This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

If you’ve been anticipating the arrival of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Remastered Edition, you may recall the disappointing news last month that the game won’t feature local multiplayer.

At the time, the lack of offline co-op was attributed to ‘development reasons’, but the game’s director Ryoma Araki has elaborated on what those reasons are in a new interview with Destructoid.

The game does feature cross-play, with the title arriving on PS4 and mobile devices as well as Switch, and it seems that it was either local co-op or cross-play in this instance, with Araki telling Destructoid that “the game didn’t mesh well with local play that would restrict it to one platform.”

Still, online play is much more viable today than it was back in 2003, and is arguably the default way to play multiplayer games these days. Araki certainly believes Crystal Chronicles: Remastered Edition is well suited to the modern way of playing:

“I believe players of the remaster will enjoy the same multiplayer user experience as they did back in the day with the original game. Three of the four platforms that this game will be released on are portable, so even if all four players play on different hardware, they can play together in the same location, or even if they’re physically far apart. Multiplayer was made so that players can choose how to play depending on their gameplay style.”

Let us know down in the comments if you’re still planning on revisiting Crystal Chronicles despite the lack of offline co-op.

Source: Destructoid