Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition owes its existence to the fact that the developers at Square Enix feared that the original version of the classic Japanese RPG would become “unplayable”.
Details on the project’s origins come to us from a new official Square Enix interview with the developers behind the project. The Radical Dreamers Edition originally started as a way to commemorate the game’s 20th anniversary, which would have been in 2019, but ended up releasing in 2022, oddly around the time of the 23rd anniversary. However, it is nice to hear the intention of the project.
“When the project comes out, Chrono Cross might become unplayable,” says remaster producer Koichiro Sakamoto. “There was a game archive service on PlayStation 3 that let you play PlayStation 1 games. But PlayStation 4 was already in the market. We didn’t know at the time if PlayStation 4 would also have a service archive. It looked like Chrono Cross might become unplayable. So a remaster project was created. This is the back story.”
Outside of Japan, this service was known as the PSone Classics Collection and was, or rather is, essentially a selection of original PlayStation games available for a few bucks on PS3, PSP, and Vita. Many of these games are still available on older machines, but their store pages are starting to take increasingly drastic steps to locate, and intermittent technical glitches have rendered them unplayable at times.
Radical Dreamers Edition launched with questionable visual and performance issues, although recent patches have improved these issues significantly. Radical Dreamers itself, the text-based spin-off for which the new edition is named, is perhaps the most notable preservation effort here, as it had never been published in English before and became quite rare in Japan.
Original director Masato Kato says he was “a bit embarrassed” by Radical Dreamers, as it wasn’t quite finished, and lobbied for it not to be included in previous Chrono series relaunches. “But then the game started selling at an incredible price, which was a strange and unpleasant situation. So I thought ‘why not?’
did you know a Chrono Trigger musical it happens ?