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.