Chrono Fan Game: Crimson Echoes 98% Complete Leaked
May 30, 2009 by Ruibo
Just two weeks ago we’ve reported Squre-Enix sending the fans and developers of Crimson Echoes a C&D letter to halt development of the game for infringement of copyrights. Good news for fans as the game has been released leaked out earlier today. Square-Enix isn’t going to be too happy about this but at least the fans are.
The creators may get in a whole lot of trouble for this but whether this was intentionally their doing or not, I do hope the outcome will be a minimal. It’s not like none of Square-Enix’s games, videos or screenshots was leaked before the official release date.
Crimson Echoes can be downloaded at various places all over the net such as torrents and megaupload. It requires a SNES emulator such as SNES9X. 35 hours of gameplay and years of development is quite an awesome job from the creators, hate to see it go to waste.
In my opinion, Square-Enix should honestly consider purchasing the game off the CE team or allow them to finish it and retain the publishing rights. Perhaps even allow the team to earn some cash for their hardwork and efforts. Considering the fact that Crimson Echoes was to be released for free anyhow, they deserve to get some credit for their work. All parties would win, Square-Enix make some cash and build a bigger happier fanbase, developers gets to finish their hardwork and earn some cash, fans gets the game they’ve waited years for.
UPDATE: After some playtime and testing, it is NOT the 98% beta version that is out but more of an alpha version and confirmed by the experts at http://www.chronocompendium.com.
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IMPORTANT This is an announcement on behalf of the Chrono Compendium. The leak linked here isn’t the 98% version of the beta, in fact it’s an older version that’s roughly several months old. Therefore it’s buggy, lacking finishing touches, and missing a lot of text.
This is even before the first preview was done (the first preview – you can watch it on Youtube – shows that Magus’ OmniShield has a gold and not green sprite layer spell effect, for example). This version is probably from around early February, before it even entered the beta phase.
The 98% has not been leaked and the version circulating the net is therefore well… pretty old with imbalanced difficulty (anyone who’s played as Magus in Chapter 1 will know this).
See the following thread for the official statement, and follow the YouTube link for the official playthrough:
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,7548.0.html http://www.youtube.com/user/CEMemorial
Hi, this is Meteo Xavier on behalf of a loose association of curious figures from Ocremix. My question is directed towards the official representative of Chrono Compendium:
What the hell is this?
Where did this leak start from? I’m willing to believe some fan, in a crazed overinflated sense of internet uploaded and started a chain, but if Chrono Compendium is backing Square-Enix’s supposed command to destroy every copy of CE there is, why are you plugging the Youtube videos? Why are you not denouncing the leak?
While I’m willing to suggest you overlooked such things, the length of effort Chrono Compendium went to say “ITS NOT A HOAX THIS IS REAL OMIGOD WE STAND BEHIND S-E FOR C-E”, it seems like this, more than ever, is the time to tell people to destroy their ROM copies.
So, whats the deal?
The leak was apparently from a beta-tester, though it’s a really old version from way back in January or February. We had just began recruiting beta-testers at that point and you might as well call this an alpha.
By May the game had changed a lot as we fixed bugs, actually inserted the new dialogues, actually balanced the game’s difficulty, and inserted new graphics and techs. When the C&D letter struck we were about 98% complete and that’s the version we’re showing on YouTube. The leak is not the 98% complete version.
We have footage to show because FW recorded videos of his playthrough to make trailers before the C&D letter struck ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVMqhplgqzg&fmt=18 was published in February for instance).
To further what 99 said. It’s pretty much without a doubt one of the early beta testers of the game. While I won’t go as far as to say that beta tester uploaded it to torrent sites I’m pretty sure he/she started the chain that eventually put the game in the hands of the perpetrator. It’s really depressing because the leak is so much earlier than what it eventually turned into.
As for the YouTube videos 99 nailed it again. We wanted to release a “video” walkthrough for when CE was released. After the demos we were flooded with questions about how to do XYZ and thought the walkthrough would be a pretty cool feature. It served a dual purpose as well because it allowed him to get footage for his absolutely amazing trailers. One sad part of this (and I say this in the commentery on the videos) is you don’t get a sense for the difficulty of the game
A ton of work went into getting just the right difficulty in the final months of development. It was the final months because honestly for 90% of dev time I used a ** game, it just wasn’t feasible for me to play through half done dungeons with characters at the correct level. So I just sort of winged it, it wasn’t until we offically started beta testing that I saw if the stats I chose were too hard/easy. And anyone who does have this “leak” will tell you…I errored, on hard….bad 
We aren’t denouncing the link because we’d rather not bring attention to it as much as possible. In fact…if we made a huge post denouncing the link wouldn’t you agree that it could be viewed as us publicizing it even more as though…we wanted people to know about it? If we did that people would come out and say we leaked it and were now trying to spread it (despite the plethora of evidence that we didn’t) I’ve honestly come to terms with the internet not being happy no matter what we do.
The youtube videos in my opinion are a perfect way to please everyone. Hopefully it shows that the game was truly 98% complete, it was good, and in my opinion it shows that we didn’t fake a C&D (why would we C&D a game that was so close to done). Now that there’s been a leak it also shows that said leak was a really old version of the game. The quality between that leak and what is in the youtube videos is pretty startling, even for me. From my view we were just making small incremental changes but it really did add up. And…I am hoping that since it’s a different medium than CT was SE will allow them. They have never mentioned to me to take down any of the trailers we had and I’ve been contact over the last few weeks.
Finally about the last paragraph, we did PM every beta tester to tell them to delete CE. I’m not really sure what you’re saying we should have done. Do you want us to make a front page post reiterating it? I’m pretty sure at this point anyone who was going to destroy it already has…the other people aren’t going to change their mind.
–JP
P.S. Meteo, your post was really awesome here. Last time I was on those forum everyone seemed really immature and wouldn’t rationalize their arguments (no offense, I dont know the full story but there’s pretty obviously bad blood there). Maybe things have calmed down a bit now so I’ll check in every once in awhile.
While I agree that explanation makes much more sense, its not still covering the full ass, I thank you.
Sure, it could look like you’d be publicizing it more by not saying anything, but thats not what a lawyer sees when he/she finds out material went out anyway and you posted videos of it, fan art or not, to potentially capitalize on the highly controversial event without any notice by you or your administrative staff or even a negative word about the leak. That just looks like you’re not doing your job.
To me, the main thing driving this mystery is the damn C&D letter. While I’m not, by any means, accusing any administrative member of CC of BS to publish CE against the C&D, I’m not at all sold on its authenticity. Yes, I could call the number, but I learned what can happen if you dial a number from a questionable document and I really don’t want to lose my car again.
What I really want to do is hit up Square-Enix’s website and ask them, but Darkesword pointing out how that could potentially damage the rom hacking community, a sizable chunk of the video game community.
I suppose what you could do, since I have the half-hearted belief Square is going to get word of this and maybe contact you anyway, is ask them to release some notice on their official website? Can you do that? Its worth a shot and Its pretty damn hard to argue with an official notice on their website.
Hell, we got official documentation on the 3D remake C&D letter, how hard is it to get this done?
just to confirm this is NOT the full 98% version of the game, its an alpha.
So someones been working on a game for all this time that has to run on a SNES emulator? lol. I couldn’t be bothered if I was Square Enix…just let ‘em finish it (but I sure as hell wouldn’t fund them in any way).
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you’ve got to be kidding me dude. have you visited their site, the chrono compendium? it is a bible of all things chrono trigger. these guys know their shit and are possibly the most dedicated chrono fans on the planet. all this whining about how the ce team faked the shutdown letter is such horseshit. people need to grow the fuck up and stop trying to think of the best griefer comment to post whenever they see an article online that makes them unhappy.
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Oh, so I take it you wouldn’t mind if they got sued, then?
Of course you don’t, because YOU wouldn’t be getting in any trouble.
People NEVER care about other people, I swear… While I would love to have a copy of CE, I know it’s likely not possible without someone getting in trouble, so don’t call them pussies. If anyone is a pussy, it’s you guys, hiding behind a computer screen calling them names.
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Same to you as my above comment. Mr. “Anonymous”…
“In my opinion, Square-Enix should honestly consider purchasing the game off the CE team or allow them to finish it and retain the publishing rights”
HELLO, COPYRIGHTED WORK. Your line of thinking is EXACTLY why the companies lawyers sent out a C&D.
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It saddens me that such a brilliant piece of work has been destroyed. But has it really? Would the core developers seriously destroy their own artwork?
I remain confident that a definitive, archival version remains, somewhere. Hidden away on a CD-ROM in a little drawer. Although they won’t and probably can’t admit it, I don’t believe for a minute that these guys had the heart to eradicate all copies of their own, lovingly-crafted work.
It really does suck that this game will never be released, but it is understandable why SE would want to see it destroyed… SE’s pretty anal about its copyrighted material… What I’m thinking is that all the work that went into this game was the developers’ own work, and not SE’s, so why not just change the central motif of the game so that it’s detached from the Chrono-world? In that way, SE can’t complain that its material was stolen, and the devs’ hard work could pay off in a big way… Hell, maybe it can be developed into PSP homebrew or something… Not a bad idea, if I do say so myself
An artist does not burn his work. If he is to burn his work then he declares that all effort put into it was worthless from the beginning. This stands even moreso given that an outlet was left for SE to jump in and end everything; seriously, what were you expecting?
Furthermore, the posting of walkthrough videos that just happened to be around before the C&D seriously reeks.
hey have u ever sent this letter to the legal department and square usa developers department?
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=CEMemorial&view=videos
there has got to be someone with a copy of the beta out there, no? TORREENTTT ITTTT