I liked Cross, though not to the same fervor as other members of the forum. I liked Chrono Trigger better but Cross did answer a few nagging questions left from CT (at the same time, it created a massive amount of new questions concerning CT) and I liked the story and world as a whole. Though, you should be warned that some of the team had worked on Xenogears before this, so CC is definetly more heavy handed in terms of philosophy and idealism. CT is kind of "kid friendly" while CC is definitely appreciated by an older crowd. At the same time it also takes some of Xenogears bad habits such as being overly convulated and preachy at times but I personally never had much problems with it in this case.

I'm with Clo about not caring for the battle system, it was sort of a weird mixture of Xenogears Combo attacks, VII's materia, and CT's skills and Dual/Triple techs. It sounds great on paper but didn't work as well as I would have liked. Though the Elemental Field Effect was pretty nifty. Also the final boss fight was really interesting since it involved more of a puzzle than a straight up fight. Oddly enough it makes the final boss harder as you go through more New Game+.

The game also has a mostly superfluous cast. There are over 40+ characters to recruit but only 10 of them are actually important to the story and even then I feel only a handful of them are actually well developed. The rest are just gimmicky characters who join you just for the lulz. Not to mention if you want to actually acquire the whole cast it takes three playthroughs.

The endings are also not as funny or interesting as the ones from CT but I blame a lot of that on the less focused cast of characters. Still this is all irrelevant if you never played CT and even then its still opinion.

I still feel you should play Cross, it was one of Squares better games in the PS1 era and though it wasn't the game some Chrono fans wanted, I feel in the end, it went in the proper direction by taking a completely radical turn from its predecessor.