Alright so I've played this for a few hours and I have to say, it's actually not too shabby all things considered, at least so far.
Even though the story so far follows pretty closely from Chrono Trigger and is essentially a "fanfic" in that regard, it does manage to do some things well. First, it actually does an okay job realizing what the world in various time periods would actually be like 5 years after the first game, with NPCs and various writings giving a lot of background information as to what's going on and how the events of the first game have affected things going forward. Second, it follows the philosophy established in the first game, being that you're more or less free to explore around time and space at various points to check out new events and see how changes in the timeline (and believe me, there are some) affect the world around you.
As for the characters, you have the requisite OOC moments just by virtue of having people in their spare time doing the writing, but it's not too bad and each character is as you remember them. Yes, even the now nonmute Crono, where it seems the only reason they gave him any lines was to establish that he wasn't mute I guess. Given what many might have feared when giving Crono a voice, the hack makers have shown considerable restraint, at least so far.
As far as gameplay, well... it's Chrono Trigger. Weapon/Armor seems to have been redone, though I'm not far enough along to see if there are any real major changes to the game's balance. Skill system is the same, though everyone now starts with a set of skills and some magic from getgo, with some of the skills being replaced with new ones IIRC. The real change in the gameplay is with rebalanced enemy encounters, as expected, and it's not all good news. I'll say now that, so far, this hack completely avoids any super obnoxious fake difficulty BS that you see with some hardtype RPG hacks. Not that there aren't any weird balance issues, like an entire section where you play as one character through an entire dungeon. The enemies aren't really hard, but the encounters are numerous and they hit hard enough that you really have to be proactive in buying and using healing items to be able to survive. Once again, not obnoxious, but considering how early in the game this is and how broke you are (unless you cheat at the Casino like I did) you might get a bit frustrated.
Not much else to say until I get more into it, but seeing as the story is actually pretty competent so far and the gameplay is basically more Chrono Trigger, I'm certainly willing to play more and see where things go.
