May 16, 2018 Edit: After the second patch, the awful battle UI has been replaced with an almost identical UI to the original SNES version, save for the fact that it's translucent. Huge improvement. The control latency has also been improved, and a pause function has been thankfully added to battles. Supposedly some bugs have been fixed as well, but I had one of the worst of these (the dialogue bug I mention in the main body of my review) happen in the middle of a freaking ending, so they still have a lot of work to do. Otherwise, though, this is a huge step in the right direction. One or two more patches like this and I'm willing to change this review to a thumbs up.

May 7, 2018 Edit: I've uploaded some gameplay which you can find here on my YouTube channel. This is gameplay after the first patch. Please note this video contains some spoilers (Magus' Castle), so if you haven't played the game yet you may not wish to watch. The video shows the dialogue bug I experienced and mentioned earlier in this review. Please note this video is not monetized and has no ads, I made it purely to give an example of some gameplay for this review. May 16 note: You can see the old Battle UI that has since been fixed in this video.

May 5, 2018 Review:
All of the praise heaped upon Chrono Trigger is accurate. It's the best JRPG ever made and one of the greatest games ever created. The gameplay is great, random battles are ingeniously eliminated, the soundtrack is among the best scores ever created for a game, and the art is outstanding. The open-ended nature of the game and the multiple endings are fantastic, and the game's creation of the New Game Plus mechanic was groundbreaking enough that it continues to be used today.

I'm a longtime fan of Chrono Trigger. I still own the original cartridge for SNES, purchased back in 1995.[i.imgur.com] I played the hell out of that game in the '90s, playing it and replaying it, and to this day I consider it one of my favorite games of all-time. There is not a single thing I dislike about the game.

I feel like it's important for me to establish how much I adore this game, because even with the first patch already applied to try and fix this disaster of a port, I still recommend against purchasing it unless a major overhaul is made by Square Enix. This is the absolute worst way that you can possibly play this game.

The first patch has added back the original graphics, which is nice since it solves the problem of the HD textures being terribly executed and leaving the tiles misaligned. But I'm still experiencing some pretty severe graphical issues with this port, mostly having to do with the awful framerate. My framerate monitor is reading 60 fps, and there are times when it looks close to that, but others when it's clearly running at sub-24, with odd hitching and stuttering occurring regularly.

The controls are also very laggy, leading to a delay in input in battles that can cause you to enter the wrong commands when it's imperative that you get the correct ones out quickly. It makes playing on Active mode much more frustrating; you're pretty much stuck playing on Wait mode thanks to the horrible control latency. The pause function has also been inexplicably removed from battles, another blow to playing on Active.

The current UI is strikingly ugly, retaining a lot of the mobile buttons that are an eyesore and lack utility with either a controller or mouse and keyboard. Supposedly this is being worked on for a future patch, so I'll edit my review accordingly if it comes.

There's also a lot of difficulty in changing the settings. The settings available are bare bones even for an SNES port. You've got to restart the game any time you change the window size, and the dialogue text outside of battle plays at an excurciatingly slow speed. This is editable in other versions of this game, such as the DS port and the original SNES game, but it isn't in this version and it needs to be added.

There are also a number of bugs present that are more evidence of the shoddy porting job done by Square Enix. I'm less than an hour into the game but I've already encountered a few big ones. First off, I'd recommend against ever using the Bookmark function to save your game, since it has a tendency to freeze on a blank screen upon attempting to load, then erasing thereafter. This happened to me twice out of the four or five times I tried using it, and I won't be attempting it again. Another is that it's impossible to return the girl's kitten at the Millenial Fair if you're playing with a controller. The first time you talk to the kitten, it runs off like it does if you try to talk with it twice. When I instead did it with mouse and keyboard, it worked. I'm lucky I'm so familiar with this game, if I hadn't already known about this then I'd be stuck thinking the cat was just supposed to run away each time. Another bug occurs when you go into the Jurassic Rhythm dance section in the upper right area of the fair. There are 4 colored squares clearly visible on the screen, which I assume are left over from the mobile controls that have been so sloppily ripped out by Square Enix. Another more minor bug is Taban not registering as a character on the screen, so whenever you try and speak with him, you end up running through his character model. Keep in mind these are all bugs I've found within just an hour of play. There's also a bug I've experienced in which dialogue freezes in place, only to finish and then cut off immediately, which is annoying. It's really embarrassing to see stuff like this so early in the game, and I'm not looking forward to seeing what other bugs are present in this port.

I would highly recommend that anyone interested in playing this game instead purchase a used Nintendo DS and play it on that instead. That port is great, certainly better than this one, and the first patch has not done nearly enough to make this worth the $15 price tag in my opinion. Everyone leaving positive reviews saying this is fixed have clearly not played the DS port or the original game in some time, because this Steam port still runs like garbage even with the original sprite graphics patched in.

If further patches are applied that make this game more playable then I'll edit this review. Until then, stay far away from this game. It's a terrible version of an all-time classic, another example of the frequent, shameless cash grabs that the soulless corporate husk of Square Enix is becoming famous for. Don't reward them for sub par work, and don't be tricked by the sudden increase in positive reviews like I unfortunately was.