Crimson Echoes: The Unofficial Chrono Trigger Sequel That Was Never Released

Chrono Trigger is considered by many to be the greatest RPG of all time. The game, released by Squaresoft in March 1995, brought together a "dream team" by uniting the minds behind Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Dragon Ball to create a title about heroism and time travel.

The title revolutionized the RPG genre and remains acclaimed to this day, more than 30 years after its release, for its technical innovations and memorable characters. But Chrono Trigger never received a direct sequel; its spiritual successor, Chrono Cross, was released in August 2000 in the West with a story that connected to the previous game's plot, but with new characters and settings, creating a "gap" between the events at the end of one game and the beginning of the other.

Fans hoped that a new Chrono series title would connect the dots and give cohesion to the links between Trigger and Cross. However, the game never came out, and it became clear that the series would not continue — the greatest RPG in history had ended its cycle with an indirect sequel, in which many important events happened off-screen.

Four years later, those same fans decided to answer their own questions: a game made by a team of fans that would connect the dots. Thus, in 2004, Kajar Laboratories was born: a team of members from the Chrono Compendium forum willing to create a Chrono Trigger fan-made mod that would serve as a direct sequel to the game and a prequel to Chrono Cross. Crimson Echoes was born.

Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes had a team led by a game director, Agent 12, and two co-directors, ZeaLitY and Chrono'99. The project, conceived shortly after the release of the Temporal Flux tool, would be released as a "ROM hack" of the SNES version of Chrono Trigger, designed to run on emulators. The release would be in the form of an IPS patch file — International Patching System — to avoid illegal distribution of a full ROM as a commercial product.

The team sought to create a story consistent with the plots of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross, connecting events in an original narrative, using the fan community's knowledge and the Chrono Compendium encyclopedia as reference material.

Development lasted four and a half years. The team updated the Chrono Compendium with behind‑the‑scenes information, including problems executing script ideas with Chrono Trigger's assets, file corruption, and the difficulty of adapting some ideas, like Schala as a playable character or Frog in human form, into the final product.

Crimson Echoes was, according to its creators, 98% complete and would have 23 chapters, totaling about 35 hours of gameplay and ten alternate endings. The game would be set five years after the events of Chrono Trigger, with Crono and Marle as rulers of Guardia and Lucca as a researcher. Guardia would be in a political conflict with Porre, which had modernized its army and sought to end the kingdom's economic hegemony. As explained in Chrono Cross and presented in one of the alternate endings of the Chrono Trigger port for PlayStation One, Guardia suffers a military attack from Porre in 1,005 A.D.

The offensive is led by Dalton, the military commander of the Kingdom of Zeal. Dalton was brought to the present by the machinations of King Zeal, the primary antagonist, reborn with the Frozen Flame. King Zeal would use the powers granted by the artifact to bring his kingdom back, manipulating events and eras: the extension of the Mystic War in 600 A.D.; the creation of the Dragon God in an alternate timeline where the Reptites win the war against humans and found Dinopolis; and the emergence of Schala in the Darkness Beyond Time — all events, in Crimson Echoes, set in motion by King Zeal that, as the story unfolds, would culminate in the events leading up to Chrono Cross.

Balthasar, the Guru of Reason, also established his temporal research in Chronopolis in the year 2,305 A.D., with the help of Robo, aiming to create a bastion of time to ensure a threat like Lavos never appears again. At the end of the story, with Zeal's defeat, Balthasar would come into possession of the Frozen Flame and, aware that Lavos is still alive, would begin Project Kid.

In November 2008, Square Enix released Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS. The port was acclaimed as a faithful adaptation that adds new elements to the plot, connecting some of the loose ends between Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross — the same promise Crimson Echoes made.

The re‑release revived the copyright discussion that had seemed quiet for four years. Before Crimson Echoes was finished and released on May 31, 2009, Square Enix sent the developers a cease‑and‑desist letter on May 8 for trademark and copyright infringement. The letter ordered the team to halt development and cancel all ROM hacking activities, including translation and distribution of other already ongoing or released projects, and also stated that the authors could be sued for up to $150,000 per work.

The team contested the validity of the claims but complied with the demands to "avoid the costs of litigation, because they can afford a frivolous lawsuit much more than we can." The incident sparked a reaction online: some fans were outraged at Square Enix for shutting down the project, while another front, favoring copyright, criticized the modders for using Square Enix's material to "release a game."

Shortly after receiving the letter and the project's shutdown, an alpha ROM — an early playable but incomplete version of a game — of Crimson Echoes leaked. The creators strongly opposed the leak, because if Square Enix obtained proof that they themselves had leaked the ROM or kept any source code despite complying with the cease‑and‑desist order, it could be interpreted as bad faith and result in even bigger legal problems.

In 2011, another version of the mod appeared on file‑sharing sites, with more mechanical balancing and fewer bugs. Fans speculated that this was the beta version or, as some claimed, "95% finished." This version gave rise to Chrono Trigger: Flames of Eternity, a recreation of Crimson Echoes aimed at completing its development.

Flames of Eternity substantially altered some story elements found in Crimson Echoes and rebalanced combat. The project was criticized by Kajar Laboratories and received mixed reactions from fans for modifying some narrative elements instead of focusing exclusively on finishing the game with the original ROM team's vision. In defense, the Metronome Project, responsible for the new version, attributed the changes to character misrepresentation.

The project hasn't received updates since 2021, when the Metronome Project posted on its blog that it was still looking for developers willing to bring Flames of Eternity to completion, citing the COVID‑19 pandemic and personal setbacks as interrupting factors.

In honor of "the month that could have been" — the release of Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes on May 31, 2009 — the team behind the project created the CEMemorial, a YouTube channel with a complete playthrough of the beta version, which was 98% complete. This became the only way for fans to experience the (almost) final version of the title as conceived by Kajar Laboratories.

The full development story is still available on the Chrono Compendium. The records of the plot and characters, with decisions such as giving Crono a voice instead of keeping him as a silent protagonist, or the interpretation of Lavos as a reflection of humanity's evolutionary desire taken to the extreme, demonstrate the care and dedication the team had for the project and how much a single piece of media can make an entire community rethink the story, redefine established concepts within it, and ultimately imagine a new way to interpret its message.

The Chrono series remains without a new release, and there's no information about any project in development. As the years pass, the story of Crimson Echoes may end up forgotten and buried in the far reaches of the internet. By the end of this text, however, the fan‑made title that never came out deserves to be celebrated as evidence of how a community's memory and affection keep a series alive, even when the rest of the world has moved on.