Are you ready for the feel-good story of the year? Square Enix did a thing, fans didn’t like the thing, and then Square Enix actually addressed and fixed the thing in a way that will make everybody happy.
Here’s what happened. In February, Square released a surprise version of Chrono Trigger on Steam, which briefly delighted RPG fans before they noticed that it didn’t look great. Last week, after a month of review-bombs and widespread negative reception, Square said it would patch the game with a setting that lets you enable the original SNES graphics. Yesterday, that patch went live, and it’s just about everything you could want.
When you load up Chrono Trigger on PC, you’ll be asked whether you want to play with high-resolution graphics or old-school ones, so you can pick your poison. Square also made some other big tweaks and fixes. The two most significant changes are 1) the font, which now has proper kerning and no longer looks like it was ripped from a terrible iPhone app, and 2) the battle screen, which no longer has giant mobile blocks all over it:
For context, here’s what battles used to look like:
Now we just need these same fixes for Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, which I’ve asked Square about. Crossing my fingers.