Actually, I replayed Chrono Trigger recently, and I was really surprised to find so many flaws in it. I loved it as a kid, but nowadays I see a whole lot of wasted potential in it. Let me explain:
First, the combat. It is really nice that in this JRPG, the positioning of the characters affect combat. Except you never get to determine that positioning! There is no way to move your character on the combat map, except by being thrown by some enemies. Even when a long range PC is face to face to an enemy, she will stand there using her weaker attacks and all. The long range thing doesn't even make sense, because a melee character will walk to any foe to deliver his attack, no matter how far away. I guess you still have the special abilities, which sometimes have different areas of effect. But most abilities either affect one character or all of them (even a few that look like they should affect an area). The few that have a specific area are usually lines or balls. They also happen to be, mostly, very early abilities that are useless in the late game. Now, there are a few that do have interesting area of effects, such as the flamethrower (which is a line that goes from the PC to the enemy, but may damage any enemies in between), the slash (similar to the last one, but the attack keeps going past the original target) and blackhole (which is a circle around the PC). But even these attacks have their potential for making combat interesting limited. As you can't walk during the battle, how useful these attack will be will depend on how your characters and the enemies end up distributed when combat begins. Which wouldn't be so bad, as you can see the enemies in the map, and avoid or approach them as you prefer. However, whenever combat begins, both the enemies and the PCs move to predetermined positions, so you can't even try to plan to approach the enemies in certain way.
Speaking of abilities, I always felt the game has too few of them. Each character only gets 8. I guess I could understand if the abilities themselves were more unique, but that isn't really the case. The attack spells are probably the most boring of the bunch, always affecting either one or all enemies. To be fair, some enemies react interestingly to certain elements, but most of the time, it is simply a question of pairing the right element to the enemy. Special physical attacks had the opportunity to be a little more interesting, since they seem to be based on what weapon you are using, but different weapons are mostly upgrades from one another, so that is another wasted opportunity. There are a few techs that create "status effects", which can be a bit interesting. But even then there is little variety, and most of those are double or triple techs, requiring a specific character arrangement. Aside from all that you have healing spells.
Now, to be fair, one cool thing about the abilities is how they are pretty unique to each character, and how each character can combine different techs to make special attacks. This not only gives them a little bit of personality, but makes deciding which characters to use a bit more tactical (well, the game is easy enough for you to not need any tactics, actually, but at least the possibility was there). My only complaints about the combining of techniques is that one of the characters, Magus, doesn't get any double techs (making him a rather useless character to have), and that all the triple techs that don't need special items need Crono. I think the game would have been better if every possible party had a triple tech (and given how the abilities we have aren't particularly interesting, it shouldn't have been to hard to make).
There is also no customization of the PCs, except by equipping them. And you only get 4 item slots, 3 of which (weapon, armor and helmet) usually have items that only differ in strength. Sure, a few of them have special effects, but those are rare, and bound to eventually become useless. The accessory slot is more interesting, but still, it is a rather limited way of customization.
Moving away from combat (and preparing for combat), the game is like your typical JRPG. The story flows linearly for the most part, with a few actions having very minor effects. There is a little bit to explore at first, with the millennial fair, the cities at the present time, etc. But there is nothing really useful to be found or done there. And as the game goes on, these exploration aspects matter less and less. There is the book puzzle in Zeal, for instance, that can net you some nice items (and TP). But the puzzle itself is rather mediocre. There are the optional quests before the final fight which have a bit more of flesh to them, but most of them end up being dungeons you need to clear up. I guess there is not much point complaining a JRPG is a JRPG, but I think it would have been more interesting if at least the time travel aspect of the game had been used more in the exploration itself. I mean, if you changed the story of CT so that, instead of travelling through time, you were travelling to other worlds with different tech levels, the game wouldn't have been much different. I mean, the story would, of course, but the "quests" you would have to do could remain mostly unchanged.
Enemy wise, I admit the game does a good job making them varied. Different kinds of enemies work differently, and even form different categories together. Some are almost immune to magic, but are weak physically. Some are very weak to a certain element. Dinosaurs have problems with lighting. It is basic, but the cool thing is that you can eventually predict this when meeting a new enemy because you can peg him as this or that kind, just because of how it looks. And some bosses have even more elaborate weaknesses and strengths. Like Magus with his barrier change. But even here there is a pretty nasty problem: Most of these are too simple. Even the barrier change boils down to simply using the right kind of attack.
My point is, CT has nice graphics. It has very good music. Its storytelling and characters don't make you ill as many JRPGs are liable to. But there is a whole lot about it that could have been done better, and it seems really strange to me that it wasn't, because the mistakes are pretty glaring. I mean, it sometimes feels like they wanted to go all the way and actually make something different, but were forced to simplify the game somewhere along the way.
One thing I am sure of though, is that more isn't always better and I think that for Chrono Trigger more abilities and stat distribution would have made it worse. The abilities do every possible elemental type of damage in a variety of ways... there were several buffs and debufs... What more did you want exactly, that poison spell no one would ever use? Stat distribution would have been meaningless, making an easy game even easier with no real payoff.
