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Chrono

Threads Of Time screenshot shows off its pixel art.

This Retro Love Letter To Chrono Trigger And Other JRPGs Keeps Looking Perfect

by admin September 30, 2025

Will Threads of Time be the next Sea of Stars, or instead another tedious JRPG homage that emulates the classics without being able to capture what really made them tick? That was my question when it debuted during last year’s Xbox Tokyo Game Show livestream. But every time this indie game has resurfaced since, it’s looked better and better. It returned to TGS 2025 with yet another trailer perfectly calibrated to play on fans’ hopes and dreams for another great 16-bit homage to all-time greats like Chrono Trigger.

The turn-based RPG with beautiful pixel art and an amazing 2.5D depth of field is being made by Canada-based Riyo Games and published by Humble Games. There’s a team of over 30 people working on it. We still don’t have a release date but it’s looking in better shape than some flashy projects that dazzle with trailers but fail to actually ship. I hope the team isn’t biting off more than it can chew, especially amid a tough funding environment for smaller indie developers and publishers, because everything in this trailer is exactly what I want from a Chrono Trigger spiritual successor:

The time-travelling adventure spans millions of years, from a prehistoric past to a cyberpunk future. Turn-based combat takes place in a dynamic view with bespoke attack animations. There’s an overworld map, town hubs, and NPCs to chat up. You’ll recruit characters from different eras and unlock team combos for battle. Why are you doing all this, exactly? It sounds like you’re working for the Order of Time Knights to try and protect the integrity of the timeline or something. Also: cool boss fights.

Threads of Time is being developed in Unreal Engine 5 with hand-crafted 2D pixel art. I can’t stress enough how great the environments and characters look. If that can hold up over an entire 10-20 hour adventure it will be an impressive achievement, especially for the indie studio’s first project. 2023’s Sea of Stars was the last game to pull this trick off, selling like hotcakes and winning nods at The Game Awards that year (DLC released earlier this year). Before that, there was 2021’s incredible-looking Eastward. I hope Threads of Time can deliver something equally special in the next year or two. It’s currently only confirmed for PC and Xbox.

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September 30, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

As Chrono Trigger celebrates 30th anniversary, spiritual successor Threads of Time gets fresh gameplay trailer

by admin September 29, 2025

The Chrono Trigger-inspired retro RPG Threads of Time has received a new gameplay trailer, showing off more of its time-travelling narrative.

From Canadian developer Riyo Games, Threads of Time was first revealed at last year’s Tokyo Game Show. Now, a year later, this new trailer was shown at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct and it looks to be progressing nicely.

As with Square Enix’s iconic classic, Threads of Time will take place across a number of time periods, from prehistory to a cyberpunk future, and is presented similarly to the Octopath Traveller HD-2D aesthetic.

Threads of Time gameplay trailer – PC Gaming Show Tokyo DirectWatch on YouTube

One minute the adventurers are strolling through a bustling medieval town and battling the sort of fluffy or botanical creatures you’d typically expect in an RPG; the next they’re exploring sci-fi facilities and a rain-soaked futuristic metropolis with flying cars overhead.

There are some beautiful animated scenes chopped in too, though I hope the character designs don’t lean too heavily on Chrono Trigger nostalgia – I’m looking at you, robot.

What’s really struck me, though, is the look of the battles. These are turn-based, but have a strong sense of depth with a perspective sitting between Octopath and Dragon Quest as characters fight across the foreground and background with some evocative environments.

Image credit: Riyo Games

There’s no release date yet, though presumably it’s set for release on PC.

It’s also well-timed, following the critically acclaimed Sea of Stars from fellow Canadian studio Sabotage as another Chrono Trigger-inspired retro RPG. That game’s DLC Throes of the Watchmaker was recently released, if you need an excuse to return.

What’s more, Square Enix is this year celebrating the 30th anniversary of Chrono Trigger and promised various projects would be released, sparking hope for some form of remake or remaster.

It’s still unclear what’s happening there, even as fans cry out for a re-release on current hardware. Until then, Threads of Time could well fill the gap.

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September 29, 2025 0 comments

Dragon Quest 7 characters sail on a boat.

Game Reviews

Dragon Quest 7 Remake Has Me Pining For A Similar Overhaul Of Chrono Trigger

by admin September 16, 2025

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined was one of the most surprising announcements to come out of last week’s Nintendo Direct. It’s yet another remake for the often overlooked PS1-era Japanese RPG, and it’ll arrive amid a recent influx of other Dragon Quest remasters. This one has my full attention, though, and not just because the original game is a sprawling adventure I’ve always wanted to go back to and properly finish. It’s also the art style, which moves past the recent obsession with HD-2D pixel art glow-ups and offers a blueprint for how to revive tons of other beloved JRPG classics.

The new “hand-crafted” aesthetic is more akin to the toys-and-dioramas-style visuals of Yoshi’s Woolly World or the Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake than what we’re used to getting from Square Enix. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined sits somewhere between the HD-2D retro sensibility of last year’s excellent Dragon Quest III remake and the hyper-realistic, Unreal Engine visuals of the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, with detailed graphics that exaggerate the storybook whimsy of Akira Toriyama’s original designs rather than running away from them.

The big secret to this new look? Scanning actual dolls. Hi-res captures of IRL toys for characters like Hero, Kiefer, and Maribel helped ground the new art style while retaining all of the whimsy. “For this game, we scanned figurines, like this one here, to create the in-game models,” the remake’s producer said in a short overview with series creator Yuji Horii. “They’re very well done. Using a graphical aesthetic we call the ‘diorama style,’ we’ve depicted the stories and the characters’ emotions in an entirely new way.”

The game isn’t far away either. It comes to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Switch 1, and Switch 2 on February 5, 2026 (one small bummer is that the Switch 2 physical version is a game key card only and progress doesn’t transfer between the two console generations).

Alongside exploring dungeons, engaging in familiar turn-based battles, and tinkering with a meaty job system, Dragon Quest VII revolves around an island-hopping adventure that sees its heroes time-traveling between the past and present as they confront the Demon Lord Orgodemir. It’s a very, very long game, clocking in at up to 100 hours just for the main story. Despite the heft, it was mostly overlooked when it first came to PlayStation due in part to its dated-looking graphics. It didn’t get localized in the West until 2001 after the PS2 was already out and just a month before the arrival of Final Fantasy X.

Dragon Quest VII got a second look when it was remade for the 3DS in 2013 as Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past. It completely overhauled the graphics into 3D polygons and abridged much of the story to shave dozens of hours off the average runtime. Reimagined will make further improvements, including an even more streamlined story and new quality-of-life features like a redesigned UI to make the game easier to navigate. But the most pivotal change will probably be the new “Moonlighting” mechanic that lets characters use abilities from two different jobs simultaneously.

Looking at new screenshots of Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined, it really looks great. I wish they’d use this to make new games.

It looks almost like a diorama. They could push it further and have claymation-like style in the future pic.twitter.com/bMMzU2rhyn

— Dream’s Longest Day (@Dreamboum) September 15, 2025

We’ve seen Square Enix take all sorts of different approaches to reviving its back catalog in recent years. While FFVII got the full remake treatment, other PS1 games like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana have simply received HD resolution boosts and additional features that would be considered barebones even by the standards of a third-party emulator. Then there’s stuff in the middle like Dragon Quest III and Final Fantasy Tactics which are ground-up overhauls that still try to remain as faithful the originals as possible.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined offers a fourth alternative that would be perfect for other games like the original Chrono Trigger, which Toriyama also designed the characters for. It even looks perfect for seemingly impossible-to-remake RPGs from other publishers like Earthbound. Players have been sharing fan art of that SNES classic in the style of Reimagined for decades now. We even recently got new clay models of the main cast that are perfect for scanning. I hope the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined model proves to be viable for projects beyond Square Enix, though I could certainly see it working for something like the long-rumored Final Fantasy IX remake as well.

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September 16, 2025 0 comments