Has anyone here ever played the japanese sequel to Chrono Trigger? It was never released in the U.S. and was made for the Super Famicom. If you have played it, what is it like?

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Are you talking about Radical Dreamers? It was a game for Satelliview, and add-on for the Super Famicom. It was text based, and used some of the characters from Chrono Cross. Chrono Cross makes a reference to it somewhere.

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I've played it. The ROM is pretty easy to find on the web (I can't tell you where, but google will probably help you find it). The game is officially called "Radical Dreamers: Le Trèsor Interdit" (French for "The Forbidden Treasure"), not "Chrono Shift". It's text-based, in that you see some pre-drawn backgrounds, dimmed, with white text on top. The whole game is like this. It's sort of like a door game, where you pick "Go left, go right, go straight, stay and fight". All the text is, obviously, in Japanese. There was a romhack project to translate it into English, but they apparently had problems deciphering the compression used on the text. I again can't tell you the website that had this, since they also had the ROM file. The site seems to be down anyway, now.

The game stars Serge, Kid, and Guile from Chrono Cross. They sneak into Viper Mannor to steal the Frozen Flame from Lynx. There are a few pieces of music from this game that were borrowed in Chrono Cross, I think just the Viper Mannor theme and the battle music (which would explain why it was horribly bad compared to the otherwise incredibly good soundtrack of CC). You get into battles occaisonally, but it's really more of a puzzle/memory game than an RPG. If you can't read Japanese (and I can't), you can only guess or use trial and error to figure out what the options in the menus do. Even then, it doesn't do much good, because you still can't really gauge how well you're doing except by which visual backgrounds appear, and which music plays.

A lot of people mistakenly say that Chrono Cross is a remake of this game. It's not. Chrono Cross is completely different, and includes a lot of stuff that Radical Dreamers did not. The first 3 or 4 hours of Chrono Cross might bear some extremely vague allusion to RD, but that's most likely just the design team giving a shoutout to it, rather than trying to remake it. RD was made to fit into the confines of the Satellaview, not to satisfy Chrono Trigger fans who wanted a sequel. Chrono Cross WAS meant to be a real sequel, and it had the normal cadence, presentation, and content of a real Square RPG (and then some). You're not really missing much with RD, but it's worth a look at least, if you're a big fan of the series (like me).

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