Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers has been out for nearly year now and while it hasn’t been terribly well received, the fact that Square Enix even went back to remaster it is nothing short of a miracle. The 1999 title was released at the peak of what many consider to be Square Soft’s Golden Age, albeit with an abundance of other JRPGs that flooded the market at the time. In a recent interview involving game’s original director Masato Kato, composer Yasunori Mitsuda, and remaster producer Koichiro Sakamoto, the three acknowledged that the end goal of remastering the title was to ensure that the game would not become “unplayable.”
The title’s development originally began as a way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its release. Since that time frame passed before the game’s launch, the objective changed to preserving its gameplay and features so that it could be played without utilizing backwards compatibility. “Back when the project was launched, Chrono Cross was possibly going to become unplayable,” explained Sakamoto. “There was a Game Archive service on PlayStation 3 that allowed you to play PlayStation 1 games. But PlayStation 4 was already on the market. We didn’t know at the time if PlayStation 4 would also have a Game Archive service.”
Sakomoto goes on to explain that Chrono Cross was in danger of becoming unplayable due to these developments, and a remaster project was instead set up. As we already mentioned, the game did not launch in very good shape, something that the company acknowledged and pledged to fix by the end of last month. When the game originally launched in 1999, it was a PlayStation-only title. Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers was the first time that the game in any capacity was made available on an Xbox, Nintendo console, and the PC platform.