Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is a remaster of the original, coming to Nintendo Switch in April
Square Enix has announced that a remaster of 1999's Chrono Cross is coming to Nintendo Switch – with a few bonus bells and whistles.
At tonight's February 2022 Nintendo Direct , Nintendo and Square Enix announced a Chrono Cross Remaster – in line with the sorts of things we've seen with the re-releases in the Final Fantasy series (most significantly, Final Fantasy 8 Remaster).
The game, which you can pre-order from today via the Nintendo eShop, will launch on the system on April 7. You will be able to turn off enemy encounters in the game, as well as play that eponymous Radical Dreamers portion of the game – a side story that connects both Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger. Until now, we've not been able to play this game outside of the SNES adapater that was only available in Japan. So that's a pretty good excuse to jump back into the game!
The announcement of this remaster links back to an old report from March 2021, in which Forever Entertainment announced it would be working with Square Enix on remakes of "several" titles. At the time, the company noted that these titles would all be from within the same "brand" that the publisher owns. Does this mean more Chrono Content in the future?
Per the report, Forever Entertainment's projects will feature "a new graphic design" but retain the same "gameplay and scenario" as the originals – and that seems fairly in line with what we've seen this evening.
If you're curious about where else the developer has been felxing its remastering muscles, you may be familiar with the developer's work on the Panzer Dragoon remaster on Switch.
This project looks nice, in theory – let's just hope it doesn't come off like the Chrono Trigger PC version that launched in 2018.