Update, April 3: In an update posted to the Steam Community today, Square Enix promised a patch coming later this month will "include an option to switch between the current high-resolution graphics and the original graphical style of Chrono Trigger." Done correctly, this patch should save a good deal of effort on the part of the hard-working modders discussed below.

The patch is the first of "a number of patches over the coming months" promised by the publisher, which says it is "working very hard on adjusting, updating and supporting Chrono Trigger on Steam."

Original story: When Square Enix launched a PC version of RPG classic Chrono Trigger on Steam last week, nearly 23 years after the SNES original came out, fans were surprised. That surprise quickly morphed into dismay as fans noticed some ugly HD filtering on classic character sprites and background art, as well as lazy, big-buttoned menus that look like they came from a port of the iPhone version of the game. (TouchArcade is quick to point out the differences that actually make the PC version look worse.) Indie developer Lars Doucet laid out other problems, including inconsistent pixel sizing and misaligned tiles, in a thorough Gamasutra blog post.

Now, modders are trying to fix Square Enix's mistakes and restore the PC release to match the SNES original more closely. The core of the effort is modder Jed "Nyxo" Lang's CT_Explore tool, which allows players to modify the game's messy art assets with better-looking ones. Lang told PC Gamer that breaking the "poor-man's encryption" Square Enix put on Chrono Trigger's resources wasn't all that difficult, thanks in part to his previous work on mod tools for the PC port of Final Fantasy VI.

Since Chrono Trigger came with the original SNES sprites for the characters, I did a test with Crono: With minimal effort (double the image size and set transparency), his SNES art can simply drop in to replace the HD art! <3 pic.twitter.com/Kg75LuQaY6 — Jed Lang ジェッドラン (@rivernyxx) March 6, 2018

Lang has also released a separate defilter mod that removes the auto-upscaled smoothing of some of the game's characters, and has been testing using CT_Explore to replace those characters with the original, blocky sprites that are included in the game's files (as seen here). The Chrono Trigger Restoration project, meanwhile, plans to expand on that work with manual graphical replacements for everything from background tile sets to menu UI. And other modders have already jumped in with additions that remove the game's odd sepia filter and add in a CRT scan line effect for maximum retro feel.

"So, if we got ALL of the original art (characters AND backgrounds), my belief is that it'll largely look 'better' (for some definitions of 'better')—in that it'll probably mostly look like the original SNES game, with the caveat that it'll be running with a few modifications of the Steam release," Lang told PC Gamer.

While it's nice that modders will be able to try to improve on Square Enix's mess in this case, there's really no reason why they should have to. Recent efforts like the Mega Man Legacy Collection and Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap show how classic games can be updated for modern consoles without losing the original charm. Heck, even an official Steam release of the original ROM via legal emulation would have been an easy stopgap for Square Enix, à la Sega's recent PC "Classics" efforts