Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition – Remastering a classic

blog.playstation.com:

Hello everyone – this is Koichiro Sakamoto, Producer of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. I’m excited to announce that our new remastered version of this classic RPG is out tomorrow on PlayStation 4!

In addition to the original adventure, the new release includes some additional features, including the never-before released in the West: Radical Dreamers – Le Trésor Interdit.

Working on this remaster has been a real labor of love for both me and the team, but you may be wondering, “how exactly do you remaster a game as beloved as Chrono Cross?” To celebrate the game’s release, I thought it would be interesting to give you some insight into how it all came together.

Some gamers might expect that creating a remastered version is simply a case of taking a game from one system and moving it onto another – but it’s far more difficult than that! I’ve worked on a number of remaster projects, and they’re often very challenging.

For example, original PlayStation games – especially late-era games like Chrono Cross – really pushed what the hardware was capable of. Developers used their technical knowledge and skills to overcome barriers that hardware presented them with, which makes it difficult to break that code down and analyze what it’s actually doing.  

It is at least typically easier to port original PlayStation games than PlayStation 2 titles (the chip inside the PS2 is really unique, and difficult to emulate well), but we faced an additional challenge when it came to Chrono Cross, as the game program and graphical data weren’t preserved in a complete form.

That meant across the start of development, it was impossible to recreate the original version of the game across multiple platforms. We had to pore through the