundtrack. It’s awesome!

I was being a little flippant with my comment. I’m sure they’ll just make it higher quality or whatever, which would be great. If they do change the composition though, that would be sacrilege! 😀

@WaveBoy did you say Jade Cocoon, that vastly underrated Playstation Pokemon-but-with-dragons that was absolutely awesome and so misunderstood? Count me in.

@GravyThief Isn't it just <3 When I worked electronics retail I would frequently put Memories of Green and Manoria Cathedral from his remaster on our speakers when demoing them for older customers <3

Ha, as long as we're clear on one thing - that Yasunori Mitsuda can do no wrong. If you don't know of it, the Radical Dreamers live version of Arni is gorgeous, I am listening to it right now as I work <3

Can't wait for this!

I can understand why cutscenes would remain in 4:3, but there's no valid reason not to have the gameplay be in 16:9.

@tehKAMI hand drawn backgrounds would have to be expanded

The game was great. But the re-do is a higher texture overlay on top of the PS1 game - which is why it's 4:3. You can still see the original polygon jitter from the PS1 emulation underneath, it's just a little less noticeable as the resolution isn't 320x280 anymore. The background have Squenix's "stipple-painting" process on top of the old backgrounds - same as what they did to the textures in FF12. It's a fresh coat of paint on the PS1 game. To nostalgia fans, it looks great - to modern day gamers, it looks like ass. It looks like a touched up, high res PS1 game and that's better than it was.

The game was epic, dark with lots of twists and turns and I enjoyed it more than some of the FF entries. I'd play it again for sure.

@MisterXpoSay Likely 60, but the PS1 animation frames were 30 (or less), so character animations will not be 60.

This is a pretty mediocre effort. Saying it's "better than the FF remasters" is kind of like saying "this cheese isn't as moldy as that other cheese." They did clean up some of the textures, but otherwise it's just an emulated PS1 game with some mods that somehow still runs like it's running on a CDi even on a PS5.... Even the animation is still mid-90s.

Chrono deserves so much more love than this, even if CC isn't half as good as CT. Radical Dreamers is really the only thing that makes this worthwhile.

@rjejr You have a good point. This is a slightly up-rezed "remaster" that would be completely unnecessary if the PS5 could just play my PS1 disc.....

@Dragonaged I think CC gets overrated. CT was a masterpiece and was in many ways a stand-alone adventure. CC changed too much about what worked and was very controversial at the time with the producer basically doing a "sorry, not sorry" about what CT was about to HIM vs what fans tended to see it as when they rejected CC at the time. (Now somehow CC is beloved when at the time it was churned like ground meat.) In hindsight it's a good game, but it shouldn't have been a sequel to CT. You don't even find out the connection it has to the first game until the final act, and then that connection is kind of out of left field, and all makes sense, but feels retconned like it didn't really need to be there even though they tie it together tightly.

@Ralizah I was gonna say that too. It needs to be upped to at least 30FPS. It looked so jank for no reason.

man, the editors of this website and gaming community at large were fooling themselves all this time thinking this would be a outright remake haha... you guys are the real "radical dreamers"

great game and all, but neglecting it in this way is insulting. instead, they decided to give "live a live", an incredibly niche and obscure jrpg the bigger budget and remake treatment? just bizarre.

I’ve already got it preordered for the ol Switch.

I’m so excited. This was my favorite of Square’s Golden Age RPGs.

@Ralizah does it matter on a game like this

Tbh I expected it to look a "bit" better. I think this is a game that could have benefited from a total remake.

This is the best thing to happen this year. Obviously can't wait for Elden Ring and Strangers of Paradise and I'm currently playing through Edge of Eternity and The Rise of the Third Power (both of which are well worth your time) but it will all be put on the back burner once this drops. I religiously play both Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross at the very least once a year (along with Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy Tactics, every, single, year) and this is dropping at the perfect time!!