Final Fantasy Chronicles is a reissue, like Final Fantasy Anthology. Unfortunately, it has very little reason to exist as a separate release. See, this time around, we get Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger. Now, there was every reason to include Final Fantasy IV in Final Fantasy Anthology, but very little reason to release it separately. Chrono Trigger isn't even a Final Fantasy game; it's like Square just decided to slap it on because they didn't want to try to sell a ten-year-old RPG by itself. It would have made much more sense if they had released the three Final Fantasy games together, like the original plan was, and included Chrono Trigger along with Chrono Cross, so newer gamers could know what the inspiration for that game was. That would have cut into Square's profits a little, though they could have charged a little more for Anthology and Chrono Cross as a result, but it would have been much more appropriate.

The reissues themselves? Well, they're not bad. Both games get some extra FMV. The FMV in Final Fantasy IV works pretty well, sprucing up the beginning and ending a little, but I think the FMV in Chrono Trigger was unnecessary. See, the artwork of Chrono Trigger was done by Akira Toriyama, an artist of extremely limited technical ability. His drawings translated well to small sprites, but as full-fledged anime sequences, they're not all that appealing. Toriyama's characters always have this snarling expression on their faces, which really doesn't fit Chrono Trigger all that well. Magus in particular looks kind of like a lawn gnome. Moreover, there's FMV tacked onto the ending (in the Japanese release, at least) which actually changes Chrono Trigger's plot, in order to legitimize a certain plot point in Chrono Cross. In Chrono Cross, that particular plot point is unconvincing and unnecessary, so it's pretty appalling that they'd actually alter a far superior game in order to justify it.

So, that's the gist of it. Two classic games with a few extraneous frills and longer load times. Admittedly, Final Fantasy IV is presented in the original Japanese version, with amped-up difficulty, but the ROM of that version has been available online for years. You'd probably be better off just playing these games on an emulator, to be honest with you.