Square Enix revealed that it came up with a Chrono Cross remaster project when the company began to fear that the classic game from 1999 would be lost to time and “unplayable” on modern systems.
In a new interview, the game’s original director Masato Kato and composer Yasunori Mitsuda acknowledged that while originally a way to celebrate the RPG’s 20th anniversary, the Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition also sought to ensure that the game would be playable in the future even without backwards compatibility.
“When the project was launched, Chrono Cross might become unplayable,” remaster producer Koichiro Sakamoto explained in an interview, as spotted by GamesRadar+.
“There was a Game Archive service on the PlayStation 3 that allowed you to play PlayStation 1 games. But the PlayStation 4 was already on the market. We didn’t know at the time if the PlayStation 4 would also have a Game Archive service. It looked like Chrono Cross could become unplayable. So, a remaster project was set up. That’s the backstory.”
Last month, Square Enix promised to finally address issues affecting its beleaguered Chrono Cross remaster, known as The Radical Dreamers Edition, in a new patch nearly a year after its initial release on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.
Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition launched last April, offering players a gentle remastering of Square’s dimension-hopping 1999 PlayStation JRPG Chrono Cross, in which a teenager named Serge finds himself in an alternate reality where he died as a child.