Chrono Trigger is very special. It’s a bold and beautiful RPG assembled by some of the best developers working in gaming at the time. Perhaps just as importantly, it holds up remarkably well for a game that released on the SNES over 30 years ago. Go play it right now if you haven’t. I promise you it sill looks great, sounds amazing, and packs a neat, evocative, one-of-a-kind story into an incredibly streamlined but satisfying time-travelling structure. I mention all this because Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, who was also one of the writers on Chrono Trigger, is once again playing coy about Square Enix’s plans for a remake.
“I can’t talk about that,” Horii said on the latest episode of the ‘KosoKoso Hōsō Kyoku‘ talk show livestream (translated by Automaton) when asked if anniversary events for the SNES classic might be leading up to a bigger project. He continued to say he couldn’t talk about it in a way that heavily implied there was something to talk about. “Wait, if I say that, you’ll figure it out!” he added, followed by “Don’t ask!” and “I’ll get in trouble!”
Square Enix is in the middle of a remaster frenzy
This might feel like a bit of smoke with no fire if not for the fact that Horii has done this before. At Napoli Comicon, the designer appeared to let slip that Chrono Trigger was getting a remake before following it up with “You have heard nothing.” There was video, and first-hand accounts from attendees, but it was all a bit messy to parse due to the translations and loud audience reactions. Square Enix later followed up to say that Horii had been “mistranslated,” which only convinced fans the remake was even more real.
But while I absolutely believe at this point that Square Enix is working on something related to Chrono Trigger, what exactly it will be and when, if ever, it’ll see the light of day, is harder to pin down. Square Enix has released all sorts of remasters and remakes running from simple HD updates (Chrono Cross) to HD-2D glow-ups (Dragon Quest III Remake) to complete 3D overhauls (Final Fantasy VII Remake). There’s even Horii’s own upcoming Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, which falls somewhere between those last two categories.
In other words, Chrono Trigger could get a straightforward Pixel Perfect-style upgrade or a full-blown reimagining. My money’s on something simpler. Square Enix has shown a desire to remain pretty conservative when tampering with its classics, and doesn’t necessarily have the resources to be throwing at a more ambitious remake. Then there’s the fact that things like a rumored remake of Final Fantasy IX are still MIA. As it pulls from its back catalog, Square Enix seems a bit less predictable with what will come out when and in what form.
Yes, Chrono Trigger really is that good
Maybe there’s also a little bit of trepidation with trying to “improve” on what’s widely considered to be one of the all-time greats. The Outer Worlds 2 game director Brandon Adler was recently gushing about the game with zero caveats. “Let’s just take the actual visuals and the music on that thing,” Adler said on a recent episode of My Perfect Console. “Just aesthetically, the game is gorgeous on so many different fronts. I can still hear the music. The characters, they made such an impact, and they did such interesting things, even in terms of the actual systems behind them, like the [techniques] that were being used.”
He also complimented the pacing which remains unmatched in the genre. “It doesn’t get enough credit for, although I think the real RPG heads will know this, is the pacing on it is just amazing,” he said. “It’s one of the only JRPGs I can think of where you don’t actually have to grind. You can just play through the entire experience and you don’t have to worry about that aspect of JRPGs. Which, some people like that, but also it’s a grind.”
This is the kind of stuff people think about when they call Chrono Trigger a “perfect” game, and the kind of thing that would be easy to mess up with a remake that starts reorganizing things at a deeper level than just the look and sound. Those things are precious too, though. Trying to remake that first glimpse of the Kingdom of Zeal would be like going in decades later and trying to monkey around with Laurence of Arabia. Good luck! But also I would 100 percent use it as an excuse to go back and replay Chrono Trigger either way. Some games are too good to be remade. Others are so good that no remake could ever take anything away from them.
