It stands on its own as a unique little adventure game. However, the greatest value you'll find in Radical Dreamers is as as piece of supplementary material to Chrono Cross – for Radical Dreamers is essentially a four-to-five hour expository exercise to fill in some of the blanks about Kid, one of the main characters of Chrono Cross whose backstory, motivations and psyche are left somewhat vague in Chrono Cross proper.

It's the missing puzzle piece to Chrono Cross's infinitely-labyrinthine narrative, and cements Chrono as my favorite game series. A must-play if you've any investment in Chrono Cross, especially understanding the unique and unorthodox way in which Kid is written and her characterization is fleshed out.

Gonna be honest and say that I really don't care much for Chrono Trigger. I loved playing through it when I was 14 or 15 years old and then forgot about it very shortly after beating it, which to me speaks to it being a piece of media that is very impressive on the surface but ultimately doesn't have a lot to deliver on otherwise (of course this is coming from someone who hasn't played it all the way through in close to a decade). It's a nice cast of characters, it's well-paced, beautiful score, yada yada yada; people talk about it being a "perfect" game but I don't care much for "perfect" games, just as how I don't care for "perfect" films. Raw, wildly ambitious projects mixed with deeply personal narratives that are also very flawed (i.e Xenogears) are far more interesting and important to me than a game that's really well-designed and whatnot.

Radical Dreamers strikes me as the kind of project that holds in that same vein; though it's essentially a side-project, it also holds measurable ambition within it that's bursting from the seams of its visual-novel structure (and all on an add-on for the SNES no less). The repetition that comes with going through the same dialogue/multiple choice screens is a bit annoying but also somehow comforting, you gain a very intimate knowledge of the castle's layout despite it being conveyed through text, and the hints of the larger world outside the confines of Viper Manor speak to a desire to render that world, these feelings of loss and a desperate flailing against death, in a manner that the SNES could not convey and would eventually be made manifest in Chrono Cross. The writing itself is wonderful; this is the first VN I've ever really completed and while I don't care for its connections to Trigger it was the characters and the sulky, gothic tone and design that kept me interested. The ending is genuinely mind-blowing in the way that all my favorite pieces of art are, a wistful reflection on time stretched before you, contextualized by a moment where you broke into a dude's mansion to impress a girl you liked. Those are really the only important ideas for any piece of art to tackle: love, death and time, so all of that makes this a special game in its own right. May expand my thoughts on this here as I think on it.

by kato’s own admission, radical dreamers is an unfinished bastard child. developed in just three months and released on the ill-fated satellaview, its no grand revelation to say that it made an unremarkable blimp on his career and the general public. the game has yet to see a rerelease in over two decades and it’s a miracle it isn’t lost media entirely. even acknowledging less-than-legal outlets, it’s only perceived as that weird, nonessential, complementary work to its bigger brothers. i’d be posing if i didn’t make it explicitly clear that i came to dreamers for those same, enigmatic qualities - if not for the irrevocable attachment it has to a game many hold close to heart i feel as if the western world may have passed it up entirely.

but i don’t say any of this begrudgingly, it makes it fascinating even, how dreamers takes advantage of our nostalgia for trigger. radical dreamers was drafted hot off the back of trigger’s release, a period where kato was in an emotional slump. thusly, dreamers exists far removed from the juvenile enthusiasm characteristic of his past works. if trigger was a game about how opening up about our personal background and motives to loved ones can allow us to, collectively, strive towards a more brilliant future, radical dreamers is that future. a future where not everybody got to realize their desires and the indifferent thread of time has cursed them with regrets and woes regardless of their achievements. for the better part of its runtime, you’re trudging through rugged corridors after rugged corridors aided by people with baggage too heavy and complicated to plainly clarify, complimented by an ambient to downright melancholic mitsuda score. the manor is an emotionally draining hub, tasking you to backtrack through samey halls and text crawls you’ve seen three times over only to be met with characters wallowing in regret and cynicism once you finally reach your destination. made worse with some only being here to reinforce the notion that there’s no future for kid nor her gang of drifters - a pessimism that she long since deeply internalized.

yet, despite the burden this milieu is actively afflicting on kid’s already vulnerable psyche, she still finds a way to banter with the party every opportunity she gets. never getting a chance to sit down and process her emotions being surrounded in a never static environment, she attempts to make the best of the cards she was dealt and drifts on towards her ultimate objective - not knowing rather it will result in some final emotional catharticism or rather it’s even accomplishable. it’s not sincerity coming from a place of previously reached self-actualization a la trigger, it’s coming from a place of accepting the regrets of yesterday and fears of tomorrow in an earnest pursuit of that final, personal pillar. even surge never quite stops fawning over kid whilst submerged in the bleakness, and while magil never comes around to the two he still holds that fundamental will to live. the aforementioned chrono trigger links don’t ever dare to steal the spotlight from dreamers’ established mood and themes, instead opting to recontextualize what we know of these characters and their tribulations. it’s the only sequel the kato of 96 could have envisioned, a sequel that firmly stands as its own being, sometimes recounting nostalgic yet somber memories of days gone in a yearning to find solace in a future unknown and soon to arrive.

in some parts, it feels like radical dreams was meant to be abandoned, with the narrative being framed as the ramblings of a distant relative, lost and deceased. it’s a dream cast ashore, its vestiges dismantled and lifted to realize aspirations of greater prestige. but, i just can’t help but marvel at what kato perceives as some pebble, a pebble crafted with so much passion, so much emotion, so many dreams only for it to be simply forgotten.

If you took my average rating across a video game series, the Chrono franchise would easily be on top. Chrono Cross, flaws and all, is still in my top 10 favorite games, and I still consider Chrono Trigger the best game ever made. Unknown to most fans though, there is actually a third Chrono game, which for many years remained somewhat obscure, until the Chrono Cross remaster brought into greater consciousness. Radical Dreamers is technically the second game in the series, released for the Japanese-only Satellaview SNES add-on, and previously only available in English via a mid-2000s fan translation. The game features three characters -- Serge, Kid, and Magil -- as they attempt to break into a manor and steal the treasure inside. For most of its playthrough, Radical Dreamers seems to have nothing at all to do with Trigger, only dropping vague references, waiting until the end to reveal that the entire game is meant to answer the open fate of one of its characters. For those who have played Chrono Cross, this plot will sound incredibly similar. Indeed, dissatisfied with how Radical Dreamers turned out, its plot would be reused as the basis of Chrono Cross, so far as to reuse much of this scenario in that game, when Serge, Kid, and a third party member break into Viper Manor near the beginning of the game. Somewhat ironically, I think the characterization shown here is much better than we got in Cross, as Kid and Serge actually have a relationship, and the connections to the first game are much more solid (Magil has a heavily hinted upon connection to Trigger, while his modified Cross version Guile is a completely discardable character). The game itself is a visual novel with some exploration and light combat thrown in. It's somewhat engaging, and the music is excellent, but I can see why the developers wanted a do-over. There's a hidden and somewhat arbitrary health and relationship stat which will determine how the ending goes. In addition, it carries on the tradition of silly alternative endings, but those are probably best viewed online. I think if you're a fan of the series this game is worth playing, simply to get some additional insight into the development of Cross, and to spend more time in this world. Besides, if you know where to look while playing Chrono Cross, you can find out that this game is not entirely forgotten.

Uma visual novel bem envolvente, imersiva e com grande senso estético. Suas conexões com Chrono Trigger são apenas um pequeno detalhe; é uma obra bem fechadinha e fácil de apreciar mesmo sem a experiência do outro jogo.

Além da, hum, chamemos de "campanha principal", há vários finais e caminhos alternativos disponíveis após se zerar o game "normalmente" pelo menos uma vez. Alguns são absolutamente hilários, outros apenas absurdos. Todos são um pequeno deleite narrativo.

E a trilha sonora é foderosa.