I would like to see what western developers would do to "improve" CT, out of curiosity, but beforehand I suspect it would suck.
See, the focus of most JRPGs is having, if not realistic, at least memorable and charismatic characters. They put a lot of emotion in their characters. The majority of Western RPGs focus too much on making "plausible" fantasy worlds, "plausible" interactions, "plausible" characters. It's all about realism, even when they're dealing with a fantastic setting. Although there are exceptions, most Western RPGs are more like "fantasy world simulator" than "fantasy story". Characters are usually very generic, too.
Even being "silent", Chrono evokes some charisma. See, he's a goodwilled adventurer. No way around that. Even if he doesn't speak the lines, you can imagine he doing so by the reaction of his interlocutors. Western RPGs usually have silent main characters, but they have this habit of letting you choose all the dialogues (in favor of "immesion" and "intractivity", and despite plot coherence and depth), making the character's personality a mess (as most of the choices are pretty much generic and the fact that you can choose them randomly at any time and disregard previous choices when making new ones makes the main characters' personality look pretty random at times).
Chrono is silent, but you can't make him a jerk. He's always the typical good guy. He may be nasty sometimes (eating food from others in the festival), but it's not something totally incoherent with the way he shows himself in the plot.
Even with the multiple endings, CT never tried too hard to give players "absolute freedom". It tried to be a great story, regardless of which ending you got. I'd like to see how an western RPG developer would deal with that.
