It turns out the Chrono Cross remaster is also a restoration, as Producer Koichiro Sakamoto went over how the team needed to replace missing data and manually rebuild locations’ backgrounds. This was due to an incomplete version of the game and its 3D data. This meant the team needed to replay the game during development in order to properly prepare the modern ports.
Sakamoto first explained PlayStation limitations meant Chrono Cross locations involved creating a 3D place and using a capture of it as an actual background in game. However, part of the lost data involved the 3D designs. This meant the team had to take the renders they had, and then have AI and people fix them.
Here’s his full statement from the PlayStation Blog.
As a result, what we did back then was to create a 3D image, and then take a still capture of it. By using a still image for the background and moving the polygon characters around, we were able to depict depth and make it feel like a 3D space. It was a compromise between the realism that people wanted, and what we could realistically achieve with the hardware.
This is an approach the developers of Chrono Cross also took, but unfortunately, like many games of that era, the original 3D data before the prerender is no longer available – and that’s a problem.
What we had to do when working on this Chrono Cross remaster was to take each existing pre-rendered image to as high a resolution as possible. We then upscaled that and manually built on some of them at an even higher resolution.
It’s a very difficult task. We used AI to help to sharpen the images, but that’s not perfect – everything still comes down to having manual processes or the “human touch” to make sure it all looked appropriate.
The backgrounds you see in the final release is the result of a lot of effort from the team – something I’m very grateful to them for.
As for the Chrono Cross Battle Boost, the goal was to keep things from being too easy. Enemies are very likely to miss. Sakamoto noted, “That way, combat is made easier, but still requires involvement from players.”
The Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition remaster is now available on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
