If you’ve played or plan to play Chrono Trigger it acts as a rough draft to some of the ideas Takashi Tokita would expand upon in that masterpiece. It’s lack of polish does not keep it from being interesting if you have the patience for some of its quirks. You can see the shadow of one of it had been given a bit more refinement. The core needed a bit more time to develop and deserved further depth for a modern release. When you reach the final chapter the enemies finally present a challenge, but the step up is absurd at times and has left me with a few annoying game overs. It’s a turn based grid with cool unique special moves for each character with some very nice animations undone by cake walk encounters that dole out minuscule EXP so you can’t grind early. I’m hopeful that the Dragon Quest 3 and Suikoden 1/2 remakes will fair a bit better and have a bit more budget in them for the backgrounds, but overall finding this style to be more gimmicky than good. Having played a lot of SNES and GBA RPGs last year I greatly prefer the true 2D to this 2D/3D mashup. Castles and medieval scenes translate really well, some of the natural backgrounds are jarringly smooth compared to the pixelized characters, and the present day/futuristic settings have an ugly, cheap mobile game aesthetic. I’m playing the Switch remaster and it’s my first experience with the 2D-HD graphical style and I’m mixed on them. The tone is bumpy, mixture of low brow potty humor (which can be fine) with sudden murders and perma deaths out of nowhere (effective for making the stories memorable but rarely feel meaningful).

However, the stories themselves are very hit or miss, some are quite underbaked and it’s hard to care about most of the characters due to the lack of time spent with them. It’s very satisfying seeing a complete story arc almost everytime you sit down to play (30min-3 hours). Self contained short stories/vignettes that are made by different small teams of people sharing a common art direction and gameplay draw you in. 22h 1m PlayedAn interesting game, poorly executed.

Download live a live how long to beat