I don’t suppose it’s unfair to say that when Super Nintendo basic JRPG Chrono Trigger first hit PC again in February, the standard of the port might be summed up as ‘hot garbage’, with blurry sprites, a careless interface and even utilizing Windows default system textual content in locations. The iconic opening display of the sport – a clock pendulum swinging – was even undermined by being utterly out of sync with the audio.
Fortunately, Square Enix have made real efforts to enhance issues, with the previous patch cleansing up the blurry, overly-filtered sprites and yesterday’s update making important enhancements to the fight UI, with extra enhancements due in June.
The focus of this replace has been transforming the fight UI to look a little bit extra authentically SNES-styled, whereas nonetheless retaining some fashionable niceties like window transparency. For essentially the most half, it’s a hit, and a major enchancment over the earlier, mismatched try. There’s additionally a brand new choice to modify between a mouse/touchscreen-centric UI with extra seen buttons on-screen and a extra console-styled structure for gamepad customers.
I’ve but to see them in movement but, however the patch notes additionally point out that they’ve improved the decision of the anime cutscenes that had been first launched for the PlayStation re-release of the sport. Perhaps they’ve managed to dig the unique uncooked video information out of storage? Either method, one other small step in direction of making this the definitive launch of the sport. Character sprites on the world map have been cleaned up, too, one way or the other missed by the earlier patch’s sprite enchancment move.
There are nonetheless some apparent issues with the port. Most notably that it’s all too clear that numerous sprite layers are operating at mismatched resolutions, giving it a barely disjointed look. Characters seem to slip round on a visibly totally different degree to the background. Attempts to widen the view-port to suit fashionable widescreen displays have been hit or miss too, with the side ratio of backdrops nonetheless being a bit stretched.
You can try the full patch notes here, and the sport could be discovered on Steam & Humble for £12/15€/$15, though it might nonetheless be greatest to carry off for the following main patch (deliberate for June) to see if they will’t hammer out the worst of the kinks.
