Developer: Coin Drop Games, Lucas Immanuel, jucobee, Kyle Chuang
Publisher: Coin Drop Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time – Review
What exactly is the greatest RPG of all time? A classic like The Legend of Zelda or one of the early Final Fantasy games? Something more modern like The Witcher 3 or Expedition 33? If the subject of today’s review, The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time, is anything to go by, the answer is quite obvious. For legal reasons, the game doesn’t outright state what it considers to be the greatest RPG of all time, but it’s very clear that it’s supposed to be Chrono Trigger. But why then, would you play through a legally distinct remake of the final hours of Chrono Trigger instead of, well, playing Chrono Trigger? Strap in if you want to know the answer, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Story
The story of The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time (which we’ll henceforth simply refer to as Remake) operates on multiple layers. Uncovering this narrative Russian nesting doll is a major part of the game. At the most obvious level, you start at the end of a fictional 1990s-style RPG. Storylines have already been resolved, your inventory is filled to the brim, and you control a max-level party, including not only our protagonist but also different side characters like Captain No Beard and Robert the Robot too. Upon loading your save, you find yourself in the game’s end dungeon, the Castle of the Red King, where you’re facing off against the final boss, the Chronobeast. All of the game’s Steam achievements are also instantly cleared as soon as you load that save, because that is what it is: someone else’s nearly completed save file. Without any context or knowledge of the game’s mechanics and lore, you’re forced to reconstruct just how everything works.
The next layer of Remake plays out like a documentary about how the game came to be. Throughout the dungeon, you find developer commentaries, documentary footage and other materials that reveal the nature of the game you’re playing as a remake of a beloved classic. It’s here that Remake raises interesting questions: should a remake stay faithful to the original or should any flaws be fixed? Who has the right to alter a beloved classic? The final pillar upon which Remake’s narrative is built then comes in the form of strange things happening. The remake appears to be glitched, with corrupted save files, inaccessible content, and a suspicious party member who appears to have been modded into the game. It’s here that Remake becomes meta in a way that you have to experience for yourself, because words don’t do things justice, especially not when explaining just how strange things get.
Graphics
Because of its concept, Remake’s presentation is deliberately designed to blur the line between a polished retro-style RPG, a glitched prototype and a video game documentary. The framework is a colorful, nostalgic love letter to SNES-era classics, with detailed pixel art, retro sprites, and classic dungeon-crawling environments. Beyond that first layer, you’ll find extreme shifts in visual style, with liminal, first-person spaces and “broken” graphics reminiscent of early development builds. This is then further supplemented with live-action footage about how the game was made, leading to a better understanding of why specific choices were made. It’s hard to gauge visual performance when so many oddities are intentional.
Sound
Apart from the live-action documentary footage, you’ll also run into developer commentary audio tracks that start off as normal, but over time start to follow the same bizarre meta evolution as the rest of the game. That also includes the chiptune music, sound effects and ambience, all of which are built around that retro aesthetic and are effective at evoking classic RPG nostalgia before glitching out.
Gameplay
Despite what the title of Remake suggests, this is not an RPG. Instead, you’re getting a deduction puzzle game disguised as a SNES-style JRPG. Your main task is gathering information and interpreting clues to figure out how various systems work, rather than leveling up, optimizing builds or engaging in traditional RPG progression. In essence, you’re reverse-engineering the rules, having to determine what items actually do, how combat works and how the various layers of the game connect together. While the framework is recognisable as that of classic RPGs, Remake’s mechanics are full of odd quirks and rules, making this one a challenge even for seasoned retro game veterans. Clues come from many sources, including the aforementioned developer commentaries and footage, but also manual pages, NPC dialogue, and even beneficial glitches. The game does provide all the info you need to know to make progress, although where to find it can be obtuse.
You’re constantly kept on your toes, looking for clues. Combat comes across as unfairly challenging as enemies resist all of your attacks, unless you look for weaknesses in torn manual pages, and then figure out which attacks to combine to exploit those weaknesses. You’re hopping between the RPG itself and a separate, first-person liminal space, trying to piece together how a clue from a documentary clip might reveal the info you need to solve a puzzle elsewhere. An item found “outside” of the RPG itself might unlock progress back inside it. The constant back-and-forth is a large part of Remake‘s structure and is where much of the meta gameplay emerges. It all feels like a massive and surreal escape room more than anything, and when a solution finally clicks into place, it’s very satisfying. The caveat here is that Remake is an incredibly cryptic game that constantly wants you to think outside the box. In fact, missing some of the clues can result in sequence-breaking the game and creating softlocks. Fortunately, Remake isn’t a very long game in the first place, clocking in at around 4 hours, but be aware that this isn’t one for you if you’re afraid of reloading a save.
Conclusion
Strip away that retro-RPG aesthetic, and you’re left with an experience that is akin to a mystery-driven escape room spread across multiple interconnected layers of reality. We know that that’s a lot to take in, but in this case, that is kind of the point. Remake isn’t a game that is going to land well with a broad audience because of how bizarre it is, but if you’re a fan of bizarre puzzle games, this one will be right up your alley.
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