I had tried two or three times to play this, initially emulated on PC, and then through the official rerelease. It wasn't until after it had been patched (there were many framerate issues) that I picked it up for my Switch. There was something really alluring about this follow-up to Chrono Trigger (a game I had only played for the first time a couple years ago) that, for whatever, reason had fallen flat.
The colour-based combat/element system is really interesting, but setting up elements themselves quickly gets tedious - most of the time I was auto-setting things and tweaking one or two things. Trying to include primary characters (a handful out of a potential 45) for dialogue options can be a pain, as there wasn't a great deal of variety in their colour attributes.
The story has some fun stuff happening in it, but the pacing quickly goes off the rails, and trying to comprehend what it was getting at (let alone emotionally resonate with) seems to require a perfect recall of specific events in Chrono Trigger, which I didn't have. I'm not too proud to admit I did look up some explainers after, but I'm sort of glad it didn't spoonfeed me a synopsis of CT either.
Despite all the above, I found my appreciation deepened when I looked up all the endings on YouTube, one of which was a secret Developer's Room. This must have taken a fair bit of work in itself, and involved a lot of the devs presented as NPC's proudly explaining and demonstrating the components they'd worked on. Clearly, they really loved what they'd created, even if it didn't hit like its predecessor.
It is hard to recommend this unless you're interested in old video games as historical documents. It's a janky yet charming collection of interesting ideas that don't quite live up to the potential, but it's commendable they tried to make a new game as opposed to just Chrono Trigger 2.
The colour-based combat/element system is really interesting, but setting up elements themselves quickly gets tedious - most of the time I was auto-setting things and tweaking one or two things. Trying to include primary characters (a handful out of a potential 45) for dialogue options can be a pain, as there wasn't a great deal of variety in their colour attributes.
The story has some fun stuff happening in it, but the pacing quickly goes off the rails, and trying to comprehend what it was getting at (let alone emotionally resonate with) seems to require a perfect recall of specific events in Chrono Trigger, which I didn't have. I'm not too proud to admit I did look up some explainers after, but I'm sort of glad it didn't spoonfeed me a synopsis of CT either.
Despite all the above, I found my appreciation deepened when I looked up all the endings on YouTube, one of which was a secret Developer's Room. This must have taken a fair bit of work in itself, and involved a lot of the devs presented as NPC's proudly explaining and demonstrating the components they'd worked on. Clearly, they really loved what they'd created, even if it didn't hit like its predecessor.
It is hard to recommend this unless you're interested in old video games as historical documents. It's a janky yet charming collection of interesting ideas that don't quite live up to the potential, but it's commendable they tried to make a new game as opposed to just Chrono Trigger 2.