Five months after its woeful PC port, Chrono Trigger receives its final patch

When the PC port of Chrono Trigger came out in February, it made one of the best-loved RPGs of the past 25 years look like a shoddy mobile game. Wonky controls, a fiddly UI and a strange pixel smoothing filter had fans incensed, prompting Square Enix to release a series of major patches to set it right. The fifth and final one arrived yesterday, and—judging by Steam reviews—the game is finally where it should've been in the first place.

The patch lets you rebind keyboard keys and (some) gamepad buttons, and adds new mouse functionality, such as the ability to cancel an action with a right click, or move characters by dragging your mouse. It also adds an Extras section to the main menu, which lets you view a movie of all the game's cutscenes, watch any endings you've unlocked, and peruse illustrations of the characters and setting.

The update fixes various bugs, including one where the game wouldn't boot correctly for certain graphics cards, and adjusts smaller features: you can now use direct keyboard input to enter names, for example. The full list of changes is here.

The result of the five chunky patches is that the game is finally getting praise from fans. Steam reviews are still "mixed" overall, but those from the last 30 days are "very positive". Virtually every review comments on how much the port has improved since its initial release. As one user succinctly put it (and this was their entire review): "Port was bad, now it's good."

Square Enix signed off the patch notes by saying that this was the "final major update", which leaves the door open for more minor changes in the future.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.