One year later, Chrono Cross’ busted PC port is finally getting a patch
PC players have been getting a lot of shitty ports recently (opens in new tab). We’re talking frame-dropping, glitch-swollen monstrosities that feel like they’ve warped here from the dark days of the late 2000s. But at least one of them might be getting a fix. The remaster of Chrono Cross, which hit PC last year riddled with stuttering and framerate issues, is slated for a patch “this month,” per an announcement on the Chrono Cross Twitter account (via RPS (opens in new tab)).
We’re launching an update for Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. pic.twitter.com/pMxwcuoxzNFebruary 20, 2023
The Chrono Cross remaster’s performance was so bad that it eventually got re-remastered by the fans themselves. A mod by a creator named isa (opens in new tab) managed to coax a stable(ish) 30fps out of the game by opening it up in Cheat Engine and poking at things until they worked better. But you hopefully won’t have to rely on such jury-rigged fixes for much longer.
The devs are promising a “wide range of changes” in the upcoming patch, including improvements to the framerate, changes to the growth system for Pip (what those changes will actually be is a mystery), and “fixes for other bugs”. As an aside, I don’t know how we as a society came to accept things like ‘Bugfixes and other improvements’ in our patch notes, but it’s become a problem that desperately needs rectifying.
I’m hoping the patch will finally turn Chrono Cross into the game it’s meant to be, but I can’t help but remember Square Enix’s patch for the PC version of Nier: Automata (opens in new tab). That one came out a whole four years after the janky port of the original game, but while it made some improvements, Nier’s PC version still suffers from performance issues to this day. Still, I can only hope that Chrono Cross’ patch goes above and beyond Nier’s, if only to finally give PCG’s Wes Fenlon the shiny port (opens in new tab) he so richly deserves.
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