One year later, Chrono Cross' busted PC port is finally getting a patch

pcgamer.com:

PC players have been getting a lot of shitty ports recently(opens in new tab). We're talking frame-dropping, glitch-swollen monstrosities that feel like they've warped here from the dark days of the late 2000s. But at least one of them might be getting a fix. The remaster of Chrono Cross, which hit PC last year riddled with stuttering and framerate issues, is slated for a patch «this month,» per an announcement on the Chrono Cross Twitter account (via RPS(opens in new tab)).

We’re launching an update for Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. pic.twitter.com/pMxwcuoxzNFebruary 20, 2023

The Chrono Cross remaster's performance was so bad that it eventually got re-remastered by the fans themselves. A mod by a creator named isa(opens in new tab) managed to coax a stable(ish) 30fps out of the game by opening it up in Cheat Engine and poking at things until they worked better. But you hopefully won't have to rely on such jury-rigged fixes for much longer.

The devs are promising a «wide range of changes» in the upcoming patch, including improvements to the framerate, changes to the growth system for Pip (what those changes will actually be is a mystery), and «fixes for other bugs». As an aside, I don't know how we as a society came to accept things like 'Bugfixes and other improvements' in our patch notes, but it's become a problem that desperately needs rectifying.

I'm hoping the patch will finally turn Chrono Cross into the game it's meant to be, but I can't help but remember Square Enix's patch for the PC version of Nier: Automata(opens in new tab). That one came out a whole four years after the janky port of the original game, but while it made some improvements, Nier's PC version still suffers from performance issues