Radical Dreamers is a visual novel set in the Chrono Trigger universe. It is a pseudo-sequel to Chrono Trigger itself, and is commonly referred to as the game that inspired Chrono Cross. This is true to a very great extent, but if you’re expecting Chrono Cross on the SNES or anything even vaguely similar to it, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

RD plays very much like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Text is displayed for a while, and eventually you will be prompted to make a choice based on the text. You navigate the mansion that way, you fight battles that way, and in fact, you do everything that way.

At the core of any novel - whether it’s pushed as a paperback or hardcover book, a PDF file on some website, or a game like this one - is its story and its writing.

The patching program you need to use is a special program made by Demi that inserts the translated script into the game. Unzip CABBAGE.EXE and SCRIPT.DAT into the same directory as your rom. You can either rename your rom to RAD-J.SMC and double-click CABBAGE.EXE, or you if you know your DOS, just type CABBAGE ROMNAME.SMC at the command prompt. Naturally, type in the actual name of the rom, please. This patch will work on all versions of Radical Dreamers, including the 1MB rom that crashes when you run it unpatched in emulators. In that case, CABBAGE.EXE will automatically fix the rom for you so you can play it on emulators. Yays!

One thing to note: after patching the game, when the save menu thing comes up, pick any of the numbered options, press A, then press start to begin the game.

Demi’s work is second to none. The writing is excellent and everything is translated. Happy reading! This new version 1.2 fixes some text errors and adds a new title screen, thanks to FuSoYa’s graphic decompressing thing.

• Database match: Radical Dreamers - Nusume Nai Houseki (Japan) (2-24)
• Database: No-Intro: Satellaview (v. 20200424-131853)
• File/ROM SHA-1: A4FF257E0CA71A60A7D76EA49B0DBAB770268A5F
• File/ROM CRC32: 660B8CC4