Quote Originally Posted by VeloZer0 View Post
That is the one downside with only having three characters present for all the cut scenes. All the dialog has to stand independent of the other two party members. Factor in the fact the Magus is optional and I can see the nightmare the developers were faced with trying to make Magus fit into the party.

(Maybe nightmare is a bit strong, but I would certainly say there would be a much greater deal of difficulty having him sustain conversations with party members.)
I don't know much about how much space Chrono Trigger took, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot is crammed into the game. I'm sure the lack of dialogue might be due to limitation issues. My solution to it would have been to dump a few useless NPC's/dialogue in the game to make room for such dialogue. For example, you don't need 15~20 NPC's telling you that "there are evil spirits in the Northern Ruins".