Honestly Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of all time, and of course I have no expectation for a new game in the series. If SquareEnix were smart, they'd make a high profile new sprite based CT game and took it seriously, the way they claim they're taking that first big budget tablet Final Fantasy game seriously. Get together a good team, some of the original members and keep the same foundation in place (abandon Cross). A distinct journey through eight or nine different time zones which you can freely journey between, a great mysterious danger must be stopped across time, but all the other details are distinct in the story outline. Maybe perhaps work in parallel dimensions angle, that would put its distinctive mark on it so it's not too similar (you'd have to maybe solve puzzles across similar yet somehow distinct areas at certain points).
Really work in multiple endings, the novel way CT did it. Chrono Trigger really had fun with the concept of time, which is why Cross was such a comparative disappointment. In Trigger you could do something in one time period and the world will have significantly changed in the future permanently. This shit blew my mind when I was young. Why is this concept so hard for them to at least build upon again for them? Radiant Historia was basically the best non-Chrono Trigger game we're ever likely to get, so it's not like it's impossible for modern developers to tackle the idea of time in unique and similarly novel fashions.
But I know deep down if they did do it, SquareEnix would probably hit on a fourteen point outline of all the possible ways they could fuck it up. And so the Chrono series rests, and perhaps happily...
...but I do maintain that it is a hidden pillar that SquareEnix rests on, readily waiting a semi-thirsty market if kept within a "modest" 5 million dollar budget (truly 2D sprite based, but with much higher resolution sprites obviously) and once again lovingly rendering Akira Toriyama art. They could multiplatform it, and no way you gonna tell me if it reviews well it's not going to cause a very happy reaction amongst the gaming community. I bet we could even get it trending on twitter.
FFVII was really unique for me, I had purchased FFVII in excitement prior to even having a PSOne (was a Nintendo brosef only at the time, hey I had to choose a system 'cause my parents were buying them at the time don't judge me).
And there are elements that really did work well. Midgar was such a cool city to open the game toward, was like a revelation when compared to RPGs I was previously playing on SNES visually. It was distinct in atmosphere. The music remains some of the best in the series in my view, and the battle system was just easily exploitable, not
bad precisely. Materia system I maintain could have been worked into something really good with some tweaking.
And of course the game had tons of stuff that by itself is "lame", but when put into the context of a 40 hour RPG you just paid for spanning multiple discs just made it scream "this is something extra special." I'll never forget the Golden Saucer, and to this day I feel that it's an amazing extra to add to most RPGs if developers have the time. It was always wonderful to go around the world doing work and then you take a break and go play some of the janky-ass minigames they had there. And you could earn shit important for your journey, and even experience extra funny story scenes. And bet on 'em Chocobos. It seemed like "polish."
The game had a bizarre storyline that was just too melodramatic for my taste, because it wasn't justified by the sometimes awful translation (borderline offensive caricature with Barret which made me uncomfortable
even when I was 12) and truly outrageous plot outline. The battle system wasn't refined enough, leading to a game just pathetically easy to break. And of course summons would be awesome if half of them didn't take for
ever to get through (but there was still the impressive novelty of seeing them the first time).
So what I'm saying is maybe the game isn't shit but just mediocre instead with occasional hints of greatness and what could have been.
