Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition’s frame rate and balance patch is live

Targeting a crisp 60

The previously announced patch to Square’s remastered Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition is going live on all platforms. It’s set to tackle some issues on all fronts: fine-tuning the performance, adjusting certain balance aspects, and dealing with bugs.

Square Enix’s patch notes detail all the changes to this remaster. The big one is that the frame rate, during battles, is now set to a maximum of 60 FPS across all platforms. There are, however, some addendums to this.

The final battle on the Switch version will have a max frame rate of 30. Additionally, when using recommended specifications for the Steam version, the game should run at an average of 60, and 30 FPS maximum outside of battle scenes. However, “certain” graphics cards may not run at 60; Square Enix says this wrinkle was observed specifically with AMD Radeon RX 6000 series cards.

Performance is one thing, but there are also graphs. The update addresses changes specifically revolving around the form-shifting Pip, with some pretty in-depth adjustments. At this point, Square Enix literally breaks out the spreadsheets and graphs to show how its changes work. I’ve not played this new version of Chrono Cross myself, so I can’t comment on how effective the changes are. But I am impressed by their presentation.

Crossing over

The bump to battle scenes alone sounds like a good update, as frame rate was a notable sticking point for the original release of The Radical Dreamers Edition last year. Hopefully this makes the remastered version land a bit better for fans.

The creators behind Chrono Cross did a roundtable talk recently about making The Radical Dreamers Edition, and why they tackled the project in the first place. It’s a lengthy video but it has some neat insight into the making of these games, both then and now. Chrono Cross has always felt like the complicated sibling to Chrono Trigger that nevertheless has its fervent defenders, and I’m glad we’ve at least got a playable version of that for future generations now.

Eric Van Allen

Senior News Reporter