One of the things that helped Mass Effect, I think, reach a much wider audience than most RPGs do was its real-time third-person combat. It combined a (somewhat clumsy, at least in the first game) Gears of War-like mechanical experience with the hallmarks of a traditional RPG, such as player-customizable statistics and weapons and armor. Similarly, one of the more revolutionary aspects of Chrono Trigger was its Active Time Battle System 2.0, lifted from Final Fantasy IV and tweaked and improved for the new game. Of course, this was not as dependent on twitchy player skill as is the three-dimensional combat in the Mass Effect games, but for the time, it was as interactive as could be expected of a turn-based battle system. What’s more, the player’s success or failure was entirely contingent on which party members he chose to bring along for each battle. How much of Mass Effect’s strategy and sense of interaction boiled down to selecting which squad mates would be best for the mission at hand, or even which characters you took a liking toward? Sometimes, I’d pick characters I knew weren’t the best-suited for the task, just because I liked their dialog and personality; with Crono’s adventure, I took along Frog and Magus much of the time, just because the lines they would pipe up with were so well-written (in the remake, anyway. Translation was shaky at best in the Super Nintendo version.)
​