I'd say that the cast should also deviate more from the CT ones. I mean, even with those changes, they still would be too similar to the originals.
That's the tricky part: how can we have a spiritual successor of Chrono series, but removing every reference to CT and still being faithful to CE's story-line?
Keeping with Crimson Echoes' theme -- Ambition, Aspirations and Dreams -- I've played with some ideas before, and here are some I thought was pretty cool:
1) Replace "Frozen Flame" with "Dream Ember" -- a legendary power that can grant any aspirations agency to take off. This can be symbolical to "Passive dreams", such as having a love-life, living in harmony, or to "Active Ambitions" such as desiring to rule the world, or changing the world for the better, to even "Delusions" where everything you
dream might simply be a set of hallucinations that you project upon the world, and hence making you more susceptible to sin, deceit and manipulation. Many characters seek this flame, much as they would seek the Fountain of Youth, and much like the ironic twist of the Fountain of Youth it turns out that the Flame is
within every character that lives -- including robots that have harnessed Sentience.
2) The Kingdom of Zeal will be revisited, but with a different twist: It's no longer the "Enlightened" who have ascended thanks to Lavos' intervention. Instead, Zeal will simply be an equivalent to "Valhalla" -- a gigantic broken continent and chains of islands in the sky, reigning upon the planet -- where the civilians share the same blood lineage with the Earthbounds. Here, the Earthbounds seem to relate more with the characters than the Valhallans, and the people in the sky would be a reminiscent of Nordic lore / Poetic Edda (think about it: King Zeal is Odin?) We WILL have characters from the Earthbound, perhaps even a female equivalent to Siegfried (which may or may not replace Ayla). But how does this Neo-Zeal fall? Not because they summoned Lavos, but because they waged war against the Morning Star, Loki-equivalent, bringing the War of Ragnarok (which may have been
just as cataclysmic as the "Foundation of Zeal").
3) King Zeal would be the "Captain of the Titanic", who died along with his Kingdom. Except
something saved him. And he intends to eradicate whatever it is that destroyed his Kingdom from the Prehistorics itself, so as to sustain his Kingdom's prosperous future (even though the Heroes of Time destroyed that villain before).
4) Most of the other characters from CT would be re-visited, and will be introduced similar to how CT introduced their characters. But of course, there will be changes. Schala
can be a playable character
if she isn't saved in time; otherwise, she'll witness the horrors of time and obtain the Dream Flame to destroy all of reality. If she is saved, then we'll have a completely new Final Boss.
5) Janus (not Magus) flees the wars of Zeal in order to seek out Schala, and finds himself Time-Hopping. He will be different from Magus, but will display the same level of competence and darkness (or at least he
becomes darker as the story progresses). The only way he can save Schala by the end is to change himself into a more faithful fellow. If Schala isn't saved, we have the
exact same ending as the ending of CE, where Magus and KZ converse.
6) This time it's not Crono who goes and attempts to save Marle from the Time Portal, it's the other way around: Crono finds himself stumbling through cracks in reality, while Marle goes in to save him.
7) Many ideas for Crono: He may be a simple kid, as in CT and CC (Serge). He could be a thief (RD). He could be a soldier, working for NASA (LOL) or Chronopolis, and volunteers to experiment with time travel. He could be a hermit. He could be Mr Bekkler.
Belthasar isn't saved because Crono and co
murdered defeated Lavos. Instead, he finds himself alive because KZ changed timeline.
9) So who's the Lavos / Dream Devourer replacement? Well... there's plenty of options.
There are a lot more ideas, but these are just off the surface of my mind.
Of course, I had to refer to some of those ideas from Thesaurus.
