Chrono Trigger

I played the DS Chrono Trigger only. (missed the boat on the original)

It's up there all right, The touch screen selections (they've added for the DS, I assume, lol) are really fast and the game transcends it's genre by a quite a good push. the story deals creatively and competently with time travel and there are several branches to the main story and various endings.

Even if you especially don't like early FF's or turn based or ATB games, there's still a large chance you'll enjoy Chrono trigger.
It's up there in the elusive bunch of titles that are both brilliant for their time and are still brilliant today and that's considering I played it around the same time I played Pokemon White, Radiant Historia and Zelda Spirit Tracks.

Sometimes people just build bad ports.

I played streets of rage 2 on PSN and it was the worst experience of my life.
I know every pixel of that game, the precise inputs of each attack and how each character feels down to the level one would expect from a 2d fighter specialist knowing his/her favourite characters.
on the PSN version the controls were laggy, completely hopeless and destroyed the game entirely.
it's amazing how dodgy controls or a bad port can destroy the fun of a game. It makes you wonder how many game you've played which might've been amazing games but for the "roll of a dice" of it winding up having dodgy slow loading times.

I remember hating FF9's loading times, it would take an eon for the game to handle you getting on or of a Chocobo. It would take about 9-12 seconds from the "screen wash" to inputting your first command in the battle and because of the slow animations, moves would stack up and you'd be operating about 4 or 5 commands behind what the screen was showing. so if the three other characters have moves in queue and two enemies, but you need to heal, you select heal, and you need to wait for 6 other commands to play out.

I believe XII had a problem with that two didnt it? the magic would queue up, meanwhile all the attackers could go nuts, in the later stages the attackers in the battle could get 6 or 7 turns in while the magicians were waiting patiently for the previous persons Curaga or Ultima to finish it's animation.

I can see how a laggy port would ruin Chrono trigger. I shall endeavour to warn people against the PS port and instead go for the DS.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Well as previously mentioned the music is really terrible in the PS1 port. They really ruined it compared to the original SNES music. Most of all though it's the load times that kill the game. Every time you get into a fight or change screens the game has to pause for about 5-10 seconds to load and it really slows the game down and kills it.

I actually looked into this a bit more, and I think I managed to find a proper explanation as to why CT and the Final Fantasy Anthology are so busted on PS1 / PSN

The load times come from the crazy way they injected the text when porting the Japanese version on the PlayStation. Every time you moved from one screen to the next, it would have to access the text file on the disc, find the script pieces for that screen, and inject it (using a bootstrap method) into the Japanese code, because Square Japan couldn't be bothered to provide the source used for the Japanese PlayStation version. I guess the delay comes more from it injecting the text, rather than the access times.

And obviously, Square did nothing to rectify this in between releases, so that's the version everyone else received. So, while it's still a bad port...Tose basically may as well have been handed a piece of paper that had "FFIV/V/VI source code lolz" written on it.

So in short, there are fully functioning versions of the Final Fantasy Anthology and Chrono Trigger that could run on modern hardware, they're just to ****ing lazy to do it. So they release gimped versions.

buy it on the ds right now