Chrono Cross - Review @ Sportskeeda

Sportskeeda reviewed Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition:

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition review: A classic game with a flawed release

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition has arrived, bringing back a classic RPG to the mainstream again.

Chrono Trigger is well-documented as one of my favorite games of all time, but the direction of Chrono Cross bothered me as a younger man. I grew to like the game and appreciated the various changes made to the combat and magic systems.

The story is grim and often sad, but I appreciate it in my RPGs. However, while I'm most pleased with Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition, there are some problems worth mentioning.

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is a classic brought back to life

As a remake, the focus will be on gameplay and visuals since the mechanics of the game have not changed since the original PlayStation release.

But in summary, Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is a tale of a pair of parallel realities and focuses on the main character, Serge. In one reality, he is alive and well, but in the other, he dies young.

The hero sets out to discover the truth of why his world diverged into two separate realities and evade Lynx, the primary antagonist, who is trying to capture him. Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition brings several boosts and upgrades to the game as quality-of-life changes.

[…]

In Conclusion:
For a 20-dollar remake, Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is not too bad. I was very disappointed by some of the backgrounds' blurry, unclear nature and the occasional framerate dips the game did.

I feel disappointed by the game when I stack it up with some of Square Enix's other remasters, such as Final Fantasy X/X-2. For the price, it's not a bad pickup, but I suppose I was expecting a little more care and work being done. It very well might have been problems with the game engine itself that led to these issues, but I'm no expert on that.

It's not a perfect release. However, I still enjoyed playing Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. I will continue my various playthroughs to get as many endings as possible.

Score: 6/10

More information.

Good game, bad port, unacceptable price.

Wouldn't call it a bad port but a half-assed port for easy cash. Though from a few tweets and a recent article it seems some of the original data was lost over the years.

Some will disagree, but Chrono Cross was never a very good game to begin with, imo. It was especially weak as a sequel to Chrono Trigger and has also aged much worse.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Some will disagree, but Chrono Cross was never a very good game to begin with, imo. It was especially weak as a sequel to Chrono Trigger and has also aged much worse.

I certainly wouldn't disagree. I don't play many jRPG's but back when I was a younger man (with a stronger fortitude) I played Chrono Trigger and I enjoyed it. The themes are certainly still relevent today. When Chrono Chross came out I attempted to play it but found it a much more generic jRPG and I gave up on it and moved on. Very few games tackle Time travel and very few get it right like Chrono Trigger did. Day of the tentacle did it well too.

I really love Chrono Trigger, but I played it for first time just few years ago on 3DS. I wanted to playe Chrono Cross since, so even though I know the game itself is not as good as first one and I was aware its lazy port, I got the Switch version of remaster. It is lazy port and its really not as good as C-Trigger. But I still have fun with it and small undocked Switch screen is forgiving. So I dont regret buying it at all. Im playing it for first time, so no rose-tinted glasses involved here.

Chrono Trigger is so damn good, one of those games I know I'll be replaying for the rest of my days. I'd hoped this would be in the same realm, obviously not so much. I still might grab it when the discount hits.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Some will disagree, but Chrono Cross was never a very good game to begin with, imo. It was especially weak as a sequel to Chrono Trigger and has also aged much worse.

Oh, it was borderline terrible. They made a mistake making the cast so big that they gave time to almost none of them. I finished it, but I did so in a fog, barely paying attention to anything that was happening.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
Oh, it was borderline terrible. They made a mistake making the cast so big that they gave time to almost none of them. I finished it, but I did so in a fog, barely paying attention to anything that was happening.

I couldn't finish it. I wanted to see the eventual connection to Chrono Trigger, but the combat bored me to tears, and the whole thing just wasn't interesting enough for me to keep going.

And yeah, the cast was a gimmick that didn't work for me either. I didn't see the point of having that many joinable NPCs. The game isn't good enough to replay multiple times.