Oh God

Squareenix were retards and didnt save anything from their older games, if we ever get a remaster of ff9 it will be just as bad as the ff8 remaster or cross

It's just a dumb filter. Here is that same background but actually AI upscaled.

i.imgur.com/MikndCH.jpg

>Square Enix in charge of finding the original backgrounds
fuck that SHIT

They deleted them and know they deleted them, there is nothing to find

While I loved Trigger. Cross was a fucking disaster and overall a piece of shit. I traded my friend my copy of FF9 for it because he claimed that this game was better than Trigger in the first 3 hours. After I beat it, I asked to trade it back to him. But he was in Juvenile Hall for stabbing a kid in class for the 2nd time in the eye with a pen.

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user they already did FF9 remastered and it looks just like the op pic.

heh

It was made back in the 90s when they deleted everything. They don't even have the original assets and shit for the PS1 version of FF7 which was their biggest game ever, so every port has been based on the PC version that was missing visual effects.

i'm starting to wonder if they even have sourcecodes for Vagrant Story, Threads of Fate, and many other classics that were thrown out.

Id honestly rather have someone recreate all the pre-rendered backrounds from scratch with a similar visual style to the originals at higher resolution and pay 50 bucks for it

But no modern games use pre-rendered stuff anymore so meh

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Why can hobbyists create AI upscaling programs for these games that fixes the backgrounds but SE keeps fucking up their games with this shitty filter.

Correct. SaGa receives good ports because Kawazu is there and he cares, seems like. A bunch of Trigger, Cross and early FFs people don't even work at SQEX anymore,thus the cheap ports by trainees.

...

lmao you think square enix is going to shell out the money for that? They're going to do the bare minimum of poorly upscaling it and you're going to buy it, goy.

incredible, this is just salt on the wound for triggerfags. can't wait for the physical copy to arrive

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It isn't, they didn't AI upscale it. It's literally just god-awful xBR filter.
SaGa Frontier was AI upscaled, this is not.

>SaGa Frontier was AI upscaled
Is that why the backgrounds have artefacts out the arse?

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Manachads win again.

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Yes, it has a very telling AI upscale "look"
Meanwhile FF8, FF9 and Cross got these terrible filtered backgrounds with dogshit filter.

Speaking of SaGa how do I get into it? Is the steam version of Frontier the best way?

Those backgrounds are fucking terrible holy moly.
The character portrait is surprisingly amazing though.
There's been a tendency for 90s anime style art in media to get redesigned to fit more modern styles when they get reboots or remasters.
It's nice to see that they were able to keep the 90s style but do it in HD.

God bless whoever was smart enough to keep the original artwork.

Probably want to start with Romance 3. Frontier is kind of it's own beast that does things differently in several areas compared to the rest of the regular SaGas and playing it first may sour you on other games in the series.

>hey maybe let's keep these multimillion dollar assets instead of throwing them out to save buying a couple thousand dollars worth of extra hard drive space
Knowing Squaresoft, that man was probably fired on the spot.

Mana is half-assed.
They redrew the backgrounds but didn't redraw sprites so they clash like a motherfucker because now you have old pixelated sprites running on HD redrawn backgrounds.

They're all standalone, just like FF games, so pick whichever you like, recommended versions to play of each game:
SaGa 1: Wonderswan Colour remaster (fantranslation needed)
SaGa 2: DS remake (fantranslation needed)
SaGa 3: DS remake (fantranslation needed)
Romancing SaGa 1: PS2 remake
Romancing SaGa 2: 2017 remaster
Romancing SaGa 3: 2019 remaster
SaGa Frontier 1: 2021 remaster
SaGa Frontier 2: no remaster atm, so your only option is PSX original, but there's a decent chance it will get remastered next so might wanna wait 2-3 years to see
Unlimited SaGa: no remaster atm, also not recommended to start with since it's Dwarf Fortress of JRPGs
Last Remnant (aka Romancing SaGa 4 as it was in development, but had the name changed for marketing reasons): either the PC version or the 2018 remaster, the remaster is technically a sidegrade, it improves graphics a bit but downgrades a few of the gameplay elements to how they were in the infamously broken X360 original, personally I prefer PC version
SaGa Scarlet Grace: 2019 remaster

Ideally I recommend starting with Romancing 2 or 3 or Last Remnant
Don't start with the remake of Romancing 1 because it kinda incorporates the additions from 2 and 3 and is ideally played after them.

Also honorary mention:
Final Fantasy 2 aka SaGa 0
If you end up wanting to play it, PSP version is best.

That wasn’t a remaster that was literally just a port with to current consoles, RE4 style.

this was upsetting. chrono cross' OST is the first game album i ever bought. who are these dreamer' circus amateurs and why are there lyrics in regular songs. what the heck were they thinking, who even made this shitty version?

They still used the same upscaling method as FF8 and this CC rerelease.

>Square Enix

>Crossgenders get a butchered port that massacres the graphics and music
>somehow that's a win against Trigger fans
I don't get you Crosstrarians man

the core saga team apparently dictates exactly what changes are done to the remasters and making sure the quality is up to snuff this is why SagaF remaster is the definitive version now i doubt the cross team had much of a hand in this

The backgrounds from legend of mana are much easier to recreate due cartoon style, you can hire a cheap art undergrad and ask him to redraw these backgrounds on the same style, they don't have to recreate or interpret anything, just scale and redraw, copy the values, apply colors and done.

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>inb4 xenogears is next.

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For Christ's sake, can Square Enix PLEASE stop making "remasters" and big-budget "remakes" of their 90s-2000s games? for some reason people keep talking about a Kingdom Hearts 1 remake recently. If that ends up happening, I'll have to pay someone in Japan to KyoAni the offices of SE. In Minecraft.

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>had a chance to make a remake and fix all of its problems ad turn it into an actual masterpiece
>just badly upscaled the backgrounds instead and called it a day while spending all their money on garbage like forspoken and whatever failure of a multiplayer game they're going to put out next
I hate this company so goddamn much. I wish they would just stop making anything besides FF14 since it's the only thing they manage not to fuck up.

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Thats the real music though. The OG music was compressed.

The OST is the same as the original just cleaned up and uncompressed. Those arranged tracks are just bonus stuff, not replacing anything.

Only thing SE does with Xenogears now is throw them into gachas.

its honestly baffling there games have so much weight i remember dudes here saying they wouldnt touch chrono trigger/cross unless they were trying to phoenix down themselves but if they did it would be amazing YET here we are with another shitty remaster

There's literally no reason to make a KH1 remake. It looks great in HD and they've ported it to everything and it still plays well.

SaGachads won again

>xenogears remaster
not gonna happen
FFT though...

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Square-Enix has literally never made a good PS1 remaster.

>My biggest regret is people are going to buy this as their first exposure to the Chrono Trigger universe
Not only should it be none of your concern, no rational person does this shit.

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>unlimited saga
>dwarf fortress of jrpgs
no way it can't be that complicated

>supporting SE in 2022
Cross is one of my favorite games and I still will not buy this abomination.

I mean might as well. It cant get much worse than what we have, which is a great game despite its rushed development

I still don't get the weird hateboner that both SE and bamco have with Xeno. Specially because Xenoblade is ridiculous popular now.

It's crazy looking at the company now vs where they were in the 90s till like the mid 00s. If you look at like 95-01 they were putting out several games a year and they were mostly phenomenal and now treated as absolute classics or cult classics. Meanwhile in the last 6 or so years we've gotten mostly shitty remasters and trash like Babylon's Fall and FFXV with the occasional okay release.

Wasn't KH practically "remade" to a degree? A friend told me SQUEX lost most of the original files so they had to remake a lot of textures and 3D models, is this true or was my friend bullshitting me?

Sounds fake but something similar happened with FF8 and FF7

original assets don't exist, so they ai upscaled it
it's probably why the remaster is only $20
luckily you can toggle the "improved" graphics back to the old compressed ones
so it just becomes hi rez playstation jaggies (now featuring steam achievements)
side note for new players who haven't touched cross before, you want to have multiple saves all over the place because of the dimension shift gimmick this has instead of time travel (you can NG+ starting from any save file's current location)

Try it user, try and you'll see.

You clowns expectation for these ports are too fucking high, especially if you are aware of how shit modern day Square is along with their lack effort to hold onto old game's assets. You're just complaining for the sake of complaining at this point. There is an option for the old pixelized visuals, apparently, if you are that retardedly anal about it.

THIS, very good, specially since it added cut content and very nice QoL features, only "bad" thing is the fonts but compared to the ugly ass shit from the FF pixel "remasters" they look like heavin in SaGa Frontier, hope they remaster SF2 soon cause I never played it.

>is this true or was my friend bullshitting me?
Your friend is bullshitting because KH is owned by Disney. They'd have the original files.

KH1 Remake is not going to happen anytime soon. The reason being Square Enix being dumbasses lost the original source files for KH1 and had to go over a KH1 retail version and redo it ALL over again. Which is why you hear the soundtracks in the Final Mix sound a lot better and the models look better than their original KH1 counterparts. A remake will happen within the next huge anniversary maybe a decade later but definitely not now.

SE"s probably mad that they only have claim to Xenogears while Bamco and later Nintendo got spiritual successors. Bamco doesn't seem to have an actual hate for Xenosaga aside from not really wanting to remaster it, they still let Monolith use Kos-mos in XB2 after all.

>You clowns expectation for these ports are too fucking high
Literal nobody games like SaGa and Live a Live get a ton of respect, meanwhile we just get to pick up scraps. Even FFVIII got more love with how little effort was put in

While hyperbole, Unlimited Saga has a lot of depth hidden beneath it. Every time I play a new game, it comes with the extra knowledge of all the complicated BS I learned from past play sessions or some guy in Thailand who made it his life to figure out the hidden shit about the game.

FFT already had a remaster with WotL, just with a redone script, added cutscenes, and a few new features. It had massive slowdowns with everything that wasn't basic attacks, terrible sound effects, and removed battle quotes.

they're never gonna do xenogears cause that would pretty much be an advertisement for a Nintendo game at this point

This is entirely true.
No this was mentioned in Square Enix interviews and it also gives reason on why Final Mix took so long to actually come out AFTER they announced it. It's typical Square Enix blunders. FFXV had a similar problem with their game engine being a huge mess and basically having to rescrap the whole thing making Tabata be the fall guy for Square Enix's fuckups and saving Nomura in the process.

>SQUEX releases 20th anniversary video for Brave Fencer Musashi in 2018 with remixed tracks
>"Cool, maybe this'll get a remaster soon..."
>Nothing...
>"M-maybe it's just a remix album, nice, I loved the music"
>Still nothing...

BFM bros... why? Anyone knows if there's full versions of these tracks somewhere out there?

youtube.com/watch?v=Ar1v1AVlzEE&ab_channel=スクウェア・エニックス

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Personally I couldn't stand Frontier 2 but I went into it expecting more Frontier 1.

He's not bullshitting.
They did lose source code for KH1.
But they didn't lose the assets.
What they did, was decompile the game's code off the original PS2 version and did some tweaks while they were at it and replaced the old models with the upgraded KH1 models from Dream Drop Distance for Sora, Riku and Ansem.

siliconera.com/kingdom-hearts-1-data-is-lost-square-had-to-recreate-everything-for-hd/

>FFT already had a remaster with WotL
15 years ago and it was basically just a port
also there are already rumors of a FFT/Ivalice collection remaster like the Mana one on the horizon

Yep SQUEX went even as far as to phone call some guys that made the FFVII PC port from 1998 like 15 years later to see if THEY had the original files...

What is with Japanese devs and throwing old shit away? There you have million dollar companies throwing away code from their most sucessfull products.
Meanwhile in the west you have, like, some guy who made games out of his garage and sold about a couple dozen copies. And he still has everything. What gives?

It's just awkward because Xeno is so tied to Nintendo at this point.
Like if you port Chrono Cross and someone plays it maybe you get some people interested in Chrono Trigger or their other old rpgs. That's the thing these rereleases aren't just about getting money from the initial sales themselves, it's also about building a retro catalog filled with many games that might interest people to buy each of them

But with xeno all they're really gonna do is get people to want to buy games made by another company lol

The crazy thing is that XG has 3D environments and objects.
Only the characters are 2D and it's a relatively 2D anime style to upscale.
Too bad the game is unfinished.

IMO Vagrant Story is probably their only PS1 game that could easily be remastered as it's all 3D.

Hardware was expensive in the 90s, and Yakuza need their protection money.

>Disney would have the original files
Disney is not a gaming company and does not care about Kingdom Hearts, they only care about their own IP characters IE Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and the Disney worlds.

>"oh yeah, that happened"

Around this time was when I realized old Square was quickly dying as they started making weird ass decisions and getting all arty fartsy with their FF and KH spin-off naming conventions.

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I know it's an entirely different style, from the music to the graphics but I've come to appreciate it on its own, have not played it, just looked at the art and music which is what made me play SaGa Frontier 1 in the first place.

Moguri is a lot more than just set-and-forget upscaling.

>FFT already had a remaster with WotL,

Wouldn't call it a remaster, because it was on the PSP. It had some extra features, but performance wise, it was a downgraded port.

Japanese companies back then just didn't think it would matter. Reselling games back then wasn't as much of an thing back in the day and a lot of japanese corporations have the mindset of not going back to the same exact stuff over and over

It's why western media is significantly more about rehashing the same properties over and over and over. Nip media is more about finding a consistent stream of constantly rotating properties and with that in mind old devs just thought they would never need to go back.

>the moguri mod for ff9 is AI upscaled and it looks amazing
LOL

If anything I think Xenoblade's popularity makes it more shocking they haven't done it yet.

This FUCKING game had a lot going for it but...
>Sequel to my favourite game
>Art and intro done by gainax, they even kept the "no nose" style
>Cool as fuck opening and look
>Unlcear if the game is a sequel or a reinterpretation or even if this is the same Musashi
>Bratty and loudmouth attitude mostly gone, now he's some sort of ladies' man, like turning kid Goku into any generic anime MC
>Music is not bad but it's fucking boring, fucking mistake to get rid of Tsuyoshi Sekito
>SOUL: mostly gone
>HUB is a boring ass building, no real "open world", more like "level select" kind of world
>For a game that came out late in the PS2's life, it sure feels sorta tanky

iirc ff7 is based off the script tetsuya gave higher ups at the time that he wanted to use in the first xeno game they stole it and let him make the gears/saga games as repayment.

they prob just dont touch the xeno series out of respect

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>Wouldn't call it a remaster, because it was on the PSP
What a retarded take. By any definition it was a remaster. What console it's on is irrelevant.
>performance wise, it was a downgrad
Par for the course with Square-Enix

They KNOW they'd have to add all cut content or else people will lose their shit and I think they're not on "speaking terms" with the director

>Yea Forums complaining again
Yawn.

>it was a downgraded port
Technically the slowdown was a bug, the patch simply fixes the bug and that's why it works even on original hardware.

So you'd still call Sonic 1 for GBA a remaster?

>Square
>respect