Today, Square Enix announced that it has finished patching Chrono Trigger on PC, just days after releasing the fifth major update to the game since it launched six months ago. (Chrono Trigger is 50% off on Steam for the next week to celebrate.) Now if only Square’s other classic games would get the same treatment.
In February, Square put out a surprise release of the classic Super Nintendo RPG on Steam, briefly delighting fans before they discovered that it looked horrible. Square took the feedback seriously, promising to address it, and since then the company has put out five major patches full of tweaks, fixes, and new features, including key-binding, better UI, and a toggle for the original graphics.
This is all great news—it’s just a shame that Square Enix hasn’t treated its other classics the same way. The PC port of Final Fantasy IV has mysterious framerate issues that cap battles at 15 frames-per-second, while Final Fantasy XIII is so poorly optimized that it struggles to retain 60 FPS on my GTX 1080.
Most notably, the ports of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI remain mind-bogglingly ugly, with the same jarring fonts and washed-out graphics they’ve had since they launched for PC in 2015. There’s no way to toggle the original graphics for either game, which is a real shame, because they’re both all-time classics that I want to be able to recommend to everyone with a working Steam account. Now that Square has finished patching Chrono Trigger, maybe it can make the rest of its classic library more palatable on PC.