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Chrono Cross, 300+ backgrounds, enjoy

R

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
Not my favorite game by any stretch, but it was gorgeous

Credit to this tweet for alerting me to this treasure trove and to GAF's own mattp for creating the gallery!

http://imgur.com/a/7E4oK#0

Download in bulk here

PnU780x.png


UCiqWOX.png


PliILNB.png


And many, many more at the link.

Amazing reference for any of us in the visual fields.

Edit: Bonus! Final Fantasy VII and VIII!
mattp said:
here's some ff7 and ff8 backgrounds i exported back then too. a bunch are gifs, so they have the actual animations from the game. unlike the static chrono cross ones
http://imgur.com/a/Jp9AY
http://imgur.com/a/shRaP
Click to expand...
 
T

TheDinoman

Member
Cross's art direction is an odd one, that. On one hand, it's totally completely different from Trigger with the lack of Toryiama, which makes it hard to believe that all of this takes place in the same world as that game.

On the other hand...it is extremely beautiful and interesting to look at. Lots of vibrancy and detail everywhere.
 
N

Naked Snake

Member
Holy shit. This is awesome. Loved this game back then (gotta say the soundtrack did most of the lifting)... actually I don't remember the game looking this good, lol.

And it's a shame such artwork can't scale nicely to higher resolutions.
 
P

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
Thanks OP. Another reason why I adore this game.

Best backgrounds. Best soundtrack. Best battle system. I play it at least once a year.
 
N

nrvalleytime

Member
Wow.

Ishida, where are you? The other Chrono Cross apologist around here needs to see this.

Edit - ahh man. Just saw he was banned. Dang.
 
F

Fou-Lu

Member
One of the best PSX games and one of the most beautiful examples of pre-rendered backgrounds. I want games to try doing that again.

While we are in the topic of Chrono Cross, Satchbag understands why it's an awesome game and even *gasp* a good sequel: https://youtu.be/ONInWM8qd1Y (don't watch if you haven't played the game unless you never plan to)
 
adamsapple

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Man, watching these is making me want to replay the game. I really love how vibrant and colorful the backgrounds feel. CC, after FFIX, is probably one of the prettiest games on the PSX.
 
R

Raging Spaniard

If they are Dutch, upright and breathing they are more racist than your favorite player
TheDinoman said:
Cross's art direction is an odd one, that. On one hand, it's totally completely different from Trigger with the lack of Toryiama, which makes it hard to believe that all of this takes place in the same world as that game.

On the other hand...it is extremely beautiful and interesting to look at. Lots of vibrancy and detail everywhere.
Click to expand...

The departure is very intentional and it was also a sign of the times in terms of art direction. The entire GAME was a huge departure from CT in ALL areas, not just the visuals!

mattp said:
hey thats my album!
i totally forgot i uploaded these
Click to expand...

I thank you, mattp, youre doing the lords work
 
Acquiescence

Acquiescence

Member
Oh how I wish for a current-gen JRPG that plays just like FFVII/VIII/IX/Chrono Cross. None of this open-world bollocks, give me fixed-camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds.
 
M

mattp

Member
Naked Snake said:
How'd you get them? And is there a way I can download them in bulk? My hoarder instinct is tingling.
Click to expand...

i'd be lying if i said i remembered lol.

the ff7/8 ones i used a tool i found online for reading the maps in the game and i pieced the frames together to make the gifs


maybe i used the same tool for chrono cross?
 
E

Eylos

Banned
Hire a bunch of artists make HD backgrounds, and hi-Poly characters, keep the same game. Do this to PSX era games


Let me dream.

=(
 
K

kswiston

Member
I am surprised that no studio has tried the Pillars of Eternity equivalent of the pre-rendered background jrpg in HD.
 
M

MisterCrow

Member
These are really great, thanks for putting in the work! Always loved the colored pencil look to the background art.

This game wasn't always fun to play (for me at least) but I've got some really fond memories of it. Some of these locations are really bringing back the memories. Still one of the best soundtracks of all time in the business.

Looking for the background art with the time frozen waves, when you finally make it to the World'd Navel or something like that. That was a thing right? I must have scrolled right past it.

EDIT: For for of you who never played but are thinking about it: If someone made a "here's the story with little of the gameplay" video series, just watch that. There will be lots of reading but you will save yourself so much time with lots of filler gameplay. It's not bad, there's just a lot of it. I haven't played it since 2003 or so, so my memories might be off here, but it felt very very padded out and I just wanted it to be over by the end. You won't get future as much nostalgia for some of those music tracks, so just listen to the soundtrack a bunch to make up for it =).
 
P

Poppy

Member
nrvalleytime said:
Wow.

Ishida, where are you? The other Chrono Cross apologist around here needs to see this.

Edit - ahh man. Just saw he was banned. Dang.
Click to expand...
aint anything to apologize for, chrono cross is an amazing game that just has a few narrative issues and way too many characters

people that have a lot of chrono trigger baggage are strange, i mean chrono cross is basically a multidimensional game on an extremely screwed up timeline caused by time travel manipulation, gods and supercomputers. of course shit is gonna get all weird. i mean its two random and barely connected games jammed into a blender, its a miracle it even holds together
 
Dice//

Dice//

Banned
Falk said:
Waifu2x looks atrocious on the dithering, to be quite honest.
Click to expand...

Given how bad upsizing software/tools generally is and the size of the original pictures.... I refuse to complain (and for the most part a bit more manual post-processing can easily fix it up).
It's not like you're gonna really find these in HD unless Square-Enix somehow kept the original assets for all of this...
 
C

conpfreak

Member
Beautiful. My dream remaster would be a game like Chrono Cross with HD pre-rendered backgrounds. Is that really that cost prohibitive these days for devs to pull off?
 
F

Falk

that puzzling face
mattp said:
yeah, it doesnt work well on these at all
Click to expand...

Dice// said:
Given how bad upsizing software/tools generally is and the size of the original pictures.... I refuse to complain (and for the most part a bit more manual post-processing can easily fix it up).
It's not like you're gonna really find these in HD unless Square-Enix somehow kept the original assets for all of this...
Click to expand...

Eh, no, it was just an offhand observation. I think people shouldn't really expect more than a painterly aesthetic off the upscaling as some work on the FFIX Steam port has shown.

I think if someone were to go through the backgrounds and essentially define regions with problematic dithering and quickly go over them with a soften/smudge brush before applying the upscale algorithm, that'd be a pretty fair tradeoff between effort vs results.

It's generally skies and other larger swathes of gradients where the neighboring shades are obviously meant as a dither and not detailwork.
 
Fbh

Fbh

Member
Very cool. Thx for sharing.
I have my issues with the gameplay and specially the story of Chrono Cross.

But with such amazing art, locations and music I can't help but to love this game.


I really wish more studios tried to make games with pre rendered backgrounds. Even today they look amazing and really detailed. And now we can make higher res and poly models that wouldn't stand out that much.
Pillars of eternity did and it looked amazing, bravely default did (in some locations ) and it looked amazing.
Some studio like Tokyo RPG factory should really look into pre rendered backgrounds for their next movie.
 
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