Chrono Cross director discusses series history, plus Radical Dreamers in new interview
Why so many characters?
Square Enix has published a new video interview featuring Masato Kato, the director of Chrono Cross, as well as the game’s composer, Yasunori Mitsuda. During the interview, Masato Kato shared several intriguing tidbits for fans of the series. One of these touched on the inclusion of Radical Dreamers (Chrono Cross’ visual novel spinoff) in the recent remaster of Chrono Cross. It turns out, Kato had been trying to avoid rereleasing that game for some time before this:
They had approached me multiple times about Radical Dreamers. They wanted to bundle it with other games, such as the Nintendo DS port of Chrono Trigger.
But I told them it was an old title. It breaks off midway. It’s not a fully finished game. So, I was a bit ashamed of it, and I kept saying I didn’t want to re-release it. I didn’t want to see it revived in some new form. So, I kept turning them down.
But then the game started selling at an incredible premium, which was a strange and unpleasant situation. So I thought, “Why not?” It may be embarrassing to me. But if people want to play the game normally and we’re letting them play it, then that’s fine. I resigned myself to the idea. I realized it was inevitable. So I said, “Okay, as long as we do it properly.” And the matter was settled.
Luckily for fans and collectors, the game is easily accessible once again! Kato also commented on the nature of the playable characters in Chrono Cross itself, and why there are so many of them:
Let me tell you, originally we wanted to make every character in the village playable. Unsurprisingly, this idea was rejected. Looking at it with a cool head, even I could see it was impossible. I gave up on that very rapidly.
Then, it was simply a matter of “I want a character like this and like that!” I kept on adding whatever I wanted on a whim, and we ended up with that greatly diverse cast of characters.
The full interview with Kato and Mitsuda is nearly an hour long, and contains lots of insight into the history and development of the Chrono Cross games. You can watch the video embedded above.
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