Mathew Valente, known as TSSF and who worked on the cancelled fan game Chrono Resurrection, has restored the original soundtrack for Chrono Trigger. To do this, Valente had to track down every single sample that the composers used for the original game. These original samples contain the uncompressed music before it was compressed to enable it to work on the SNES.
Shared on ResetEra by user AuthenticM, Valente has shared the project over on YouTube, which contains every single song on the original soundtrack for Squaresoft’s seminal 1995 RPG. Also included are the uncompressed versions of songs from Radical Dreamers, the 1996 Satellaview text adventure that was Japan-exclusive until it was made available in English for the first time ever through Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition earlier this year.
Valente says he was working on these restorations for “about two to three years”, which involved gathering all of the samples, putting them together, and making them sound perfect. You can listen to his hard work below, and be blown away at just how different — or similar — some of these foundational songs sound.
This is, essentially, Chrono Trigger’s music as it was originally recorded, with actual instruments and synthesizers, clean and uncompressed. Put your headphones on and get lost in Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu’s incredible score — songs like ‘Undersea Palace’ and ‘Secret of the Forest’ sound absolutely fantastic, and you can pick out instruments in other songs that you might not have guessed were even used originally.
This isn’t the only SNES soundtrack Valente is working on restoring, however. The composer has also compiled multiple samples from Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI too. You can check those out on his YouTube channel, and if you’re a fan of RPG music, we highly recommend that you do.
Last year, the uncompressed Super Mario World soundtrack was shared online by Church of Kondo, and the channel has been working on revealing even more classic SNES soundtrack samples without the SNES compression.