The Chrono Cross Remaster Is Worth Revisiting, But Don't Skip Radical Dreamers

ign.com:

Over two decades after its original PlayStation release, Chrono Cross is finally seeing the light of day again with Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. It’s a fascinating remaster on a technical level, offering an identical reproduction of the original but with the option to turn on improved visuals including clearer text, retouched visuals, and new character portraits. The rest looks like it leaped right out of 1999 and into our fancy 4K TVs, giving it the thematically appropriate vibe of being temporally displaced.

Chrono Cross, despite its age, is well-worth playing today for any number of reasons - among them the amazing IGN review score it earned back in 1999. The praise our review offered then for elements like the gripping story and great combat system almost entirely holds up with the remaster, barring a few ignorable performance issues on Switch. And as an RPG classic from Square Enix greats Masato Kato (Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Final Fantasy XI) and Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Shadow Hearts, and tons more), Chrono Cross certainly merits a visit or revisit all on its own, especially since it’s not been easily available without access to an old physical copy or PlayStation Classics. But the real jewel in the crown of the Radical Dreamers collection is one that could potentially be ignored despite being right there in the title: Radical Dreamers itself, the packed-in text-based adventure bridge game between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross.

Radical Dreamers is a mysterious beast, a game somehow even more out-of-space-and-time than Chrono Cross, and its inclusion in this 2022 re-release is a delightful surprise, as its existence isn’t something you’re likely to know about, unless you’re a