The remastered version of the classic JRPG Chrono Cross will be released on PlayStation 4 tomorrow. In a post published on PlayStation’s official blog today, Square Enix Producer Koichiro Sakamoto shared some pre-launch details about Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition.
The game is a complete remaster of the original Chrono Cross adventure, and will add in some new features to enhance and modernise the title’s gameplay. These include changing the game’s speed from the outset, turning off enemy encounters entirely, auto-battling, invincibility and many more. Additionally, Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition will also include a text adventure called Radical Dreamers – Le Trésor Interdit as part of the game. This was previously only available in Japan, meaning that there’ll be a lot of Chrono Cross fans who will have missed out on this additional content in the original game.
In the update on the PlayStation blog, Sakamoto also elaborates on the challenges he and the Square Enix team have faced during the remastering process.
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.
Koichiro Sakamoto, Producer
He then explains that in order to actually remaster the game, his team (and the other companies involved in the development) had to replay the original game and work out where it had missing data, via a trial-and-error process.
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 data that had been preserved and play through the original game ourselves to work out what was missing and restore it.
Koichiro Sakamoto, Producer
The Square Enix team also released this message on Twitter ahead of the game’s launch tomorrow.
While it seems as though remastering this JRPG classic has not been without its challenges, it’s obviously been a labour of love for Sakamoto and his team. Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition launches tomorrow for PlayStation 4.
