On the 27th of February 2018, Square Enix decided to release Chrono Trigger on Steam, out of the blue, without any previous announcement… and oh boy is that a thing.
Just looking at the trailer does not prepare for what awaits you after buying and installing this port. One reason for that is that the graphics look far worse in practice when playing the port… most of the tiles and sprites have a smoothing filter over them which makes them look worse for one, but a lot of the tiles on maps screens (and some regular areas too) just don’t even match up anymore. Quite an achievement releasing it like that, expecting people to just either not notice or put up with it… and the character sprites look rather bad as well.
In addition to the bad graphics, the main screen already greets you with the terrible interface that was very obviously ported over from the mobile version with MINIMAL effort. Heck, you even get a transparent joystick overlay when clicking and dragging the mouse to move your character (if you don’t want to use the keyboard or a gamepad, though according to some reviews on Steam, gamepad control can also be a problem). Other “great” things connected to the interface are stuff like text box popups when the game asks you to name characters, badly looking buttons intended for touch interfaces, your mouse cursor not having a custom look that fits with the game…
I am kind of surprised that the User Review rating on Steam even reaches the 37% positive it currently sits at, but some people will defend it just on the basis that it’s Chrono Trigger I guess…
My recommendation: Avoid at all costs, unless they MASSIVELY improve it through updates (which I do not expect AT ALL).
It still baffles me how they messed it up this badly though.
They have released several mobile ports of their Final Fantasy games on Steam already, and pretty much all of them fell into similar potholes, but never this badly…
Both FF 5 and 6 also had a full screen pixel filter, which made the game unbearably blurry. Luckily, that could be removed rather quickly.
Both had slightly customized tap interfaces, but they worked perfectly fine with controllers AND didn’t have the stock touch-UI elements in them. And tile-seeming was never an issue in both of them.
While FF V had horrible seeming even in the original (very primitive map making), FF 6 has some of the most intricate tilesets ever made and it didn’t have any issues.
In CT, they messed up the pixel filter, as its applied to separate sprite layers instead of full screen, they messed up the color palette completely, tile-seeming is completely destroyed and those stock mobile dev kit assets are just painful to watch in such a classic.
This is not how you handle such a prestigious IP…not at all…