Cross is a direct sequel and takes place in the same world, and the plot is driven by events directly caused by the Chrono Trigger crew fucking with the timeline. Crono, Marle, Lucca, and Robo all appear in the game, and the whole thing is centered around the loose end Chrono Trigger left with
.
It does a pretty nice job of shitting all over the main cast of Chrono Trigger, actually.
It does more than that, the game design itself is offensive when you look at it as a sequel to CT. I'm not even talking about the fact that it goes out of its way to sabotage the first game's storyline, which was great BECAUSE it didn't take itself super seriously and therefore avoided a downward spiral into time travel stupidity. I mean that actual core parts of the game were apparently made in such a way as to infuriate CT fans.
CT had a small, solid cast of memorable and unique characters. CC has an army of people that is very difficult to give a shit about, many of whom with some of the most atrocious character deisgn I've ever seen. Most of them had NO personality whatsoever and their dialogue is the exact same as everyone else's except with weird accents or capslock.
CT's battle system was perfect. It took the ATB system from final fantasy and added positioning and directed/area attacks. Fun and simple. CC's battle system is what happens when JRPG developers get their head stuck up their own ass and think they're giving you god's gift to battle systems because they made it as different from Dragon Quest as possible. I can think of a few others like Xenosaga 2 but hell I even preferred that one to CC.
Then you have the multi-character techs, a feature CT didn't invent but sure did use effectively. You'd think with a cast many times larger you'd have tons of them right? NOPE there's hardly any in CC.
People tell me that it's a good game if you don't look at it as a sequel, or that I'm only mad because it takes a dump all over characters I grew to love. I'll never know, but what I DO know is that it felt like I was being trolled softly the whole time. What's worse is the game itself was just good enough that I kept playing it rather than putting it down. I still think the soundtrack is for the most part amazing, and graphically it's beautiful. It was the little things like the utterly horrid battle music (yes I know what radical dreamers is, no I didn't like the music in it), or the way it taunts you by never letting you out of that damn archipelago, just out of arm's reach of the Chrono Trigger world you grew to love. That stuff just wore on my sanity after a while. I don't care about some random shovelware game being terrible, but when something I was dearly looking forward to ends up kicking me in the balls, that's a lot worse than the feeling you get when you don't quite like a game you just spent 60 bucks on. This is a game I'd have paid money to my future self to STOP me from playing it.
Man it's been over a decade and I'm still pissed at this game enough to write a wall of text about it on the internet. That says something.