Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition
People for whom Chrono Trigger is important in some way have always had varying opinions about its sequel, and it's true that Chrono Cross is maybe not the followup anyone expected in that it's mechanically pretty different (though with forethought). But I like it, and I maintain that it builds on the themes of the first game in a satisfying way. Whereas Trigger says the future isn't fixed and we don't have to accept the bad outcomes laid out in front of us, Cross says we're nevertheless products of history, messed-up little bundles of context in a world of infinite stuff. I couldn't tell you whether the writers were hardcore materialists, but what I do know is there are several NPCs who try to explain existentialism to you.
Chrono Cross feels like the apex of the kind of 90s RPG that it is, for better and for worse. It's willing to take much bigger swings than you'd expect from a modern Square Enix game bound by the constraints of nostalgia-obsessed fandom and soulless NFT-loving executive leadership. It's also a rich tapestry of obscure nonsense, locking some of the most interesting characters and sidequests behind choices you aren't likely to make your first time through or within very tight windows of plot progression. There are more than 40 party members, some of whom lean hard into cultural stereotypes, and while the redrawn character portraits seem a little better to me in this specific way, it's essentially the same translation and they all still have their weird typing quirks. Like all the rereleased Final Fantasies that added speed-up options, CC is a good example of how turn-based RPGs never really benefited pacing-wise from every attack animation being a solid 9 seconds long. And like basically every Square game on Playstation (and, you know, every platform since), it suffered from production issues and launched with somewhat less than all its intended content.
When it hits, though, it hits. The overall mood, the particular ratio of hope to melancholy, is unlike almost anything else you'd find in games around that time. Xenogears feels similar in some ways, but Xenogears was also thought of as a Chrono sequel for a little while, after it was deemed too complicated to be FF7 and before development shifted to making it its own thing. Speaking of unfinished games.
Probably worth noting that I played the game on Switch, and it ran fine in that context, whereas a lot of people seem to have issues with the PC port.