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• Anti-Climax Boss: By the time you get to the Time Devourer, chances are your party will be strong enough that attempting to defeat it through regular means will be a cinch; the boss preceding it is far more challenging. Of course, you'll have to do things a little bit differently to get the good ending...
• Anvilicious: The game isn't subtle at all about its Green Aesop and that Humans Are Bastards. Particularly notable because humanity abusing nature isn't shown very often in this game, or at all Chrono Trigger.
• Awesome Music: Listen for yourself. Even those who don't like the game praise the soundtrack.
  • At least half the soundtrack could adequately be described as CMoA.
    • Except for the battle theme - it's not Mitsuda's best work; but the rest is easily standard Mitsuda work. And that means it's really well put together.
  • Of particular note would have to be "The Wind, Stars, and Waves", more commonly known as Nikki's Concert, which is an in-universe example, as well as real-life Awesome Music. This link is a Let's Play video of the scene if you'd like the story as well as the music.
  • Scars of Time, Dreams of the Shore Another World , Time of the Dreamwatch and Magical Dreamers are are notable.
• Broken Aesop: The aesops the game preaches so heavily about don't hold up so well with the fact that dwarfs also use technology and try to wipe out the fairies all while trying to maintain that you are the real monsters, and the fairies even seem to think so despite you SAVING them from the dwarfs.
• Broken Base: Fans of Chrono Trigger in regards to this game, specifically whether it is a worthy sequel or deserves to wallow in Discontinuity.
• Demonic Spiders: Dwarves are deadly when they get together and form a group.
• Ear Worm: The absurdly chill Chronopolis theme will never leave your head.
• 8.8: EGM's Greg Sewart gave this game a 9.5 in a review that scored two 10s (out of three reviewers), denying it a Platinum Award (if the game receives a perfect 10 from all reviewers). To this day, Sewart receives hate mail from the fans.
• Epileptic Trees: There's a theory running around the Chrono Cross fansites that Miguel's actually Crono.
• Ending Fatigue: Disc Two, where each boss feels like the final boss, but inexplicably is followed by another one.
• Flat Character: ZOAH SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS, ALL THE TIME...AND THAT'S PRETTY MUCH IT.
• Game Breaker: Glenn, a powerful character in his own right, eventually claims his Ancestral Weapon. And then he can go to the other world and get another one. Which he then proceeds to use simultaneously.
  • A more Boring, but Practical Game Breaker is filling the entire first level of your characters' element grid with cure spells. That way a quick heal is never more than a single high-accuracy-low-energy melee attack away, and you should almost always be able to max out your HP with your spare element levels after a battle.
• Goddamned Bats: Beeba. Just as there are plenty different mobs around, the turn system the game's based on makes fighting fast enemies very, very annoying.
  "Leave it to Beeba! Beeba call friend!"
  • Schoolmates with their high agility.
• Hype Backlash: Imagine, if you will, how much less Internet hate would be directed at this game if it hadn't been billed as a direct sequel to Chrono Trigger.
  • A pretty good way to tell who wasn't a victim of the Hype Backlash was to look at a review. The positive ones obviously didn't, but some of the negative reviews where they admit it's their opinion, that they simply disliked the elements, the hard-to-follow storyline and the Loads and Loads of Characters (With so many of them seeming almost completely out of place and Out of Focus) and not once saying "It's not Chrono Trigger", they likely weren't.
• It's Easy, so It Sucks: Cross is only a little harder than Trigger. A lot of it comes from Serge, who is both overpowered and can't be removed from the party until New Game Plus.
• Nightmare Fuel: Guile's first tech, Wanda In, which teleports his magic wand inside his enemy's innards and pulls it back out.
  • Skelly's a Skeleton Clown.
• Player Punch: For fans of the original Chrono Trigger, FATE deleting Robo will have them screaming at the screen in tears.
  • Ditto the orphanage scene.
• The Scrappy: Korcha, partly because he's such a good devil's advocate, and because he wears speedos.
  • Pierre
  • To some of the detractors, most of the unnecessary characters. Like about thirty-five of them.
  • Poshul too.
• Shocking Swerve: The Dragon Gods and their Face Heel Turn .
• Strangled by the Red String: Serge and Kid. While they were obviously meant to be shipped together, given Radical Dreamers, and the relationship itself was established over time, there is a slight problem: you're never actually required to let Kid into your party, and even if you do she's absent for much of the game. Yet you're still supposed to see Kid and Serge as a true love that stands the test of time, while poor Leene gets to be the Unlucky Childhood Friend.
• Squick: Poshul's second tech involves kicking... her dirty business at the enemies.
• Surprise Difficulty: A fisherman is a boss? Seriously? This'll be a—
  • "Thus, the life force called Serge was not even allowed to be born into this world. Fate has no forgiveness for those who dare stand against it...". What.
• Tear Jerker: Kid's reaction after Serge helps her out of Lucca's burning orphanage and they watch the scene from afar. That Serge vanishes very shortly after Kid laments that she will be left all on her own doesn't help much. Not to mention the implied fates of the Trigger crew, Kid's reading of Lucca's letter, and a number of subplots and character backstories. This can be a depressing game.
• That One Boss: Miguel, Garai, and Dario. The latter is so damn hard to deal with most players wait for a New Game Plus to fight him... unless they exploit his Artificial Stupidity.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The plot with Serge finding himself in an alternate timeline where he died years earlier sounds a great setup for a plot uncover how it happened get back home right? Well too bad, the developers apparently didn't think so because they conveniently solve anti-climatically by saying Serge just happened to fall into an alternate timeline by accident. Also, mentions on the main page about the game being about Deconstruction of time travel and consequences of changing the whole planet's history that sounds really interesting? Well that's only brought up once or twice and doesn't play much role in the story. Nope, instead we mostly have a slow moving storyline that does little beyond repeatedly shoving down our throats how horrible humans while doing very little to back it up.
• Tier Induced Scrappy: With 45 playable characters, it's inevitable.
  • High Tier: Serge is so much stronger than any other character in the game that he borders on this. And you can't remove him from the party until New Game+ either.
  • Low Tier: Some characters, while not bad, get overshadowed by a better one. For example, there's nothing wrong with Greco per se, but Zappa has better stats across the board, unique weapons, and actual plot relevance, which leaves Greco on permanent bench-warming duty once you get Zappa. And some characters like Sneff, Skelly, and Pierre are just plain horrible.
• Too Dumb to Live: Solt, Solt, Solt. Shows up for a fight without any Elements, mistakes a TurnBlack element for an attack element, screws up a summon, and when Peppor takes matters into his own hands and shows up with BlackHole, Solt manages to screw that up.
• Uncanny Valley: FATE.
• Wangst: (Home Fargo), Nikki
• Woobie Species: The demi-humans are discriminated against and exploited by humans.
  • Except the dwarfs. They were designed to appear as victims since humans destroyed their home , namely you and your party if you pick the "Save Kid" path, though it presumably still happens on the other path, but engender a lot less sympathy when you meet them the 2nd time. They talk about living in harmony with nature, and when they come across the fairies and decided they like where they live, and their first choice of action is murder the fairies, saying they weren't good enough for their land. This is made even worse it turns out they have Steam Punk tank. Repeat, the dwarfs that complain about humans abusing the planet use technology themselves. Killing them is supposed to make the player feel bad, but it comes off more as a Kick the Son of a Bitch moment.
• Woolseyism: Not by Ted Woolsey, but it was translated in a way he would have done it.
  • Including retaining all the Woolseyized terms and names from Chrono Trigger - notable since the game was released around the time Squaresoft's US localization teams had begun to adopt a universal (and new) naming scheme for common elements (items, spells, etc.) in the Final Fantasy series.