You’ll never be able to recreate your childhood experiences. After seeing so many projects try and fail to tap into our nostalgia for the past, doing so just seems like a fool’s errand. Over the past few decades though, as I’ve fruitlessly attempted to recreate the highs of that RPG experience ( Xenogears came close), I’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s impossible. That’s a game I was eager to play when it was originally released in 2000, but I never quite clicked with it because it was so dramatically different from my beloved Chrono Trigger. Playing Radical Dreamers also made me excited to give Chrono Cross another chance. In many ways, it was the escape I needed from dealing with a colicky infant all day.
It feels more like reading an adventurer's journal than playing an actual game, but I ended up caring for these characters quite a bit. While it's far from Chrono Trigger's epic time-hopping journey, I found myself instantly vibing with Radical Dreamers. (It was a surprise to find that some of Chrono Cross's sweeping melodies first appeared in this simple text-only title.)
Some gorgeous artwork helps to paint a picture of your journey, while Yasunori Mitsuda's music once again envelopes you in a unique atmosphere. Like your typical text adventure, the game involves lots of reading, creating a mental map of your travels and making a few choices (like the direction you're moving, or deciding to attack or dodge in battle). You play as Serge, a young thief working together with his rambunctious companion Kid and a mysterious cloaked mage named Magil. It also helps that Radical Dreamers is relatively simple. But it turns out I can still make room for a text adventure title on the Switch – it's something I can play while my daughter is busy with her Lego creations, or while I pray for my son to stay asleep at night. I haven't had much time to play any games since the birth of my son three months ago. It's somewhat fitting that Radical Dreamers finds me now, when I'm juggling family life with a toddler and a newborn. Now with the Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition, I finally have an easy way to catch up on both of Chrono Trigger's follow-ups. For whatever reason - maybe it was the daily struggle to survive as an adult, or working like crazy to get into the prestigious world of tech reporting - I never got around to playing it. So, for the past few decades, the only way to play a translated version of Radical Dreamers was through an unofficial ROM hack.
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