Chrono Cross remaster performance issues has the original game’s art director perplexed

Written by. Nick Mosier based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2022-04-11 19:00 JST)

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition released just a few days ago to harsh criticism from players. In addition to criticism leveled at the PC version through Steam user reviews, some are pointing out issues with the console version as well. The source of these complaints comes down to performance issues and even has a staff member involved with the original game making candid remarks.

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is a remaster of 1999’s Chrono Cross for the original PlayStation. The grand adventure spans two worlds and is a follow-up to Chrono Trigger, a game widely considered a JRPG masterpiece. According to the game’s Steam page, D4 Enterprise, a company known for reviving retro games, was also involved in the development alongside Square Enix.

The remaster boasts a number of enhancements such as HD 3D models, refined character illustrations, and higher-quality background music. There are also other additions to make the game easier to play like the ability to turn off enemy encounters and enhancements to make combat easier. The remaster also includes RADICAL DREAMERS – Le Trésor Interdit, an audio novel that serves as the basis for Chrono Cross’s story.

As of this writing, the Steam user reviews currently sit at a rating of “Mixed” with 50% of the 698 reviews being positive. The issues players repeatedly bring up are related to performance. More specifically, they are noting severe drops in the framerate during combat and certain scenes. These issues also seem to be present in the console versions. Digital Foundry, a YouTube channel known for their software and hardware performance analysis videos, has since released a video with the results of their analysis of the game.

In the video, Digital Foundry proclaimed the performance of the remaster is worse than the PlayStation original. And when looking at the side-by-side video for verification, the PS4 version running on a PS5 does tend to have a lower framerate than the PS1 version. There’s also a similar trend with the Nintendo Switch version. However, they also report that these issues are comparatively improved when the game is switched to the graphics mode that’s closer to the original release of the game.

Furthermore, players of the PC version have reported improvements after changing the anti-aliasing settings and changing the settings in their GPU control panels. For the time being, it looks like players are being left to find solutions themselves.

It seems that behind these performance issues are possibly problems related to Chrono Cross being a difficult game to port. In a Q&A on the game’s official Twitter account, they noted that the programming and graphics data of the original game wasn’t in a complete state when talking about the difficulties of developing the game. It’s thought that for the remaster they had to contend with reconstructing parts of the game, and those struggles could be showing themselves as performance issues now.

Yasuyuki Honne, a staff member involved with the development of the original game, also tweeted about the subject. Honne worked on the game as an art director and map painter, and is now a board member at Monolith Soft. According to Honne, the developers worked very hard to use variable framerates to make sure framerate issues didn’t impede the gameplay. Honne is also confused as to why the remaster is having frame dropping issues despite being on modern hardware. When considering that and the above Q&A answer, it’s possible not having complete source code from the original creators ended up causing problems down the line.

As an aside, the Steam version of Chrono Trigger was also criticized for graphical issues at the time of its release. But they were later able to right the course through updates, so hopefully we will see something similar occur with Chrono Cross.