The Chrono Campaign Has Begun

[Wolf Kanno]

Honestly, I would say give CT another playthrough as well cause part of its charm is that everything is pretty interconnected. The prevailing fan wank theory for why Grandfather Clock time travel doesn't work after the intro is that the Entity grants the party immunity to the effect afterwards because it's hoping it will save it.

The other thing I would point out about the way time travel works in this game is that it doesn't bother with the "butterfly effect" theory where even just being in the past for a moment can drastically change everything but for the most part the party really doesn't mug up the past much anyway. The Reptites and the Mystics War were all foregone conclusions so the party's involvement doesn't have much of a dramatic effect, most of the real tampering to their own timeline doesn't really affect them either like making the mayor of Porre generous, rebuilding Fiore's Woods, and saving Sir Cyrus' soul. The Rainbow Shell is probably the biggest thing they do that actually affects the party. Still the time travel in CT is pretty simple and works best if you don't try to apply complex philosophical nonsense about time travel onto it.

CC largely exists to answer two questions that CT left unanswered:
What happened to Schala?
What happens to changed timelines?

While I will agree with VeloZer0 that many CT fans hate the game for being a crummy sequel to CT and being totally different from what they were expecting, there are some valid problems with the game.

It has a large cast of which only half are any relevant and half of that cast becomes irrelevant once they join you. The battle system is like a weird combination of Xenogears combo system and VII's materia system and finds a way to suck any enjoyment from either mechanic, it's plot is a bit too "contemplating our navels" (to be fair, Masato Kato and the remains of the CT team were coming off of Xenogears and by god does it show) which often feel out of place, and for CT fans its not only a giant player punch but also ends up asking more questions than answering.

CT fans didn't have the new ending animations or DS ending to brace us for the bombshells CC dropped on all of us. It kind of came out of nowhere and the best I would describe it is that you should approach the game like it was new because whatever CT may have established is not the whole truth. You may think you understand things like Schala's pendant, the Reptites, Masemune, or Balthazar but CC will school you by showing that you really don't know anything.

It's not a bad game but I would definitely describe it as a vanity project for Masato Kato who was happy to no longer have Sakaguchi, Horii, Toriyama, Kitase or Ito blocking what he wants to do with the story or characters. In Kato's original draft for CT, there was something like ten characters, Marle was a fairy princess, Frog was just a sentient monster and I think Magus was really a demon in the concept stage. It got tones down and some of the characters were merged to make stronger characters. Since Kato got more control, CC feels more like that early concept of CT.

After you finish CC, I would advise you to play CT cause one of CC's strengths is that it does change how you view things in CT a bit so in some ways it was a great sequel because it enhanced the mythos.