Frog
Magus
Robo
Lucca
Crono
Ayla
Marle
For me, the toughest call was between Frog and Magus, because, at a deeper level, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the two. I think this makes their relationship all the more interesting. Both of them lost someone important to them because they were too weak to protect them. Both were changed fundamentally after that encounter. Janus became Magus, and Glenn became Frog. In the end, I deffered to Frog, because he seemed to grow from his experiences more. Frog does not let his hatred of Magus harm others, and that is an important difference between the two. Frog trys to not create more victims, Magus creates thousands. Frog gains redemption because he regains himself, wether or not he regains his old body. This is shown when he takes the Masamune, and before carving out the path to Magus' castle, he declares "Mine name is Glenn!" Janus, however is dead. Magus is all that remains. Magus himself acknowledges this at North Cape: "I lived there once, but I was a different person then." He has no chance at redemption, only vengence, which, while not dishonorable in of itself, he takes to such an extreme degree that it destroys what ever chance of a happy life he had after the Ocean Palace disaster.
Robo takes the bronze on my list. Robo, like Magus and Frog, overcomes great hardship. When Lucca repairs him, the world he has known has been dead for over three hundred years. Soon after being reactivated, his brothers trash him, and later, when he returns to the place of his construction, he must fight to the death with his friend from centuries ago, and destroy his "mother". Throughout all of this, Robo maintains an important attitude, made more incredible by the fact that he is a robot. As the game progresses, he grows to love life more and more, and to realize the importance of life and the need to defend it. It is ironic, because he is not a living being himself, but he still overcomes his programming and inatimacy to protect and nuture life where ever he can, more so than most people do.
Lucca ranks in at fourth. With an intellect matched only by her ego, Lucca is an important ally to Crono throughout his quest. It is Lucca's inventions that enable most of the quest. She and her father built the telepod that started the adventure, and using the knowledge from that, she created the Gate Key, the party's only means of time travel until the discovery of the Epoch. She repairs Robo, and encourages him along his path to understanding life. Much like her red haired friend, Lucca always keeps her wits about her, and always finds a way to get Crono out of trouble when ever he should find himself in it. Without her intelligence, curiosity, and loyalty, the adventure never would have started, and the world would have been damned the ravages of Lavos' awakening.
Ah, Crono, the archtypical silent protaganist. While we learn nothing about Crono through his speech, we learn a great deal about his character through his actions. Crono exmplifies the selflessness of the hero, needing no reason to help people; friends, strangers, anyone, Crono is willing to lend a helping hand (or sword). At any point, Crono could have turned back and gone home. The girl he dove into the unknown to save was a stranger he met minutes before, and the only thing he knew about her was a lie. The apocalypse he fought to avert would come a millenium after his life and death. While some of the battles he fought in were ultimately inconsequencial to history, he fought anyway, because he couldn't abandon people in need of his help.
I decided to not give Ayla the bottom slot, a decision that will probably leave me without company amongst fans of the series. While hard to relate to because of her broken speech and insistance on using violence to solve any problem that came in her way, Ayla is not a mindless brute. She is the leader of one of two surviving tribes of humans, and the only one fighting against the more highly evolved Reptites. Though her brain is the most primative of the party members, she manages to grasp a surpising amount of what goes on, and manages not to go crazy, despite finding herself in situations far beyond what she could have any hope of being prepared for. And while most of the concepts used to discuss the other characters are beyond the scope of her experience, Ayla exhibits a respect for her enemies well beyond what could have been expected. Like Robo, she understood the value of life, including the Reptites, as shown in her conversation with Azala just before the fall of Lavos.
Only one party member left. Marle. While she usually had good intentions, she was oblivious to the effect her actions had on others. She refuses to consider the perspectives of others, and acts impulsively without thought to the consequences. While her incompetence does eventually set moving the events which lead to the world being saved, it required divine intervention on the part of the Entity in order for her to fully play her part. While Marle was important to starting the quest, for which she is due some recognition, she seems mostly to be important in that she gets the party to do things, rather than doing things for the party.
