While its predecessor, like most role-playing games at the time, only offered a handful of playable characters, "Chrono Cross" was notable for making 45 different characters available for recruitment over the course of the game, each with distinct backstory and speech patterns. The game's writer, Masato Kato, started with the core characters from "Radical Dreamers", a rare, Japan-only visual novel he felt ultimately went unfinished, and greatly expanded the cast and scenario, while leaving the creation of some minor characters to various other members of the development team. The developers also created an "auto accent program", to apply accents and other quirks to character's dialogue, making the dialogue altered depending on who was present in the player's party.