I've got to be honest, due to skipping through battles the only new techs I've seen/remember were Magus' steal and Frog's Braveheart. (the latter I quite liked) Any others I saw, only once or didn't know who did them or whatever. (I remember something with planet in the title?)
I couldn't really comment on the gameplay balance or anything unless I'd played it though.
Ayla's (especially) and Frog's new techs made them more useful than they were in the original. Magus, on the other hand, seemed to get the short end of the stick--part of his usefulness in CT derives from the fact that he can cast attack spells of different elements, and he loses that in CE. Robo's Green Dream would have been more useful if he didn't have such poor MagDef (or perhaps that was the point).
Cheesy and dramatic is fine. Like I said I'm okay with lines like the reaper one. My problem was with the lines that were so out of character such as his little speech about being space aliens in the reptite timeline. Magus doesn't go on like that, and is unlikely to come up with a lie to get them out of possible trouble. Especially when his usual attitude is to fight anyone that gets in his way.
Magus is capable of lying through his teeth when he wants to--consider his stint as the Prophet, which was essentially one big lie. He normally doesn't bother, because he doesn't care who he kills...but he's bright enough to see that the Reptite timeline isn't something that can be gotten rid of just by running around slaughtering Reptites. I would say that his lying to the Xamoltan in order to get information is completely in character, even if the nature of the lie is a bit odd.
The difficulty of the game is something that was brought up many times by many people during beta testing. The reasoning behind this choice is that so many people complained that Chrono Trigger was far too easy. It was refreshing to be challenged by monsters. Marle's solo chapters were the only ones that I went out of my way to skip battles in. But, because of that, I had to grind for a few minutes in Lucca and Robo's future timeline to make up for the missed EXP.
I know that if I'd had the opportunity to actually play the game, I would have been grinding a lot, because having to start an area over annoys me even more than grinding. The ideal method of dealing with the problem would have been to have two or more difficulty levels--one for creampuffs like me and one for those who wanted a challenge--but that probably wouldn't have been doable in a hack.
