Chrono Trigger is over 30 years old, and is regarded by many to be one of the greatest RPGs, if not the greatest RPG, of all time. It’s gotten a few ports and upgrades over the years, the best of which was easily the Nintendo DS version, but it’s never had what I would consider a true remake. But what even is a true remake? What does it entail? Would Square Enix have to get the old team back together? If so, how many of them? Who else could be trusted to do it? Should they change any of it? Should they add anything? Who’s allowed to determine if they got it right, or screwed it up big time?
What does it mean to remake the greatest RPG of all time?
The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (which I’m going to just call The Remake from here on out for expediency) is not a remake of Chrono Trigger. It’s a new indie PC game, out today, that’s part RPG, part puzzle game, part meta commentary on RPGs, video games, and online culture. The game, which began life as a student work, wears the skin of its title: it’s an alleged remake of just the final dungeon of whatever “the greatest RPG of all time” is, an unnamed game that seems to mostly be a riff on Chrono Trigger, but with elements of other RPGs thrown around. The Remake positions itself precariously close to reality: it was made by students who grew up loving classic RPGs, and contains a number of collectible manual pages, developer documentary videos, and voice clips from the devs themselves explaining their thought processes in recapturing the magic of that mysterious, unnamed RPG.
The first hour of the game mostly has you trying to navigate through that final dungeon with a max-level party, having no context or notion of what came before except what you can glean from clues offered by the manual or other hints. For instance, the battle system is completely obtuse the first time you try to engage with it, presenting a weird row of diamonds and attacks with no names or descriptors, and seemingly providing you no real ability to damage the enemy. Chests and doors are locked, and it’s unclear what might open them. Your inventory is filled with armor and weapons with unknown effects and stats. It’s only by finding manual pages and curiously poking through the dungeon that you’ll learn how to use everything you’ve found and actually make progress.
That first hour or so, during which you’re essentially just playing a Tunic-ified classic RPG, is genuinely very fun. I like the weird battle system a lot: it has a limited number of cool tricks, and I think it’s perfect for a game this short and that doesn’t outstay its welcome. I enjoyed thumbing through the manual pages, which are indeed very reminiscent of old RPG manuals complete with detailed character art and bios and scribbled notes from whoever owned the manual before. There are even clues hidden in the dev videos themselves, and an interesting meta story unfolding in those videos about what it means to remake a game, or even just to be a fan of one.
That on its own, I think, would be an interesting enough premise for a couple of fun hours…except there’s something very clearly and obviously wrong with The Remake from the jump. When you first start the game, there are three existing save files, but two are glitched out and inaccessible. One of your party members seems to have been poorly modded over by a weird Gary Sue self-insert of some kind, and its unclear why, or who did this. There are paths that lead to nowhere, a collectible that seems to do nothing, and spots where missing object collision leads to secret, unfinished rooms. A rival character’s text boxes keep glitching out. The further in you go, the glitchier things get, until you stumble upon an entirely separate game-within-a-game with an unclear objective and an unknown creator. There’s also the question of why a dev studio would remake just the end of a game, and then fill it with all their own personal baggage, like having the characters default to shitty armor just because their little brother used to do that all the time as a joke. The Remake doesn’t make a secret of its metatextual wanderings even at the beginning, but I can assure you things only get weirder and weirder the deeper you go.
I’m really enjoying The Remake even as I feel like I’m flying totally blind into it. I thought I was close to solving the mystery at the heart of this game, but just this morning I ran across another weird clue that suggests an even deeper rabbit hole than the one I was already down. This isn’t a long game by any stretch, I’ve only put in a couple of hours, but I’ve had a few pretty major slowdowns. One sticking point was a puzzle I just did not understand, and ended up brute-forcing only to find the answer by working backward from the solution. And there are also…some bugs.
The trouble with a game that comments on itself as a game is that, often, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the game actually breaking on you and it “breaking” in an intended way as part of the experience. I do think there are elements of The Remake that could use a bit more refinement: for one, if you already know the answer to the game’s very first puzzle from having played a demo before, for instance, The Remake doesn’t seem to know how to handle the sequence break. In my case, I found myself hard locked, unable to proceed without a bunch of clues I should have collected in rooms I could no longer go back to. There’s also a second, built-in point of no return that stops you from going back and retrieving any missed clues that you might need to move forward. There are other little issues too, such as button prompts not showing up where they should, or showing up where they shouldn’t. I have a lot of forgiveness for all of these things given the size and scope of The Remake, but as a warning, just don’t try to sequence break this thing. It’s already (purposefully) broken enough as it is.
But even with those hold-ups, I am wildly compelled by The Remake and am eager to see where it takes me. There’s some super-interesting stuff going on in its mid-section, including some interesting philosophizing on who should be “allowed” to remake a classic, what can and can’t be changed, and what makes a game a classic in the first place. There’s also an incredibly scathing depiction of internet commenters who harass devs like it’s their day job. It’s so blunt that it felt like a tasteless joke at first, but the more I see of this character the more familiar their inane, blathering remarks sound, to the point where I’ve come back around on finding the depiction to be irritatingly accurate. There are still several mysteries I haven’t gotten to the bottom of, including an in-game phone number I’m nervous about calling in real life and the aforementioned poorly modded party member of the game’s first save file. I’m also just…kind of into what little scraps I can glean of the “original” Greatest RPG of All Time. It’s kind of got a cool story going on! There’s time travel, there’s a skeleton pirate, a guy wielding a broom as a weapon, a very cute robot whose birthday is every day, that sort of thing.
If nothing else, it’s now making me want to play the greatest RPG of all time. What is the greatest RPG of all time? I still don’t know, but at least someone finally remade it.
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