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To put my cards on the table, Chrono Cross has not lived well in my memory. Though I enjoyed it well enough in my youth, when I was a voracious devourer of Japanese RPGs, it has since faded into a hazy blend of other PlayStation-era games. The unflattering impression isn’t helped by being a direct sequel to Chrono Trigger, one of my favorite games of all time. But even on its own, I’ve struggled to find any parts of it especially memorable. I was curious to check out Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition primarily to give it a fair shake and find what I’d lost in my recollection of it. And what I’ve found is a fascinating, uneven time capsule of late-’90s RPG design.
The Radical Dreamers Edition is mostly the original Chrono Cross, albeit with a nice visual touch-up. The PlayStation signified awkward first steps into 3D games with jutting character designs and vibrant colors, and the remaster doesn’t dramatically overhaul the original game’s sharp, angular look. Squaresoft (pre-Enix merger) was particularly skilled at creating expressive characters within these limitations, but they were still certainly limitations at heart. The HD remaster doesn’t fundamentally change that, so the irregular jutting spires of the character designs may look unusual to modern eyes.
Within that framework, though, this is a very nice-looking remaster. The characters are crisp and expressive, and their animations hold up nicely. The Switch OLED screen is especially great at capturing Chrono Cross’ extremely bright color palette. To that end, the tropical setting that composes the game’s first few hours helps put its best foot forward to make the OLED screen impressive from the very start.
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While the port is faithful, it does include a few additional quality-of-life features that help smooth over the experience. A speed-up function makes everything move much faster, and you can turn on a “battle boost” to make the fights themselves easier. There’s also an auto-battle function to automatically execute optimal fight commands for you. These three in combination mean you’ll fight automatically, extra fast, and hit extra hard–perfect for grinding up levels. There’s an optional speed-down function as well, which feels like walking through molasses, but could come in handy if you’re frustrated with the occasional timing-based challenge. Plus if you don’t feel like dealing with regular enemy encounters at all, you can simply turn them off.
I’ve found the speed-up function most useful, to the point that it actually makes the standard combat work better than without it. Chrono Cross uses a combo-based system where you choose several attacks in a single turn. It’s unique, but at the default speed it can feel sluggish and unresponsive. With the speed-up function on, the attacks trigger with ferocity, making it feel more like your button presses are corresponding directly with the on-screen action. On the other hand, though, it can be easy to accidentally skip dialogue when you’re out of combat, so remembering to toggle the function on and off can be annoying.
Chrono Cross also uses an inventive elemental affinity system, assigning one of six colors to each of its wide cast of characters and setting them in opposition to each other. Rather than a typical red-blue-green elemental circle, you’re looking to match opposing colors: white-black, red-blue, and yellow-green. You can also shift the overall color of the battlefield to augment your attacks or dampen those of your opponents. It’s an interesting idea that adds some extra depth to the classic JRPG mechanics, but it’s also not one we saw iterated on in Square games since. Rather than additional insight about the roots of modern RPG mechanics, it stands as a monument to this experimental phase when studios took risks on singular, one-off ideas.
That experimental aspect is expressed visually in the character designs. With dozens of playable characters, it feels as if Square quickly ran out of road for regular archetypes like silent protagonist Serge or spunky thief Kid. Instead, there’s tons of room devoted to wackadoo inclusions like a sword-wielding turnip, a living voodoo doll, and an actual space alien. The cast can make the whole affair feel disjointed, like a game assembled from parts that don’t quite fit together, but come close enough. And with almost 50 characters in all, some level of weirdness is to be expected. You’re meant to go through the game multiple times and collect them all like Pokemon. One of them even appears to be an unsubtle reference to Pokemon, thanks to its cutesy-mascot look and ability to evolve.
The story hails from an era of needless complexity, when game stories (and especially those in JRPGs) often left large portions unexplained and players had to piece together the events themselves. This one starts with a relatively understandable hook: The main character, Serge, accidentally stumbles into an alternate reality where he drowned in a freak accident years prior. But it spirals out from there into dimension-hopping and various semi-explained links to the events of Chrono Trigger. It’s easy to lose the plot with so much criss-crossing reality at play, and especially with such a large cast of characters who connect not only to themselves but to the established events of an entirely separate time-hopping adventure.
In that respect, like many RPGs of the PlayStation era, Chrono Cross itself hasn’t aged quite as gracefully as some of its predecessors, including Chrono Trigger. The art style is just slightly more stark, the story just a little bit too obtuse, and the experiments with new types of combat systems and character designs don’t always fit together seamlessly. This is a Square that is clearly trying new things and seeing what works, similar to how it found its footing in the early NES days, or later with more active combat systems in the last few generations. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this more experimental Square RPG, but it’s a different experience more suited to those who like to tinker with game systems and witness a studio stretching itself.
This is especially true of the multifaceted character recruitment system, which is so complicated you can miss large swaths of story and a number of characters in a typical run. Chrono Cross built on the New Game Plus innovation of Chrono Trigger by iterating with branching paths, which is very fitting for a story about multiple alternate dimensions and characters who are mirrors of each other. The core game is more than 20 years old, so you can always consult a FAQ for a perfect run, but if this is your first time through Chrono Cross, I’d recommend striking out on your own and letting the chips fall where they may.
The jewel of the collection, at least for long-time Chrono series fans, is the inclusion of Radical Dreamers. The Satellaview text adventure has never officially been released outside of Japan, even though it served as the bridge between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Some of its references to Chrono Trigger help make the story connections between the two clearer. Given that those connections can be difficult to understand within the context of Chrono Cross itself, it’s wonderful to finally have an official translation for this lost piece of the series’ history.
That said, Radical Dreamers is more valuable as a curio than an actual game. The text adventure format often feels very static, with long sequences of narration occurring between interactable segments. Your decisions sometimes feel weightless, both because it’s not clear how they’re impacting the story and because elements like your own health are hidden from view. It’s difficult to recommend exploring its full depths when the proper Chrono Cross is available, but having it preserved like a museum display is worthwhile for the collection.
That museum aspect is really what might appeal most about Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. Chrono Cross is an unusual game from an unusual era, paired with one that many of us in the West have never even seen before. Some parts of Chrono Cross are deeply strange and some of its ideas don’t work, but that was true of a lot of RPGs made in this time period. In that way, it’s a game out of its time, brought to us with some modern conveniences that are helping me appreciate its endearing oddity. Maybe this time I’ll make some new memories.
