Chrono Trigger is one of the best games of all time – why try to make a direct sequel? It would inevitably disappoint. In hindsight, all these years later, this seems like a particularly canny choice. While the story of Chrono Cross does deal with direct repercussions and dangling threads from Trigger, it’s a very separate game. In fact, most of them are probably dead? Things are left deliberately vague. If you’re expecting to see all your favorite time-traveling heroes again, be prepared: you won’t. Here’s the main thing folks should be aware of going in: this is only a sequel to Chrono Trigger in the loosest of possible ways. And as I play Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition on Nintendo Switch, I wonder if we might see some of the same reactions again, just twenty years removed. “In Japan it was far from being well received and it was severely bashed at the time, with comments like, “The story makes no sense” or “A game like this can’t be the sequel to Chrono Trigger!” It was quite a minefield,” Kato says. Even in text, the amusement in the answer from Masato Kato (Chrono Cross’ original director and key staffer of the original Chrono Trigger) is clear. In an internally-conducted Square Enix interview that was shared with media as part of the remaster’s review package, one simpering question asks the creators of Chrono Cross how it felt for the first game to be “so well received” – a wild misreading of the situation at the time, likely based on a few arguably over-hyped and over-inflated review scores that some outlets and writers have quietly disowned since. But even in North America and Japan, things weren’t plain sailing.

Given its predecessor never got a European release and Final Fantasy was only just becoming truly international at the time this came out, it skipped Europe entirely. For a start, it didn’t release in Europe at all. A bunch of new people are likely about to experience the adventure of Serge and Kid for the first time – and that opens a twenty-year aged can of worms all over again.Ĭhrono Cross got an unfair rap back on the PS1. It’s been decades in the making, but one of Square’s most unfortunately maligned titles from its PS1 silver age is now finally getting the treatment it deserves.

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