One year later, Chrono Cross' busted PC port is finally getting a patch
PC players have been getting a lot of shitty ports recently. We're talking frame-dropping, glitch-swollen monstrosities that feel like they've warped here from the dark days of the late 2000s. But at least one of them might be getting a fix. The remaster of Chrono Cross, which hit PC last year riddled with stuttering and framerate issues, is slated for a patch "this month," per an announcement on the Chrono Cross Twitter account (via RPS).
We’re launching an update for Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition. pic.twitter.com/pMxwcuoxzNFebruary 20, 2023
The Chrono Cross remaster's performance was so bad that it eventually got re-remastered by the fans themselves. A mod by a creator named isa managed to coax a stable(ish) 30fps out of the game by opening it up in Cheat Engine and poking at things until they worked better. But you hopefully won't have to rely on such jury-rigged fixes for much longer.
The devs are promising a "wide range of changes" in the upcoming patch, including improvements to the framerate, changes to the growth system for Pip (what those changes will actually be is a mystery), and "fixes for other bugs". As an aside, I don't know how we as a society came to accept things like 'Bugfixes and other improvements' in our patch notes, but it's become a problem that desperately needs rectifying.
I'm hoping the patch will finally turn Chrono Cross into the game it's meant to be, but I can't help but remember Square Enix's patch for the PC version of Nier: Automata. That one came out a whole four years after the janky port of the original game, but while it made some improvements, Nier's PC version still suffers from performance issues to this day. Still, I can only hope that Chrono Cross' patch goes above and beyond Nier's, if only to finally give PCG's Wes Fenlon the shiny port he so richly deserves.