A very influential title for me in my youth, an absolute favorite. I can play a lot of the music on guitar, I used to draw the characters as a kid... it just was a key inspiration for me.

This port is terrible. I can deal with the upscaling on the character models and smudged out backgrounds, but the frame rate down right sucks. I've had moments where the game doesn't register inputs because of how choppy it's running. I put hours into the bad Chrono Trigger mobile port because I loved the title so much and I can deal with fun over graphics, but this feels like I'm trying to convince my younger self all of the love I had for this title wasn't misplaced every second the software is running.

idk man, I've been a SQE fan from early SNES titles as a kid to monthly payments for FFXIV as an adult. I think this is it, the dirt in the face that makes me just not want to support the company anymore. I'm not sure what is going on at SQE, but this was not supposed to be a quick cash grab. They have to stop releasing these garbage remasters and ports for their life long loyal fans. They are betraying all of heart the original developers put into these titles.

I'm not buying anything from Square for the rest of my days unless they respond to this terrible release. I'm not trying to make some stupid online threat, its just... enough is enough, I'm out.

- Atrocious frame rate
- Broken polygons on new graphic style
- screen tearing
- ugly AI upscaled backgrounds

seriously emulator does a better job than this remaster attempt

This is one of my favorite game of all time, it's such a shame they treated it like this

How Can You do this to Chrono Cross , SquareEnix ?

It was one of your best games !

"Chrono Cross : Radical dreamers " Edition is nothing but a botched job !
A 24 years old game with clunky controls and often lengthy loading times even on PC equipped with NVME SSD .

The animation is still stuck at sub-15fps with no motion blur in sight .
No option for Vsync and Gsync doesn't work either , which means there are a lot of screen tearing here and there , FMV is completely untouched and lack wide screen support .

The entire remaster feels lazy , janky and is unacceptable .

In fact the Playstation 1 emulator can run the old game better than this version which is absurd .

Don't buy this game until SquareEnix decides to actually pour some effort into fixing this .
At this moment it is simply another quick cash grab from their waves and waves of " remasters " .

A 100% demaster of Chrono Cross

It is unbelievable that a multibilional company Square Enix has once again reached a new low. We were promised a remaster, we got a badly emulated version.

Right from the start, when a launcher launches, it is clear that optimation-wise this demaster will not shine. And it will definitely not. The gameplay suffers from heavy slowdows, stuttering, wobbled textures, terrible framepacing and texture bugs.

This is just a badly emulated version that runs worse and looks worse than the original Chrono Cross that was released on PS1 in 1999 and it also runs worse than a PS1 iso via an emulator like Duckstation.

Awful awful awful!

Square once again confirms that Square just does not care. Had they lost the original source code? Then they should have re-written it just like they did for Final Fantasy IX! That is why FF9 on PC looks much better compared to this ♥♥♥♥.

There is just one personal pros. This is the first time that Chrono Cross was released in Europe. Other than that, there is basically zero possitive I could tell about this demaster.

EDIT:
I had to update the review, specifically the statement about FF8R being a better remaster. No, it is not at all. I had to reinstall FF8R to compare the both remasters and FF8R is just awfully dreadful. Pre-rendered graphics in CHC are definitely AI enhanced (but not a very advanced AI technique), framerate--wise CHC is very inconsistent but at least framerate is higher, FF8R´s framerate is constantly abysmal.

HINT:
For getting a better frame pacing and framerate consistency, NVIDIA users should set in the NVIDIA Control Panel these values
Max FPS: 60
Vsync: fast
Triple buffering: On

A Digital Foundry Tech review which basically confirms what I wrote here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFnYz5J6kXA

As an European player, I never had chance to play the following games on PS1 (Square just never released them in PAL region), so it is finally about time to fix your crime against humanity and bring us also these:

- Final Fantasy Tactics
- Chrono Cross
- Xenogears
- Valkyrie Profile
- Parasite Eve
- Brave Fencer Musashi
- Saga Frontier

Chrono Cross is a great game, and if this is the only way you have to play it then... it is passable. But, as both a port and a remaster, it falls quite short. The modding community has created better remasters through fan-made content. And, if you want the original graphical experience, then this era of game looks a LOT better on original hardware with a CRT TV.

This version has performance issues and poorly AI upscaled textures. It is running in an emulator and uses scripts to do some swaps on models and textures. This extra processing causes the frame-rate to drop quite significantly in some places, and does not appear to be fully overcome no matter the GPU used. Fan-made projects for the original game have produced much better visual quality and performance for the game using these same methods. The 'original' graphics mode has less issues, but still has some frame drop when compared to the PS1 release.

Additionally, this game has been hit with censorship in a few places. I am only aware of one graphical change, but there were several changes to dialog. The changes seem so unnecessary, that it appears someone was trying to justify their job. Unfortunately, that is what you get when it is someone's task to find 'problems'.

At the end of the day, the primary perk of this version is convenience. It is on Steam and current generation consoles. It is $20. That's all it really comes down to. But, here is a full break down of what this remaster has to offer over the original:

Good Updates:
-New character portraits look great
-New character models are good
-Ability to swap to old graphics
-Includes the text-based game Radical Dreamers, previously exclusive to Japan on the Super Famicom through the Satellaview.
-Some new art and music were made, which are used in the launcher.

Bad Updates:
-Inconsistent frame-rate, especially in the updated graphical mode.
-Quality of AI upscaled backgrounds is poor. Very bad in some places, with significant artifacting.
-There have been several reported stability issues. I did not run into them, but enough people have reported them that buyers should be aware.
-When swapping to 'original' graphics mode, it renders 3d at a higher resolution than the original. This results in having pixelated background, but very smooth model renders. It clashes badly, especially in combat sections.
-At least 1 instance of graphical censorship.
-Multiple instances of text/dialog censorship have been identified for both English and Japanese settings.

Even disregarding the technical issues and unnecessary censorship, this is a very lazy 'remaster'. When it comes to modern remasters, I expect at least some of the following:
-60 FPS
-Widescreen
-Menu Updates
-New end game content
-Runs in native environment. Not emulated.

They haven't updated this game since April, even though this port NEEDS fixes.

Edit: A year later, and the game has FINALLY been updated. I still wouldn't pay full price for this garbage port though, unless you're alright with modding.

I hate giving nearly every release a negative review, but here we go again :-\

Where to start?

If you were hoping for anything uniquely different than emulating -- ban me for saying the naughty word, I dare you -- the original PS1 game, you will not find it. Achievements are the only thing the Steam release does that an emulator would not do better.

Under the hood, things are ugly. The only part of the game that actually renders using D3D11 is the game's UI. They give plenty of high-res UI assets and an insanely high resolution font that won't even load on Intel GPUs (textures larger than 128 MiB are not required by Microsoft to work in compliant D3D11 drivers and of course that means Intel users get the shaft as usual), but there's zero hope of doing anything like a re-texture mod since the game isn't even rendered using a PC graphics API.

Making matters worse, the actual render rate of the game is decoupled from the UI framerate. You can use all the monitoring software in the world and you're not going to get an accurate measure of the game's actual framerate or the severity of its stuttering and slow downs. I can't quantitatively measure any of that stuff, but I can tell you it -feels- wonky as hell with definite uneven frame pacing between each UI and game frame.


Tl;Dr: I think the game's only saving grace is its price. $19.99 is just low enough that you might not care you could have bought the game used at a yard sale for less and had a better experience. Buy the game because you have never played it before, not because it's anything special.

Sigh, I actually had to dig out my old copy of this game to do a side by side. So where to begin?
First there is a drastic drop in fps (makes the game run in perfect slow mo) during battles. This does not happen with the old disk copy. Even with the limitations of the old PS2 I pulled out, this drastic drop did not happen. Now this fps drop doesn't really happen often on the outer map and building interiors, just battles.

The second problem is the lack of company support when it comes to correcting the problem.
As long as there is just one person that says "there is no issue", SE will drag their heels on fixes of any kind as long as possible. This is standard practice with them.

My advice is to let this one sit for a few month before you purchase it.

TL;DR Great game, bad port. Emulators run better than this.

I'm only gonna talk about Chrono Cross because I hope that even Square Enix can't mess up a text adventure like Radical Dreamers.

- Incredibly choppy framerate despite the game running at 60 fps consistently. I don't care if the whole game is at 30, but give me some consistency.
- [Pretty nasty 4:3 box. No actual widescreen support.] Correction: you can get widescreen if you press Escape and play with the video settings. Under video, use Screen Type - Full. Obviously this stretches things out though.
- Fast forward makes the game a bit faster in the overworld and during combat if you're okay with the framerate looking even worse. In emulators, fast forward buttons typically uncap the framerate (the uncap is usually how the speedup happens) so you don't run into this issue. Fast forward doesn't affect the starting and ending cinematics of battles, which is where I would have wanted the speedup the most.
- Very unresponsive controls during battle. When an enemy attacks your ally in the middle of your own attack, the game takes a second to register that you were attacking previously and shows you the base combat menu for a second before changing to the attack choices for you. Every time this happens I get confused. In the PSX version this hiccup doesn't happen at all, or in any emulators I've used (epsxe and psxfin).
- Weird clipping in certain sounds like navigating a menu. This doesn't happen in the game launch menu, only through the in game experience. Clipping happens in fast forward too but that's expected.
- "New" graphics for text and character portraits look fine (if a little out of place) but the prerendered backgrounds are pretty ugly upscaled. Someone told me once when watching the trailer that the game really looks like it's not using AI upscaling, but if that's true, then whatever they used is worse.

At 20 dollars USD, this is not as expensive as other titles, but buying a 9 dollar matinee ticket for a bad movie still leaves you feeling like you could have done better things with your time and money. I'd either wait for a patch to play both or for a 50% or greater sale to try just the Radical Dreamers portion.

This port is radically terrible and emulation provides a better experience universally. I wish that Square Enix wouldn't make us choose between bad port or no port. I would love older Dragon Quest games to get Steam ports so I can have one platform to play all of them. I especially would love Dragon Quest 7, but not if it's gonna feel like this.

Save money. Live better. Walmart.

(Note: This game is worth having on PC PURELY thanks to modders. Meaning, I kind of recommend it on the basis that you're willing to patch the game a little. Square Enix still did a bad job, but thanks to them bringing Chrono Cross to PC, at least modders got the chance to help me enjoy this masterpiece on Steam like I've always wanted. Base remaster is still hot garbage, however. Original review below this paragraph.)

I love Chrono Cross and I'm very happy I can own it on Steam. But this is a lazy, lazy upscaling with very small improvements, and it just doesn't run very well. What is there to say when emulations of the original game can run better and look better than this? Shame on you, Square Enix. It's a real shame. I'm hoping modders can salvage this somewhat...

EDIT: There are mods that reduce the stuttering and FPS drops with New graphics by a large margin. Just search up "Chrono Cross Nexusmods" and you'll find them. Makes the game run PERFECTLY and I haven't been able to put Chrono Cross down since!

EDIT 2: I feel bad reading the remaster producer's interview on how stoked he and his team was to give the game a new coat of paint, but performance issues are performance issues... If that weren't a thing, this review would be straight-up positive as all hell.