I got a PS1 around 2002 or so and I recall getting this as one of my first titles. Why? Because it reviewed astonishingly well at the time, notably with Gamespot giving it a perfect 10. So this must have been Ocarina of Time good, right?
I didn't get that far and not because of the story. I don't think I got far enough to have any issue with that. At some point I walked by a save point for some dumb reason just to check one extra screen out and ran into some unskippable battle against a giant dragonfly and died and lost a fair amount of progress and rage quit. But the game was proving to be a hard sell anyway because its battle system was incredibly weird and since I have never seen a game since then with the same approach it obviously didn't catch on.
The decision to go with a unique battle system is odd because Chrono Trigger's battle system is quite straightforward if you think about it. The appeal of Chrono Trigger's gameplay is more that it's really user friendly and polished. Trigger was developer by a dream team that combined talents from Square and Enix so the approach was more to make the ultimate RPG using all the lessons learned up to that point. Such an approach with Cross would have been cool but instead they went with something creative that was probably done to distinguish it from the Final Fantasy series. Actually Final Fantasy X probably comes across more as the ultimate RPG using all the lessons learned up to that point and it came out only about 18 months later.
Chrono Cross will always have the music though. Man, they NAILED that part!