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Suddenly, Chrono Trigger is on Steam

Joined
May 6, 2009
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Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
>PS1 rerelease

I wonder how hard it would be to fix the loadings and release that one as the PC version. There would probably be little to no complaints.

-



VGwSJH3CiJebu1Ch27UsoESl4O7SozVWPtn91o1cc3g.jpg
 
Joined
Aug 10, 2012
Messages
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You are so full of shit it's actually hilarious. Just to be clear, ROMs are perfectly legal if you own the original cartridge and dump the image yourself (not hard at all to do). However, that doesn't matter in the slightest and you're just being disingenuous for the sake of an argument you cannot possibly win, since the premise is so utterly retarded. The premise is - shitty port of Chrono Trigger is better than no Chrono Trigger at all, to which the obvious answer is you have been able to play Chrono Trigger more or less perfectly on the PC - certainly even primitive emulators provided a better experience than this port - for close to two decades.

To illustrate your (laughable) point, you cited two games - one of which is in fact a great fucking port (Dragon's Dogma) while the other was technically perfectly serviceable upon release with nothing broken, it just lacked added features that were expected of good ports and which were added less than a week after release by a hobbyist coder who happened to be a fan of the game.

Why are you defending an incredibly shitty port by a company that regularly puts out low-effort products at an absurd premium to fleece gullible consumers?

To reiterate: your point is non-existent and your examples are beyond dumb. Just walk away.
 
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Xor

Arcane
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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
ROMs are not legal. As such one can argue that Chrono Trigger wasnt available on PC.
Why? If something is comparable then it can be compared. Mathematically speaking 2 objects are comparable if you can order them within some space.
To be more clear with definition: our space are games that were ported to PC. Each game can be mapped on 2d space based on how well port was executed. Lets say that point 0 is game without any issues. Point -100 is game that was not playable in a sense that you cant boot it. Positive numbers would go to those rare gems that became better.
With this hand waving definition every game can be subjectively evaluated and as such - ordered.
As such games are comparable.
This is some high level autism right here.
 

lukaszek

the determinator
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deterministic system > RNG
 
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Jinn

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
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4,930
It's all very bad and very sad. Was hoping this would come out on PC someday and do well, to possibly encourage Square-Enix to release Chrono Cross on pc with a basic HD version. While that was far fetched before, I don't have much hope at all after seeing this train wreck.

I was somewhat hopeful that they were changing their ways a bit with their releases of Romancing SaGa 2 and Final Fantasy XII PC, but goddamn, no shits were given with this release.
 

Jacob

Pronouns: Nick/Her
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Grab the Codex by the pussy
Mainly people care because newcomers purchase it and their first experience is this misrepresentative, inferior, cash-grabbing piece of shit.

But personally I get off on this, as someone that thinks CT is the most overrated piece of shit of all time. Just kidding, sort of. I played it a few years back and while it was charming it had one unforgivable catch: the gameplay had zero merit. It would have been much better as an animated cartoon with occasional dialogue choices/choose your own path choices in a SNES cartridge. The gameplay damages the experience, even, by just being boring filler. An exception for one or two of the mini-games perhaps.

It's shit like this why people unfairly hate on JRPGs as a collective.

People praise the combat for 'having no grinding', 'fixed encounters', and 'taking place on actual game map', mostly about good presentations and not being a chore, i.e. it's praised for being less intrusive to the narrative compared to early story-focused RPGs such as FF IV.

My first time playing Chrono Trigger was on the NDS version, which has a cool anime opening (Actually I think it first appeared on the PSX version, CMIIW), honestly I think it's the best part of the game.

Someone should have made an anime TV from this game with game-accurate character design.
 

Jacob

Pronouns: Nick/Her
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Grab the Codex by the pussy
By the way, of course Square Enix wouldn't listen because there will be always blind SE funbois to buy and even defend their products.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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This is just straight up disrespect for customers, they think people who buy games on the PC are the same people who buy shit on mobile appstores.

I don't think I would manage to come up with a combination of shaders and filters that is as shitty as what they've applied even if I tried, and the interface is simply awful beyond words. Also, is sprite tiling a lost arcane art that they couldn't find anyone in the company that would be able to stretch those backgrounds into a different aspect ratio without looking like someone copy-pasted them with mspaint?

What a shame. These companies have a mountain of incredible legacy material that they can re-release with great fanfarre to gullible weeabo buyers who are willing to shell out infinite shekels, and they come up with this low effort shit? Hahaha.

chronotrigger-180228-lks66.png

gib shaders
 

JBro

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 12, 2016
Messages
701
I wanted the original 2d graphics for old Squeenix games, and not this 3d shit they've been pushing since the FF4 remake on DS.

I feel like this is some monkey's paw bullshit.
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
ROMs are not legal. As such one can argue that Chrono Trigger wasnt available on PC.

That's the painful bit. In a sane world, a proper 2018 PC release would be a better experience than a pirated copy running on some DOS-looking emulator from a decade ago.
Best part is the bug fix and cd quality audio fanpatches that only work on the ROM. Which is how it should be of course.
 

lukaszek

the determinator
Patron
Joined
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Messages
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deterministic system > RNG
 
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LESS T_T

Arcane
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Messages
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Codex 2014
The game developer who wrote articles about how awful ports of FF5 and FF6 are is at it again: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Lar...make_the_Right_Way_Chrono_Trigger_Edition.php

So, Chrono Trigger just got re-released today on Steam. Aaaaand....

cronoboat.png


Square. Buddy. Pal.

We've talked about this:
Doing an HD Remake the Right Way

We've talked about this twice:
Doing an HD Remake the Right Way: FFVI Edition

For those of you just joining us, hi, my name's Lars, I'm some random indie game developer you've never heard of who made a random game you've never heard of, (out now on Steam and consoles!) and I have a lot of opinions about how to do HD Remakes the Right WayTM.

This is not to say that I think my own games' art styles are unimpeachable or that I'm so great, (far from it), just that no matter how small your budget or simple your approach, there are some well established best practices for presenting classic games in the best possible light, regardless of the player's subjective personal taste.

These techniques are cheap, straightforward, and easy to implement, and I'm giving them away for free!

But somehow, Square Enix, despite their comparatively unlimited resources and rich collection of history's most beloved RPG's, isn't getting the message.

Before we begin, this doesn't seem to be the fault of a "crappy mobile port" either. The original mobile version was released December 8, 2011, and has had a series of updates. According to the iTunes version history, Version 2.0.0 launched today, Feb 27, 2018, with this changelog:

Now available as a version upgrade!
- Updated graphics and sound.
- Improved controls and screen layout.
- Compatible with Apple TV.
- Compatible with gamepads.
- New autosave function.
- Compatible with cloud saves.
- New achievement function.
*Upgrade available free to customers who purchased the previous version

Which seems to be the same set of graphical "upgrades" that match the day-one Steam version.

In other words, at least as far as graphical presentation is concerned, the team that made the original mobile port may very well have had nothing to do with this. It's entirely the fault of whoever directed these most recent changes, which follow a clear pattern set by the FFV and FFVI HD remakes also released on Steam.

Shall we begin?

IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you're reading this on a phone, images might not be at the proper scale for you, making some of the points the article makes harder to grasp. Each image can be clicked for a full resolution version.



1. Thou Shalt Not Apply Filters Inconsistently
Those of you into the emulation scene might know about upscaling filters. I talked about them in the previous articles.

So on the original SNES, Chrono Trigger looked like this in terms of pixels sent to your TV:

cronoboat_snes.png


Of course, that's not exactly how you would have remembered seeing it. It's a matter of subjective taste whether you prefer 1:1 upscaled blocky pixels or whether you prefer the "classic look" with simulated scanlines, CRT color bleed, and even screen curvature. But we can leave that aside because instead of opting for either of these techniques (or even better: letting the user choose), they've again opted for the worst of both worlds.

Here's that detail shot again, from the Steam version's opening cinematic. And even though this is a cropped detail shot, this is not shrunk or scaled, these are the exact pixels on your screen:

cronoboat.png


Some elements are fully pixelated (the boat, the seagulls), some have an upscale filter applied (the houses in the village), and some are pixelated with a bilinear filter slapped on top (the clouds, which are transparent to boot). To top it off, scaling is inconsistently applied at a non 1:1 ratio - at 1080p resolution, the boat features pixels variably scaled at 7x5, 6x5, and 5x5.

Absolutely none of this is consistent, and does nothing to make the art look better than the original, regardless of one's taste.

Here's the boat from the SNES version, sized up to match. It's not a 1:1 comparison because the color model is slightly different, the birds and clouds are in a slightly different place, but you get the idea.

cronoboat_snes_crop.png


Option one is to just leave everything as-is. Granted, blown up on a huge monitor this doesn't look exactly fantastic -- pixels really weren't designed to be viewed at this scale. Here's a wider shot at 2:1 pixel scale, which depending on your device is probably a bit closer to how it appeared on an old 13" TV from 10 feet away:

cronoboat_snes-1.png


So. Let's try some filters!

Here's the XBR 4x filter:
cronoboat_snes_4xbr.png


Here's the HQ 4x filter:
cronoboat_snes_HQ4x.png


Mmmm, okay. Admittedly not great. But at least they're consistent.

These filters top out at 4X scale, so to get to 1080p you'd have to scale again, or you could just leave the screen with black borders. (Options are always good)

The trouble with filters is that there's only so much they can do. If you're upscaling anything beyond 2X, you really start to tear at the fabric of the original pixels. Still, I personally think that picking one filter, and applying it to the entire screen, looks better than haphazardly applying different styles to different elements within the same scene:

cronoboat.png


Ideally, the game would provide a solid options menu full of choices for pixel filtering style, scaling, scanlines, etc, but instead this is all we've got:

2018-02-27-14_59_46-Chrono-Trigger.png


But the real tragedy here is that until someone makes some mod tools to undo some of this stuff, users cannot fix this themselves. I can't even run the game's raw pixel output through a 3rd-party visual tool to do custom post processing, because the output is corrupted with these artifacts.

But this is about a lot more than just filters. Once again, it looks like Square has been applying upscalers to the tile sheets themselves rather than the final output.

2. Thou Shalt Not Exacerbate Tile Boundaries with Upscaled Assets!
I talked about this in the original article, concerning artifacts like this in Final Fantasy V:

ffvgarbagezoom.jpg


This problem is caused by two things -- 1) upscaling tilesheets before you compose them, and 2) the insecapable nature of pixel art itself.

Compose your tilesheets before you scale them

What do I mean by this?

Here's a tilesheet dump from Chrono Trigger. Probably not exactly like the one Square used in this remake, but surely they had something similar:

chrono_tilesheet-3.png


Now let's run it through some random upscaler. It looks like Square used something like the HQ 2x filter, which will be close enough for this example.

HQ_tilesheet-2.png


Okay, maybe not perfect (I'd have preferred HQ4x or XBR myself), but pretty good, right?

Well, not exactly. You see, upscalers look at neighboring pixels to decide how to draw things at a higher size. And when a tilesheet is all compacted like this, tiles inevitably get placed next to ones that they would never border in the actual game, yet those "false neighbors" will influence how the upscaled tile gets drawn. I've highlighted a few such locations below:

HQ_tilesheet_badborders-1.png


So in the game you have grass that looks like this:

grass.png


And the seams stick out pretty clearly:

grass_seams.png


These seams don't have to be there, even with upscaling. The key is you need to take your tiles and put them in a natural mockup image with their true neighbor tiles, scale that as a finished image, extract tiles from that finished image, and piece them back into the compacted format so that the edges line up properly. This may sound like a lot of tedious Photoshop work, but any competent programmer can automate it with a script that an artist can operate with one button.

Some seams are a bit trickier, however. Algorithms can't do everything.

The nature of pixel art

Let's look back at our detail image. Here we've got a pretty egregious tile boundary break:

tileissues.png


A keen observer will point out that the original game had this issue as well:

tileissues2.png


FFV and FFVI had this problem too. The thing is, these tiles were originally designed for lower resolution, so these sort of little discontinuities were easier to fudge. Particularly because every single visual element was confined to the same pixel grid, the entire image was effectively a mosaic and it was much easier to "hide the grid."

When you scale tiles up without adapting to them to the larger viewing size, and especially when you apply scaling filters, these kinds of problems just get worse. Before, you could count on the pixel grid to obscure the boundary grid between tiles, but the smoother (and smudgier) things get, the harder it is to hide those sharp lines.

As long as you're just automatically upscaling source art 1:1 without adapting it for a larger resolution you're always going to be vulnerable to issues like this, but you can at least mitigate the issues by composing your tilesets before upscaling.

3. Thou Shalt Not Pollute The Screen With Mixels!
Ideally, pick a single pixel scale and stick to it everywhere.

Of course, sometimes art choices or limitations might call for e.g. showing some things at double scale, and others at single scale. There's good and bad ways to do this.

The original freeware PC version of Cave Story is a good example of properly handling so-called mixels:

cavestory.png


Every pixel in the entire game is the exact same size, except for the pixels used to render text. This is acceptable because the text appears by itself and therefore clashes less with the larger pixel grid, and there's a practical need for it -- it's easier to read high resolution text than pixelated text.

Celeste is similar:

celeste.jpg


Here, both the text and the portrait use the smaller pixel scale. In general, if you have to use mixed pixel scales, overlays and UI elements are the best candidates for it, and the more you can visually separate them into their own hierarchy, the better.

Absent that, at least make sure to align all elements to the same underlying grid, and pixelated images should ideally be scaled at whole-number ratios.

This is a good example of how not to do things (click through for fullscreen to get the full effect):

mixels2.png


The backgrounds for the buttons are needlessly noisy and pixelated here -- even if they're styled after the original game's UI elements this would have been better just being drawn at the same resolution as the text. It's especially confusing contrasted with the high resolution icons, background image, and gamepad button overlays.

In game it's worse. Going back to that boat scene again:

mixels3.png


Because they upscaled some of the tile assets, but not all of them, now we've got mixels all over the place.

4. Thou Shalt Respect The Work Thou Art "Improving"
Now, I know what a lot of you are thinking. Square Enix should have just made a proper, high-budget remake, something like this, maybe:

resurrection.jpg


That's just not in the cards, from the looks of it.

I imagine what most people were hoping for was a treatment like Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap:




This is the Gold Standard -- delicious high-res visuals, properly executed, and the ability to swap back to the old audio/music at any time. And nearly a perfect reproduction of the original underlying gameplay, but with modern tweaks such as 16:9 resolution support.

Let's not pretend this is easy. You need top tier talent, a good budget, and most importantly, a cohesive, committed vision. Wonder Boy is what happens when you hit all the high notes.

The thing is, even when Square commits to a bigger budget remake, it doesn't always turn out how we'd like:

secretofmanaremake.png


Now let's be fair. I own the remake (thanks for the gift, Kjell!), it can't be denied that a lot of effort went into it, and some people really, genuinely, like it. Sure, it had some questionable decisions, and even more clearly it didn't get the proper resources and support from Square, but dangit, remaking a classic beloved game and living up to people's standards is tough, hard, nigh-impossible work, even when you're actually trying.

So sometimes, the best answer is not to try too hard.

The original game already exists. People love it. People would like to pay money to play it. The emulation scene has already come up with fifty thousand different ways to stretch, scale, and shade the visuals in any possible configuration you could dream up. ROMHackers by the plenty have dumped the game, documented its every nook and cranny, fixed bugs, and even created their own editing tools.

This is your game, Square! You can take all these efforts (provided you properly comply with all the open source licenses), repackage them and sell it all back to the community, and the fans will thank you for it! And you know, you could always just hire these emulation scene people directly.

(In a perfect world we'd have a more lenient copyright system where games wouldn't be locked up forever and handed down between random horse-traders until they're finally discarded and melted down for glue, but that's another story...)

So please hire someone like Frank Cifaldi or at least consult with him or any of the fabulous ladies, gentlemen, and assorted magnificent humans at places like Digital Eclipse, The Video Game History Foundation, and the Internet Archive:



I mean, that's what the MegaMan Legacy collections did, and they're fabulous!



Make HD remakes if you like. But give us a legitimate way to experience the original version of games, too. This is why when I did my own HD remake of Defender's Quest on Steam, I included a copy of the original low-res Flash prototype for free. It still exists, jank and all, and people who want that can still experience it.

5. Thou Shalt Not Poop All Over The Name "Emulation"
Let's get this one out of the way. It's pretty clear that you, Square Enix, care less about the legacy of your own products than the community does. The digital dark age is coming. We are losing our history.

It's a good thing we have people in the emulation scene meticulously dumping and archiving ROM's, because our fancy digital media is falling apart:



Also have a listen to this excellent rant by Jason Scott:



Publishers need to embrace emulation, not demonize it.

First, emulation is not a codeword for "piracy," and NO, EMULATION IS NOT ILLEGAL SO STOP PRETENDING LIKE IT IS.

Second, although I don't condone piracy in any way, if you are at all concerned about it you have totally failed at your job as a competent business person and you are worried about all the wrong things. For more on that, read Piracy and the Four Currencies.

A few years from now, when studio closures, bitrot, failing hard drives, and the industry's own advocateshave taken their full toll, it's going to be thanks to the efforts of the emulation community that companies like Square Enix have any digital legacy to preserve at all.



The clock is ticking.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
http://steamcommunity.com/games/613830/announcements/detail/1651004639637322935

Regarding CHRONO TRIGGER

Hi everyone, thank you for the feedback you've shared so far regarding CHRONO TRIGGER.

We wanted to let you know that we are reading and listening to your messages and are aware of all of the issues that you've raised, which we are currently assessing. Please keep an eye on the Steam page for further information.

Thanks for your patience and support.
The CHRONO TRIGGER team
 

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