Chrono cross review childhood nostalgia free#

If you’ve never played Chrono Cross before, The Radical Dreamers Edition is the way to play it. (The soundtrack is still legitimately excellent, though.) Revisiting the game today, though, the gameplay can get tedious, and the story hides some of its best characters behind artificial roadblocks. I loved Chrono Cross for its clever gameplay, ambitious story and stunning music. On the other hand, the game is also a reminder that our nostalgia for old games is often rooted primarily in how they made us feel. That, in and of itself, is a worthwhile goal. It doesn’t add much, but it does make a classic title accessible on modern hardware.

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition: VerdictĬhrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is an acceptable remaster of a great game. A Celtic influence ties the soundtrack together thematically, and you’re liable to get the whole thing stuck in your head for another 20 years. Chrono Cross is one of the gold standards in JRPG music, with an ambitious and heartfelt range of tracks, from tense battle themes to somber exploration tunes. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is and always has been a thing of beauty. There are also a few small-but-noticeable graphical glitches, such as black spots appearing in the background. The backgrounds and character models sometimes look incongruous, as the characters are much sharper and more focused than the prerendered, occasionally blurry backgrounds. The character animations don’t always play nicely with the game’s higher frame rates, resulting in jerky movements, particularly during battles. However, the upgrades have also resulted in a few rough spots. The results are generally pleasant, with distinctive designs, vibrant colors and varied environments. Square Enix has redone the character models and touched up the backgrounds for Chrono Cross: The Remastered Edition. Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition: Visuals and sound Some players will enjoy the sharp writing and unconventional structure, but it’s an awful lot of text for relatively little gameplay. It’s an interesting precursor to Chrono Cross, telling a similar story in a wildly different format. This text adventure is a curious side story in the Chrono series, previously only available via fan translations. The biggest addition, however, is the Radical Dreamers mode.

Chrono cross review childhood nostalgia free#

From there, the story builds into a dimension-hopping adventure about friendship, self-perception and free will, complete with one of the best mid-game plot twists in the whole genre.

He teams up with a roguish thief named Kid, who wants Serge to help her hunt down a valuable treasure.

In this other world, Serge died in childhood, and the whole setting feels subtly different as a result. Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition review: StoryĬhrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition tells the story of Serge: an unassuming island boy who accidentally traverses the barrier between two parallel dimensions. The environments are often small and a bit empty, with a lot of tedious backtracking if you want to find every optional treasure chest. Most battles feel trivial, and grant only middling stat boosts boss fights are the only way to raise your level.

The trouble with Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers is that the game can feel a bit slow and repetitive by modern standards.