I have a deep appreciation for Chrono Cross and consider it one of the best games of it’s era. Despite that it was still, in my mind, a failure as a sequel. There are a number of reasons why but I think it’s crucial mistake was how it treated it’s playable characters.

• Passive Protagonist: Serge is a passive protagonist in Chrono Cross. He rarely has clear motivation, goals, or will. The one exception to this is his relationship to Lynx but even then Serge is always reactive.
  • Sidenote: This was not true of Serge in Radical Dreamers. He had clear motivation and comes across as a very different character.
• Companions: Serge’s numerous companions are transient and wield minor influence on the plot. They may be of importance to the plot, sure, but they have little to no agency over events in the game. It was a neat idea to include 45 recruitable characters but a side effect of that decision is that they feel expendable.

Compare this to Chrono Trigger, in which the three core characters – Lucca, Marle, and Crono – see a distant desolate future and decide to change it. There’s a moment in Chrono Trigger where the characters theorize that, perhaps, the time gates were created by an entity (heavily implied to be the planet itself) that’s reliving it’s memories before death; like a person’s life flashing before its eyes. Even if this entity is responsible for time travel, it’s still the playable characters who refuse to accept this ending and decide to change the future.

In Chrono Cross, Serge defeats ‘FATE’ as he was preordained to do by Belthasar. Off screen for most of the game, Belthasar emerges as the one whose decisions shaped the plot for the good. Belthasar and the final boss (who, as a composite character, has complicated influence) seem to be the only characters with the agency to change the plot in any meaningful way. There’s no sense that Serge, his companions, or even his opponents are anything but pawns in the chess game between these two.

It’s not just a departure thematically, it’s a complete reversal and that makes it difficult to reconcile the two games.