If any of you are familiar with Homestuck, you'd know that Homestuck obviously has taken inspiration from the Chrono series, along with many other retro games such as Earthbound.
I see a lot of people here confused about the many plot holes regarding the logic of time travel in the Chrono series. Then I remember Homestuck, and then I think that we should actually be thankful of these plot inconsistencies!
Homestuck is a webcomic/web media series that takes almost every concept of time travel and just turns it up to 11. Yet the time travel in it follows a consistent logical pattern, and one that is also fatalistic until the end. It takes time to realize the consistent logic in it and while one is watching it unfold it is confusing as hell. It takes a lot of deep plot analysis and thinking, and the characters explaining things to figure it out, but in the end it does make a twisted sort of sense and yet baffling at the same time.
If Chrono Trigger/Cross tried to iron out things regarding time travel it might have interfered with the story.
For those of you unfamiliar with Homestuck (spoilers abound if you are reading it-good luck to you!) or need a refresher, here is how time travel is there:
Time loops are a natural part of time. When a time loop is diverted, it branches out into a "beta timeline" that will then eventually decay and everyone in that timeline dies. There is one "alpha timeline" in which all time loops are stabilized or closed-and yet interference from beta timelines is also important! Because of this there is a fatalistic, blind determinism that is a series of casualities-and one that can be tampered with if an omniscient being is involved.
The remains of those "broken" timelines and the ghosts of those in them are found in the area "Beyond the Furthest Ring"-a similar concept to the Darkness Beyond Time(I think that's where the author took it from maybe) but is inhabited by "The Dark Gods" who are unfathomable Cthulhu-esque beings that rule the place.
The rules of time can, and are used in interesting ways. There are devices that take advantage of paradoxes to create life-some characters are even born this way when a device tries to teleport their future self into the present, only to create a paradox clone, which then grows up to becomes their future self.
Two of the characters begin a "side-quest" in which they have to clone-breed frogs using such a device. They have to teleport frogs but have to plan in advance to get the frogs so that it would create a paradox clone instead of teleporting the frog.
There are also characters who use time loops in combat by creating multiple time clones to assist in battle, but often creates piles of time clone corpses. Such characters are already protected by consistent time loops, so if they die in battle the timeline where they died in battle becomes a beta timeline-or the time traveler fast-fowards past their other self's death in which both the clone and alpha exist side-by side but one is dead. The "Big Bad" became vastly powerful by becoming one who has dominion over time, and even uses time to blast his enemies into oblivion. There are also characters that attack others by attacking their enemies in the past or the future within their opponent's personal timestream-like they just swat something in mid-air but are actually punching the future self of someone else.
There are also mysterious items known as "jujus" that have no beginning or end, they sort of created their own existence in a way but have legendary properties.
There is also something known as "The Scratch" which creates a new timeline from the beginning of the universe, and to better understand it requires using game save metaphors and the main characters have to cheat getting "rewound" be exiting "the game".
Toward the end of the story, there is one juju in particular that has the ability to break determinism by creating a new alpha timeline when one interacts with it. Paradoxically the events in the old alpha timeline that secured the main characters' doom led to the discovery of it. Yet it was able to be reached and used well due to a character whose power is to think about theoretical casual events, such as how certain changes in the timeline can lead to the better outcome.
So in Chrono Trigger, certain paradoxes could possibly occur due to taking people out of the timestream and negating certain events. In Homestuck these are sorta patched up with the idea of temporal determinism and explaining certain properties of the universe, which is most likely not the case in the Chrono series. Yet somehow I think temporal determinism is something that might be interesting to introduce into the series (coughcoughthebreakinchronobreakcoughlikebreakingdeterminsimcough).
