Square announced a new piano album!

https://na.store.square-enix-games.com/chrono-trigger-piano-soundscape-arrangement

And it would seem that Japanese fans can enter into a contest to win art prints of the Toriyama Chrono Trigger official art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDI_9nAywzA

Welcome to the 2025 Mega Update! It's been almost a couple years, so we've got a lot of ground to cover. We'll usher this update in with Rom's discovery of the Epoch maquette used for Chrono Trigger's Japanese commercials, which was shared by Hironobu Sakaguchi on his Twitter:



[OFFICIAL ART]  Vehek went back and discovered the source of some additional Kato concept art images: the Chrono Trigger 2019 orchestral box set. We've got them all added to the Official Art page and have taken a first look at the contents. Exciting finds include the fact that the Prerelease Triceratops was apparently a friend of the party named "Migo", and that Ayla may have originally been envisioned as a kunoichi-type character. Frog's missing in the earliest sketch too, with another knight who looks suspiciously like human Glenn. Check them out and see what you think.  [2]  From Rom comes scans of The PlayStation Vol. 170! This shows Tadayoshi Yamamuro's Toriyama-inspired designs for the Chrono Trigger PSX anime cut scenes. They're remarkable for containing different perspectives of the Chrono Trigger team, as well as some other beings (such as art for a typical Reptite)! Check them out on the Official Art page.

[TRIGGER]  Redditor cessout was successfully able to piece together virtually all of Yasunori Mitsuda's comments from the Chrono Trigger 30th Anniversary music stream, which went down on YouTube back in March. We've got them in the encyclopedia here, and have disseminated the notes about individual songs into their respective pages as well.  [2]  The Real World Influences article has been updated with a new section contributed by Belchior (who also provided a Portuguese translation of this section). Check it out!  [2]  Lord J Esq's old Encyclopedia Chronotica proposal surfaced! Check it out here. Those were dark days, when I thought we'd never finish the wiki...  [CT UNGLUED]  It's 2025, and Macromedia Flash is long dead. Unfortunately, so is Chrono Trigger Unglued. If you want to download the source files, hit up this link to grab the entire collection and remember those days (190 MB).

[CT MODIFICATION]  inuksuk has put together an awesomely thorough tutorial on transferring an accessory's status effect to other accessories! Check it out here.  [2]  inuksuk also expanded our understanding of the Active Time Battle system; refer to the new section at this article for details on how the battle system is coded.  [3]  Vehek has documented several key differences in Chrono Trigger DS's engine and handling of events/other variables; check them out here.  [4]  Reld has tweaked ChronoCharView to display sprites at 200% (fixing some horrible artifacting), and has also fixed a selection issue with tiles on the second page. Grab the better version here.  [5]  GitExl is working on a Chrono Trigger map viewing utility for both the Chrono Trigger SNES and Steam versions. Might this be the salvation for getting rips of the DS maps? Progress is ongoing right now and we can't wait to see where this goes; check it out here!  [6]  A secret project may be brewing! Check out Project Lucca. So far, this is the only glance, but it's awesome to see new work being done!

[FINISHED MODS]  Chrono Trigger+ released its "Final" version earlier this year in March!  It's already surpassed 40,000 downloads on romhacking.net alone. Check it out here.  [2]  The Enhansa Edition is up to version 1.1.2! For those out of the loop, this patch rebalances Chrono Trigger with changes to items, techs, enemy stats, player techs, and more; the readme is impressively long. You can grab the patch here.  [3]  Colmines92 has put out an amazing patch that lets up to two other players control their respective party members in Chrono Trigger! Grab it here.  [4]  We've got new translations incoming!  [ Indonesian 1.0 ][ Turkish 1.0 ][ wakkoswami's KWhazit Update 1.12 ]

[CROSS]  Art from Another Eden's versions of Chrono characters has been added to Official Art (Chrono Trigger) and Official Art (Chrono Cross), as well as the respective encyclopedia character pages.  [2]  glennxserge tracked down the lookup table where Chrono Cross determines growth for a character's Elements grid; find the notes here.  [3]  Grobycftw completed a Dario replacer hack for Chrono Cross! Dario is now playable and takes up the Turnip slot. Find the hack here.  [4]  Grobycftw also completed a tutorial for extracting an NPC's model and texture; check it out here.

[ODDS AND ENDS]  On Discord, Reld recently pointed out two issues with Prophet's Guile responsible for bad-sounding music and the infamous black screens/soft-locks at a certain point in the game. The first issue stems from the echo buffer not handling the instruments we chose to change up the music, while the second, graver issue relates to an event trick Chickenlump discovered in 2005 that lets one remove the black bar at the bottom of the screen. Well, turns out this black bar is pretty important for extending the blanking between frames for processing VRAM/animations. ZSNES tolerated the fault mostly well, but real hardware/better emulators do not. Reld has provided a patch to fix these issues; it must be patched separately/after the original Prophet's Guile patch (i.e. don't patch it to a cold, fresh Chrono Trigger ROM). Download it here.  [2]  We found a random doujinshi from Chrono Cross from 2011; download it here. It features Serge and Kid.

[CT PRERELEASE]  Reld is back with some insanely good research.  [1]  First up, Reld has carefully reconstructed the sprites for Prerelease Queen Zeal, including her boss form atop the Black Omen. Check out the thread here for details.  [2]  Reld also tracked down commercial art and other photos that were used for the moon/planet in Chrono Trigger/Radical Dreamers, as well as the original picture used for Zenan Bridge's sky. Check out this thread for details. As a plus, FF6's Opera House curtains also seem to have had their original reference curtains divined.  [3]  Nestled in the 1000 A.D. tileset of the Prerelease are sheep and windmill graphics, features of the overworld from the V-Jump 1994 build! Check them out in action here.

[HDD RECOVERY]  I recently combed through a drive image of my main Windows 98 SE machine from 2003, including all the temporary Internet cache files, and recovered some gems.  [1]  Some curios have been stashed on the Compendium's about page here, like our first attempts to diagram timelines and dimensions. Speaking of which, we also recovered a splendid old banner from 2003, intended for Chrono Compendium Design #2; see it here (we'll keep it on the Main Page button section).  [2]  Found some old fan art/wallpapers! [ Mammon Machine ][ Lavos ][ Lavos-chan Thumbnail (slightly NSFW) ][ Kid Thumbnail ] Goes without saying, but if you have higher resolution of the last two, please let us know!  [3]  Check out a snapshot of IcyBrian's Chrono series board in November 2003 here.  [4]  Here are two ancient AMVs... [ Crawling by Melknin ][ Final Fantasy and Chrono Cross by ehgzl ][ CT CC Linkin Park - One Step Closer ]  [4]  Old pages from the PHPNuke Compendium have also been found. I've curated some and upload them here if you'd like to walk down memory lane. Posts abound from YbrikMetaknight, Radical_Dreamer, JustinS1985, GrayLensman, Lord J Esq, Oswego del Fuego, warmgun, Aitrus, and so many others who fostered the site in its earliest days.

[FAN ART]  [ Nuwt Sprites by TheMage ][ Re-Zeal by EchoGhost616 ][ Reptite Rework by Reld ][FANFICTION]  Chrono Origins - Fate's Cross and Fate's Trigger by skylark ][ Chrono Collective by MagilsugaM ][ Project Unity Fragments by Lennis ][ Chrono Trigger - Dragon's Dance by lunac ]

[REMIXES]  [COMPENDIUM]  [ 'Corridors of Time Final' by EchoGhost ][ 'Star-Stealing Princess of Zeal' by EchoGhost ]  Lots of recovered stuff from the old HDD follows!  [ 'Schala Trance (Different Version)' by Prievert ][ 'Forever (Hope Remains V1)' by Suzumebachi ][ 'My Curse, My Blessing' by Ko Miho Lifo ][ 'Old Schala Remix' by Rimco ][ 'Glowing Fair (Glitchy)' by Unknown ]  [OCREMIX-CC]  [ A Synonym for Death by minusworld, p4p3r ][ FATE has no forgiveness... by ensemble ][ Lost Orphan by AzureKevin ][ Scars Worn by Time by Cyril the Wolf ]  [OCREMIX-CT]  [ 'Strain on You Insane Diamond' by zachaction ][ 'Skylands' by prophetik music ][ 'When the Walls of Time Fell' by H36T ][ '12,000 B.C.' by Outset Initiative, Jeremy Lim ][ 'Corridors of TimeShift' by JSABlixer ][ 'Ambience of the Forest' by jnWake, Emunator ][ 'Carnival of Life' by RebeccaETripp, Gamer of the Winds ][ 'Eschala Them' by Rockos ][ 'Find the Frozen Flame' by Ivan Hakstok ]

[DWELLING OF DUELS]  [ 'FATE has no forgiveness for those who dare stand against it.' by Lucas Guimaraes, Mattmatatt. ImAFutureGuitarHero, jnWake, Ivan Hak�tok ][ 'Square Off' by itsamedaddio ][ 'Ambience of the Forest' by jnWake, Emunator ][ 'Desert Search for Techno Camel Meat' by Hydrasphere ][ 'Bad Aural' by EndlessRepeat ][ 'Let's Take This Outside' by itsamedaddio ][ 'Guardia Boss Rush' by Gregorio Franco ][ 'A Cappellavos' by Ian Martyn ][ 'It's About Time' by Newmajoe, ErichWK, JohnStacy, Biggoron, Brandon L. Harnish, Shea's Violin ][ 'The real trigger was the friends we made along the way' by Triple B Music, jnWake, streifig, roqdrummer, Nivan Sharma ][ 'Zealotry Supreme' by Biggoron, Kevin Handlon ][ 'The Forest and the Trees' by The Rocket Knights, Mattmatatt, DeLuxDolemite, Extrinzic ][ 'Soul of the Forest' by Mustin ]

A month or so ago, Masato Kato released a statement regarding a new update for Another Eden - specifically, a new quest for Raven, the game's Magus-analogue, the first of which that dives into this character's actual story:

Raven's a character who has been around since
the beginning.
And with that, fans of another certain series
featuring a mysterious masked man had plenty
of time to offer up a hypothesis about the
mystery that surrounds him.
Will this be the quest that finally reveals the
truth?

The quest itself brings Raven face-to-face with a monster responsible for his loss of memory, who tells him that he isn't even from the game's world. When he asks who he truly once was, he is met with, well, let's just say a very interesting answer

Warning: Black Windy Spoilers ahead



...other parts of his story seem to make further reference to the Dreams Epilogue ending from Chrono Trigger DS, particularly a line from Magus over whether or not "some small part of him should remain".

Video playthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T36rp_L6giM

bonus: it has been pointed out that the new outfit Raven receives from this quest seems to draw heavy inspiration from Kato's own original concept sketches for Magus, with the appearance of skeletal wings on his back. Nice touch.

The greatest 16-bit RPG, and possibly game ever made turned 30 in North America last week. While we wish there were something cooking to show off, there are only the usual rumors circulating. A Compendium update is underway, with hopefully more to follow after that.

I'll take the opportunity here to plug the noble art of console restoration. We're approaching a bottleneck where some aluminum electrolytic capacitors may be failing, along with other components that disable old consoles. While shotgun recapping isn't always a good idea, it's common that many unaware owners end up tossing their Super Nintendos or other game consoles in the trash rather than opening them up, or sending them to someone who knows how to inspect them for damage/repair. The same goes for cartridges�my Super Mario RPG CR2032 battery survived just long enough for me to dump the SRAM last year, but many have long since failed by this point, and on some cartridges, the SRAM chips themselves may have gone bad.

It's always a bad idea to just throw these away. There are some modifications that can prolong the life of your hardware, like replacing the 1A voltage regulator in the SNES with one that has higher headroom. Consider also buying a Variac, and slowly ramping up the voltage when you turn on your vintage hardware. (Integrated circuits tend to go bad more from temperature cycling than anything.) For your cartridges, you can clean the contacts/pads using a Q-tip and isopropyl alcohol (don't blow on them!). On the extreme end, restorationists can even replace a bad PPU or other surface mount chip with a donor chip from an unsalveagable SNES. All of this goes for your controllers and handhelds, too�bad N64 sticks can be fairly easily and cheaply replaced and contacts can be cleaned. My Game Boy's dead audio came back to life after cleaning the headphone jack's interior contacts, which were erroneously detecting a headphone present from dirt/corrosion and thus weren't allowing the signal to reach the speaker. Rarely is a unit truly unfixable, so if you've got old hardware, be gentle and help usher it into another 30 years of 16-bit gaming.

A couple underlying issues have been fixed, so the site should be completely healthy again. Please report any strange behavior you encounter.

Consider signing the Stop Killing Games petition, too (especially if you're in the EU). We'll see if this little corner of capitalism can be thwarted by consumer complaint. Otherwise, it'll be time to send in the tanks. ☭

I think we were down 2-3 weeks, so if any interesting Chrono news has also bubbled up, feel free to shout it from the rooftops.

Akira Toriyama has passed away.

The man is a legend but it is immeasurable how much his art was crucial for Chrono Trigger and setting the visual tone of the series. Just looking at the sprite icons and how the pixel art was translated directly from his designs is making me feel some type of way.

Edit: Posted this in the wrong forum.

See here.

"Kitase described three different routes for a potential Chrono Trigger remake: a port, a graphical remaster or a remake of the scope of Final Fantasy VII Remake. Parkin shared his view on the matter, stating that he appreciated what Nintendo did with its remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link�s Awakening. Kitase responded by thanking Parkin for his great input."

https://gonintendo.com/contents/30317-chrono-trigger-devs-talk-sequel-chances-praise-sea-of-stars

No bombshells or anything, but interesting to see them still talking about it in 2023.

We kick things off with the realization that Mathew Valente (or as you may know him, tssf from the Chrono Trigger Resurrection progress) finished his Synthetic Origins restoration of Chrono Trigger and Radical Dreamers music! Restorations involve tracking down the original high-quality source samples that companies downsized for use in games, with a loss of fidelity. This restoration sounds just incredible. Check out the FF4, FF5, and FF6 restorations too! You can find them all right now right here. The Compendium will keep a backup of these.

Welcome to the 2023 update! We've got a bitter pill to lead this one off, as we've got a new article by me soapboxing about the problems with Chrono Cross's story. This effort was motivated by one last round of Q&A with Masato Kato on Square's Twitter (see links below the jump). If you want to check out the article immediately, hit this mysterious thumbnail!



[INTERVIEWS]  First up is a Chrono Cross remake interview with Hiromichi Sakamoto, Yasunori Mitsuda, and Masato Kato, brought to us by Trig! Check it out here. Though it's mostly about music, Kato confirms that he wrote Radical Dreamers completely as an original story, before declaring that it linked to Chrono Trigger at the end of the process. Which...sigh...  [2]  The much-maligned Kato/Mitsuda Q&A by Square on Twitter had one final update, which further evidenced that Cross's creative team truly did not plan the plot in detail. Brand new problems from this interview include: 1) Kid apparently remembers Serge saving her at the orphanage when they first meet in 1020 A.D., which...of course, hasn't happened yet! 2) The question of how the Masamune came to be corrupted was once again totally dodged; I'm ready to assume there's simply no story for this. 3) It's confirmed that Serge loses his memories of Chrono Cross after it's done, and that Kid is searching for him across timelines, which...he's right there in Arni, in 1020 A.D.! Go look him up!! 4) The Kingdom of Guardia receiving Schala's pendant, despite her being sucked into the DBT from the Ocean Palace, is explained by speculating that Serge, Kid, and other Cross party members visited Zenan early in Marle's life to give her the pendant. Predestination paradoxes galore.

[HACKS]  wakkoswami has released a revision of the original KWhazit translation, building on the prior work by DoctorL and LethargicOwl; check it out here! Thanks to everyone who spent time getting this up to speed as the definitive SNES retranslation.  [2]  The Turkish Chrono Trigger translation project has released another incremental update; they are now on version 0.8. Let's cheer as they get closer to the finish line! Grab this update here.  [3]  You're well-acquainted with it already, but I still wanted to note that Chrono Trigger Soundtrack Expansion v3.2 finally has the correct accoutrement on the Modification page as written by PowerPanda; grab it here if you haven't already as it's an amazing piece of work!  [4]  In case you prefer listening to your own tunes while playing Chrono Trigger, you can grab the No Music Patch by Readmit and Pseudoarc.  [5]  Last but not least (and long overdue), Reld's fork of Temporal Flux, 3.04 R1, has been made the recommended download on the Modification section for TF as well. Again, if you haven't already, swipe it here.

[PLUGINS and GUIDES]  Mauron has updated Warrior Workshop; grab it here. Mauron also made some fixes to Hi-Tech, the tech editor; grab it here.  [2]  TheMage has written an awesome field map tile editing guide; check it out here.  [3]  Mauron has made a available a spreadsheet indexing overworld graphic packets across the NA, JP, and Prerelease versions of the game; find it here.

[OCREMIX]  [ 'A Battle across Time' by jnWake, Gamer of the Winds, Ivan Hak�tok, Lucas Guimaraes ][ Treasure Beyond Dreams' by AzureKevin ][ 'Tyrano's Stash' by Lucas Guimaraes, Brandon Harnish, Cory Johnson, ImAFutureGuitarHero, ThisIsJayC ][DWELLING OF DUELS][ 'Donkey! Bobonga!' by cacomistle, The Beauty of Grind ][ 'Yet Another Time's Scar Cover' by Cyril the Wolf ][ 'Goodnight, Dear Friends' by valence ][ 'Eh?!' by Triple B Music ][ 'Longing of the Wind' by Nemo, Michelle Dreyband ][ 'Tyrano's Stash' by Lucas Guimaraes, Cory Johnson, ImAFutureGuitarHero, Brandon Harnish, ThisIsJay ][ 'Chicken Sauce' by bjkmenu ][ 'Finding the Frozen Flame' by Ivan Hak�tok ][ 'A Battle across Time' by jnWake, Ivan Hak�tok, Lucas Guimaraes, GameroftheWinds ][ 'Chronossienne' by EndlessRepeat ][ 'Corridors of Time - Enhasa Theme' by Ian Martyn, TriacFox ][ '書っかでも着けどこ' by Ian Martyn ][ 'Gods? There Are None.' by Lucas Guimaraes ][ 'The Black Wind Howls at the Showdown with Magus' by The Rocket Knights, Travis Snowberger ][ 'The Revolution Will Be Dooted' by donut, lobby ]  [COMPENDIUM]  [ Arni Village Trigger Style by Maguzar ][ Radical Dreamers English Version 2.0 by Maguzar ][RESTORATIONS]  [ Corridors of Time by Jammin' Sam Miller ]

[FAN ART & FICTION]  [ Lucca and Robo by Ema ][ Zeal Ascendancy by KSera ][ Asocksual: Ayla - Frog - Frog 2 ]

Last year, I found a recently-abandoned Japanese Chrono site that archived links to Chrono series interviews. They had a link to this Another Eden interview with a note that Masato Kato discussed Chrono Break as part of it. Today, I was able to use OpenAI's Whisper tool to transcribe the Japanese, and sure enough, he talks about the game! By feeding the transcription into DeepL, it appears that:

• He started brainstorming ideas for a new Chrono game shortly after Cross's release around 2000, with the idea that it would be a PS2-era game.
• It really is intended to be titled "Break", not "Brake", as he was imagining a story about time literally breaking somehow (DeepL says, "And the title was something like, 'That's when it all goes to shit.'")
• Preproduction was in session around 2000/2001 (including the registration of the trademark).
• Final Fantasy Dimensions II ended up recycling the main scenario of the story!

We'd already found an interview from Takashi Tokita where he mentioned, as machine-translated, that certain story details were reused this way for FFD2. But this interview sounds much more definitive, and DeepL is suggesting that the main story idea itself became the basis for the game. We've tried put together a summary of FFD2's story at this thread, but there's just hardly information available in English. You can already draw parallels between Lavos and FFD2's "flare"-type weapon raining fire from the heavens.

What we really need now is someone who understands spoken Japanese to translate this interview snippet! We'll be in our eternal debt. Anyone who's also familiar with FFD2's plot is encouraged to add details and reply to that thread as well. If you know someone who might be able to translate, I've excerpted the relevant part of the interview here: Masato Kato Discusses Chrono Break. Pass that link on!