The 'Chrono Cross' Remake Runs Worse Than The PS1 Version

Tired of sequels that are just secret remakes of the most popular entry in the series? Well, back in 1999 SquareSoft released Chrono Cross, a game that had the guts to not only continue the beloved Chrono Trigger in an original manner but also to kill the entire Chrono Trigger cast of characters off-screen. The move didn't go well with fans, but aside from the gutsy heartlessness, the game rocked hard. Despite clearly not featuring the same level of budget that the mega-epic Final Fantasy VIII had (hell, they couldn't even afford the boats to transport it to European markets), it still looked great, played great, and got arguably the best scores any game on the original PlayStation ever got. This, together with the news that the remaster Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition has just been released might pique any JRPG fan's interest, but it turns out that the remake fails in one of the most important aspects.

The devs employed AI in the improvement of backgrounds and characters to gorgeous results, sure,

the reduced graininess, the richer color-palette as well as the opportunity to play this on a larger screen all feel great, but the game somehow runs considerably worse. Those are big words for a game that only ever ran at 30 frames per second (half of what 13-year-old nowadays consider the bare minimum). Sparing our readers from the technical jargon, the remake runs not just marginally slower, but exactly one-third slower, an absolutely embarrassing result for a console that's probably a million times more powerful than the original Playstation. The gaming tech maestros at Digital Foundry openly call it one of the worst-performing games he's ever seen on a PS4 or even a PS5.

Man, our future AI overlords are gonna be so pissed that we used their ancestors for this.

Top Image: Square Enix