15 years ago, there was still hope that the dream team behind Chrono Trigger would reunite to make another Chrono game. That hope was mostly fueled by a trademark for a game called Chrono Break, which was never officially announced. Square Enix never talked about it directly, but here and there over the years some of the developers mentioned being interested in making a sequel. It didn't happen. But if it did, maybe it would've looked something like this.

This mockup of Chrono Break is the work of pixel artist Simon Andersen, who created Owlboy and worked on this project as a way to wind down from its long development. "After finishing a massive game project spanning a decade of development, I was ready to tackle a new series. I had already known for years I wanted to explore a hypothetical sequel to Chrono Trigger, Cross and Radical Dreamers, but it took me a full year until I figured out how I wanted it to look," he wrote.

Andersen makes it as clear as possible that this is not an actual game project in development, and that's for the best—Square famously shut down a Chrono Trigger fangame, Chrono Resurrection, back in 2004. Andersen's video is just a mockup, which he's been working on for the past two months. "If the sequel that was planned years ago was revived, this is likely how I would do it."

Even so, it's nice to think about what could have been, in the alternate timeline where Chrono Trigger got another sequel. Especially one with such beautiful pixel art, which feels rooted in the original game's style but with far more detail than the Super Nintendo was capable of.

When the PC port of Chrono Trigger came out in February, it made one of the best-loved RPGs of the past 25 years look like a shoddy mobile game. Wonky controls, a fiddly UI and a strange pixel smoothing filter had fans incensed, prompting Square Enix to release a series of major patches to set it right. The fifth and final one arrived yesterday, and—judging by Steam reviews—the game is finally where it should've been in the first place.

The patch lets you rebind keyboard keys and (some) gamepad buttons, and adds new mouse functionality, such as the ability to cancel an action with a right click, or move characters by dragging your mouse. It also adds an Extras section to the main menu, which lets you view a movie of all the game's cutscenes, watch any endings you've unlocked, and peruse illustrations of the characters and setting.

The update fixes various bugs, including one where the game wouldn't boot correctly for certain graphics cards, and adjusts smaller features: you can now use direct keyboard input to enter names, for example. The full list of changes is here.

The result of the five chunky patches is that the game is finally getting praise from fans. Steam reviews are still "mixed" overall, but those from the last 30 days are "very positive". Virtually every review comments on how much the port has improved since its initial release. As one user succinctly put it (and this was their entire review): "Port was bad, now it's good." 

Square Enix signed off the patch notes by saying that this was the "final major update", which leaves the door open for more minor changes in the future.

Chrono Trigger, the SNES JRPG from 1995, launched on Steam in February. It did not look good. It looked so bad, in fact, that a group of hobbyist modders took it upon themselves to save the role-player just days after its arrival on Valve's digital storefront. 

Square Enix has since patched its graphics, and has set about repairing its ported-from-mobile UI. Today's patch builds on these improvements.       

Further to last month's update, the game's third PC patch tweaks UI across its world map, inside its towns and dungeons, within shop menus, during time warps, and "during unique scenarios such as how narrative choices and mini-games are displayed," so reads this Steam Community update. New UI options designed to suit both gamepad and mouse and keyboard players have also been introduced.

On the battlefield, menu pages can now be flicked through with one button, and the speed of description windows can now be adjusted. Likewise, the update targets slow down in certain areas, balances the difficulty of some mini-games and fixes "several" bugs.  

"A fourth patch will be released for Chrono Trigger in late-June, which will continue to make improvements to the game’s overall UI, along with final changes to menu UI and the title screen," adds the post. "Additionally, key assignment functionality for gamepad/keyboard/mouse will be supported in this next patch."

Following Chrono Trigger's official updates via its Steam page. For unofficial nips and tucks check out Wes' words on why modders have taken on the quest to save Chrono Trigger on PC.

Chrono Trigger's PC port was a disaster. Fiddly controls, a weird smoothing filter and a locked resolution disappointed fans, prompting modders to embark on a quest to fix it. Square Enix is doing its part too, with a patch last month that brought the graphics in line with the original, and yesterday it released a second patch that adds new options for both the battle UI and character models.

The new UI is "based on the look and feel of the original Chrono Trigger", and you'll be able to switch to it in the settings menu. It's designed to be used with either a keyboard or a controller—you can pause the game during battle by tapping the space bar or the start button on your control pad. The UI that shipped with the port, which is still available, is meant to be used with a mouse or a touchpad. 

The update also adjusts the appearance of playable characters on the world map to bring them "more in-line" with the SNES original. The resolution and display area in cut scenes has been tweaked, and the game should no longer randomly slow down during certain sequences.

Another patch is due in early June that will change the UI outside of battle, Square Enix said. You can read the full patch notes here. What do you think of the new battle UI?

Mid-90s RPG classic Chrono Trigger debuted on Steam in February, but the decision to apply a pixel smoothing filter, and the visual mushiness that resulted, left a lot of fans unhappy. Square Enix moved to address that dissatisfaction today with a patch that enables visual improvements including an "Original" graphics options, and also dropped a couple of before-and-after screens demonstrating the difference. 

The updated visuals may not be an exact replica of the old-school Chrono Trigger graphics, as the patch notes state only that it brings them "more in-line with the original style," but it definitely looks more like it should. The patch also sets the "Original" graphics mode as the default, updates the font for "a more classic look," corrects various problems with in-game text, and fixes the way the word "Trigger" appears on the title screen—apparently it was somehow a problem. The animated startup sequence has also been adjusted to be more like that of the original game. 

A couple of before-and-after screens illustrate the difference: 

More changes to make the interface more PC-friendly are planned for future updates, and Square Enix is also extending the availability of the Chrono Trigger Limited Edition on Steam, which includes wallpapers, game music, and "digital liner notes" by computer Yasunori Mitsuda. It was supposed to disappear on April 2 but will remain up for purchase until April 30.   

JRPG darling Chrono Trigger took its time coming to PC. 23 years, in fact. Lamentably, the version we got was a mobile port, itself based on the DS port, laden with an awful UI that was designed for touch screens, ugly “high-resolution” graphics and some extra bugs for good measure. This put something of a damper on its surprise arrival. There’s still some hope for it yet, however, as a series of updates were just announced. 

“We have been working on addressing the issues that you’ve raised, and will be releasing a number of patches over the coming months as we continue to support Chrono Trigger on Steam,” the update on the Steam page explains.

The first patch is due out in the first half of this month and will introduce the option to switch between the mobile graphics and the “original graphical style” of Chrono Trigger. 

A full list of changes will be posted when the patch appears. The other two will drop over the coming months. Here’s hoping this will inspire similar updates for some of the equally-maligned Final Fantasy ports. 

One of the best videogames ever made was ported to PC last week, and it looked like shit. Square's surprise port of Chrono Trigger to Steam received immediate blowback for blurry sprites, an ugly filter over the images, and a bland UI clearly ported from the mobile version of the game. Fans were mad and disappointed. But modders have already sprung into action, aiming to understand where Square Enix went so wrong, and what they can do to fix it. The quest to save Chrono Trigger is on.

In 2016 I talked to modder Jed Lang, who wrote a tool for Square's similarly shoddy PC port of Final Fantasy VI. That tool, FFVI_Explore, let other modders dig into the game's files, understand what was going on, and replace sprites and other assets to make the game look better. When I saw him boot up Chrono Trigger on Steam, I knew he was assessing the case. Sunday night, just a few days after Chrono Trigger's release, he sent me a message: "Chrono Trigger modding is a thing now. I'll be releasing an update to CT_Explore with modding capability, probably tomorrow." That was fast.

Turns out it really didn't take long to figure out what was wrong with Chrono Trigger. "A couple of my trusted Twitter contacts actually tagged me in some of their conversations/articles, since they remembered what I did for FFVI," Lang told me over chat on Monday. "I bought the game on Steam and immediately dove into solving some of the problems." Those problems were well documented by indie developer Lars Doucet in his Gamasutra post Doing an HD Remake the Right Way: Chrono Trigger Edition, but Lang was quickly able to see the cause of those problems by decrypting Chrono Trigger's files.

First was a bilinear filter running on top of the whole game, including the UI. You can see how that added blur in this zoomed-in comparison.

Another filter messes with the colors.

But removing that filter didn't do much to fix Chrono Trigger's problems. Square's biggest misstep was in aggressively and sloppily resizing sprites and tiles, making the art assets look blurry even without a filter slapped on top. Worse, the brute force upscaling creates glaring misalignments in background tiles (a problem Doucet talks about how to avoid above).

Once he worked his way into the encryption, Lang wrote CT_Explore, a tool to unpack the game's files. "CT holds most of its assets in resources.bin, and they wrote a proprietary, 'poor man's encryption'—that is, it's nowhere near as secure/robust as a mainstream encryption method like AES or RSA, but it's also much faster," Lang told me. "Once I had figured out how the game stored all that data, I wrote a simple tool to decrypt/decompress data so I could analyze the format."

Next comes the good part—making it possible to modify those files and recompress them. 

"I then went to work on expanding it to support saving changes back into resources.bin. And this (like with FFVI) is where their 'poor man's encryption' comes to bite them in the ass: I can re-encrypt the archive with new content just as easily as I can decrypt it. As a result, the backend code to support saving changes back into resources.bin was almost trivial. The most part of the work, by far, was actually in developing a nice GUI for the user to use."

With CT_Explore, Lang has already proved modding Chrono Trigger is possible. A cyan cat isn't exactly a fix for the port's art woes, but it's a first step.

So what will it take for modders to fix Chrono Trigger's ugly mishmash of upscaled graphics? The good news is that for some strange reason, the PC port contains two sets of sprite sheets for each character—and one set is the original, un-upscaled version. The bad news is that replacing the background art would require dumping all the art assets from the original game and inserting them via CT_Explore, and that could prove complicated. Lang still needs to investigate whether Square made further changes to how it implemented assets, because it's possible they won't match up 1:1. So far, however, an initial test with Crono's sprite has been positive.

"So, if we got ALL of the original art (characters AND backgrounds), my belief is that it'll largely look 'better' (for some definitions of 'better')—in that, it'll probably mostly look like the original SNES game; with the caveat that it'll be running with a few modifications of the Steam release," Lang said. Filters can be modded out, but some bigger problems remain. The way Chrono Trigger resizes based on what resolution you choose (distorting sprites in the process) won't be fixed by the original art assets. And the UI, based on the mobile version, won't easily be changed.

In a Steam forum thread Lang made for his defilter mod, another modder posted a defilter that removes a sepia coloring Square Enix added to the game. Using both, and running the game at a low resolution, makes it look better, though tiling problems and character blur are still visible. Short of a full remake, nothing will ever make Chrono Trigger look like it was meant to be played at high resolutions—there's only so much you can do with pixel art designed for the Super Nintendo's resolution of 256x224. But Chrono Trigger deserves better than a blurry mess, and thanks to modders, the PC version should soon get there.

If you want to mod Chrono Trigger yourself, follow Jed Lang's Twitter for the latest build of CT_Explore. 

The good news: Chrono Trigger, the much-loved Square RPG released for the SNES in 1995, is now available on Steam. The "definitive version" of the game features updated controls, graphics and audio, and the Dimensional Vortex and Lost Sanctum dungeons that were added in 2008 for the Nintendo DS release. Steam-specific features including achievements, trading cards, and Steam Cloud saving are also supported.

The bad news: It does not look good.   

There are a few issues with the Steam release that have inspired complaints. It's a port (and apparently not a very good one) of the mobile game, which saddles it with wonky, tile-based controls—remnants of the touchscreen interface—and a font that doesn't quite inspire nostalgic fervor. Perhaps most offensive of all, there appears to be a pixel smoothing filter piled on top of it, making everything look disconcertingly slushy—and there's no option to turn it off.   

And despite Square Enix offering a "free upgrade" to the Limited Edition of the game (with six wallpapers, a medley of five songs from the soundtrack, and "digital liner notes" from composer Yasunori Mitsuda) for everyone who purchases prior to April 2, Steam users are not happy with it. Currently, 23 out of 30 user reviews are (very firmly) negative. 

There are other small issues plaguing the game—controls can't be remapped, for instance, and while Square Enix said that it supports 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1280x720, 1360x768, 1600x900, or 1920x1080, it's actually locked to the resolution of your display. Even if this is your first foray into Chrono Trigger and you're not coming into it with any "Good Old Days" expectations, that kind of thing is just cheap.

And in case you were wondering, no, you didn't miss anything: Chrono Trigger arrived on Steam without any prior announcement. I wonder why.

We snagged a couple screens of our own so you can see for yourself what the complaints are all about. More information about the game can be had in this FAQ.