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It is hard to recommend this unless you're interested in old video games as historical documents.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.

i love to hit things with a sword, and i love a horrid little gremlin who makes the :twisted: face.

also i cried at the end.

now my fav zelda (above OoT and BotW)

The main plot is unremarkable and the characters have seeds of interesting stories in them but are otherwise thin, and not helped by wooden animation and inconsistent voice acting. It would have been less jarring to have 2D character portraits, and frankly more interesting to look at. There's a laudable attempt at diversity within the cast, but the Asian pilot, with a throwaway line about his husband, is still working for the Galactic Empire - whose governing ideology is one of human supremacy. This is rarely explicitly stated in media outside of the pre-Disney books, and I'm not surprised to see it elided again, but this had potential for more adventurous writing than "gay people of colour can do war crimes, too, in a universe where the homophobias and racisms of the real world don't exist".

I actually did enjoy the overall pacing, and chatting to people between missions in the hangar and ready room. The engine itself seems like a great foundation for story-telling! I would love to see what modders could do with this, but this is an EA joint so expectations are sadly low.

I don't think I can really review the piloting as I'd like because I don't have a joystick. It was certainly playable with a gamepad. However, the control binding menus were very robust, including the Laser/Shields/Engine distribution keys - I think it's quite clear a lot of people from the X-Wing vs TIE Fighters days were listened to it, with good effect.

I've never been much for deathmatch/dogfights, so I've mostly played the Fleet Battles mode, in which there is a sort of soft-coded ebb/tide of territory based on your team's performance, and victory is defined by taking out the capital ships rather than First To X Kills. Did I play well? Did I know what I was doing? Did I research strategies? I did none of these things and I still had a good time.

I was also pleasantly surprised that they added custom servers, with the ability to make granular changes to the game (e.g.damage/health for both starfighters and capital ships). Now go the whole hog and let us trigger serverwide soundboards with allchat commands.

Overall, as much as they could with a relatively niche genre within a multi-billion dollar IP, the developers really have tried to avoid making something with barebones features and a sterile matchmaking environment, and their update posts give me the impression they want to maintain it and create something longlasting. It's a good video game I should pick it up again actually. They have B-wings now! B-wings!!!

i suck fucking shit at this game. teenagers from both sides of the atlantic constantly hurl homophobic slurs my way.

but you can theoretically do anything you want with any hero and once upon a time when a game went on too long the map would literally start to break and you'd get random particle effects flying around for some reason.

5 stars