Really great characters and story! I don't know how I ended up caring so much about Lucca and Marle, but darn it I did. Probably need to finish and then replay this to figure out exactly why, but injecting so much emotion into character with a handful of sprites and some text is a real feat.
Mechanically speaking however, pretty bland. Turn-based deterministic AI makes every fight a puzzle, rather than a game. This is fine, it just means that the player has to wait the entire time between solving the combat puzzle and the fight's actual end. In Chrono Trigger, the player has to do a lot of that waiting. Also, the other [ 3 ] playable characters don't get as much characterization as the other 3, which makes them feel a bit flat (at least, I didn't care about them as much).
Mechanically speaking however, pretty bland. Turn-based deterministic AI makes every fight a puzzle, rather than a game. This is fine, it just means that the player has to wait the entire time between solving the combat puzzle and the fight's actual end. In Chrono Trigger, the player has to do a lot of that waiting. Also, the other [ 3 ] playable characters don't get as much characterization as the other 3, which makes them feel a bit flat (at least, I didn't care about them as much).