![]() ![]() Missing a normal attack purely by chance can set you back a turn or two - or three if you take a hit in between, forcing you to heal instead of dishing out all of the damage that you've been saving up for. But then your standard attacks have percent chances to hit, and using them drains your stamina, which is refilled to varying degrees as turns pass.īecause of the way in which the mechanics influence each other, battles can become tediously drawn out. ![]() Basically, you use standard attacks to build up energy, which can then be spent on unleashing elements. For what it's worth, we don't think combat is anywhere near as bad as some critics have made it out to be over the years, but it is a system that could lose one or two mechanics and arguably be better for it. It's similar to Final Fantasy VII's materia, in that party members can be equipped with magic spells and abilities of your choosing - except the elements menu is seriously awkward to navigate, and keeping track of equipped elements is a bit of a nightmare.Ĭhrono Cross loves its convoluted mechanics - a trait that's encapsulated by its divisive combat system. Now look, we didn't expect this remaster to reinvent Chrono Cross for a modern audience, but there's just no getting away from the fact that the game's a slog every now and then. ![]() Again, this was ambitious design in the 90s, but nothing's been done to bring it up to speed. Chrono Cross lacks the copious quality of life improvements that have transformed the genre over the last two decades - and it's something that's painfully obvious here in 2022. Keeping up with your current objectives during these sections can be difficult as you attempt to remember which characters you need to chat with and which places must be visited. Having said all that, proceedings can get a little confusing later on, when you're jumping between timelines in order to progress. Aside from a handful of filler episodes - for lack of a better description - the plot is well paced, and as is typical of PS1 JRPGs, the writing is sharp and straight to the point. It's an ambitious tale, dealing in alternate realities, and boasting a huge cast of mostly fun characters. It's a real shame that this kind of stuff wasn't touched up or fixed for the remaster.Ĭhrono Cross does tell a fairly interesting story, though. What's worse, in certain locations, we found that our movement bugged out completely - to the point where we couldn't even walk in straight lines. At times, lining your character up to interact with environmental details or talk to NPCs can be an exercise in frustration. Needless to say, the remaster's frame rate problems come dangerously close to outright wrecking the experience - although whole chunks of Chrono Cross haven't aged all that well anyway.Īs you'd probably expect of a PS1 RPG with fixed camera angles, the controls are rather wonky. Indeed, these performance dips can lead to noticeable input delay during combat, which is just beyond a joke when you consider how slow-paced the turn based system is to begin with. You can barely walk across the screen without the frame rate tanking to an embarrassing extent - and it gets even worse in battle. The whole thing's supposed to run at a locked 30 frames-per-second - why wouldn't it? - but the frames fluctuate between what feels like about 10 and 25fps constantly. That's right, Square Enix has somehow managed to destroy Chrono Cross' frame rate on modern hardware. ![]()
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