Chrono Cross
The Cast
Or some of them, anyway. If I listed every character, the length of the list alone would force me to buy more disk space.
Chrono Cross boasts some forty playable characters, meaning that literally almost everyone you talk to who gets their own portrait ends up on your team. Except for maybe Zippa, the Blacksmith's wife.
My best guess is that they wanted to make a character to represent all the dialects of the Japanese language. Like Osaka, Kansai, Yokohama, Badly Dubbed, for examples. As such, 90% of the population of the El Nido peninsula, despite all being from a world about two screens wide, have outrageous, overblown accents. They range from the good (Oi!), the bad (Non?), to the incredibly ugly (donCHA know.) This wouldn't be so bad in and of itself, but when you get to the second and third stringers like Sneff and Mel, you realize that their accent IS their personality.
So Anyway... Some of the Cast
Serge: The silent protagonist of our story is a blue-haired, bandana'd chap with a double-edged sword and some really huge pants. He's dead, and his head is kind of screwed up.
Leena: Serge's horrible, bossy childhood girlfriend. She hits people with a frying pan and slaps them instead of punches them, 'cuz she's a girl. PROTIP: Visit Leena in the real world with the other Leena in your party to send her into years of painful therapy.
Kid: Possibly the only character with any sort of origin that is explored in any depth. She's a rough, trash-talking brat and a member of the band of brigands known as the Radical Dreamers. She has an obsessive crush on Serge. She gets stabbed more often than Aerith, and yet she survives.
Harle: Makes her entrance, sort of, by being asleep on a couch. Her main purpose in life is that she appears to taunt/seduce/inform Serge. Very shady, very, very French. Pardonez-moi, I cannot say any more. Pleeze, read onward, non?
Karsh: The first of Acacia's Dragoons to cross paths with our hero, Karsh is an axe-swinging badass kinda guy, who is the son of Zippa and Zappa, but lacks their stupid accent. D'ya ken?
ZOAH: VERY BIG GUY. MOSTLY TALK. DON'T THINK I'VE EVER USED HIM IN BATTLE. NOW POSTS ON AOL MESSAGE BOARDS.
Marcy: The Incredible Shrinking Valley Girl! She's, like cute in a homocidal kind of way, but gets pretty annoying pretty fast. Is Nikki's kid sister.
Nikki: The 'Rockin' Bard!' Which basically means he's gooped clown white all over his face, dyed his hair clown red, but goes for the leather bondage gear instead of the clown suit. He's popular with the ladies.
Miki: Nikki's backup dancer slash girlfriend. She uses the power of dance to defeat enemies, just like Michael Jackson in Moonwalker. Nikki is popular with her, as she is a lady.
Pierre: The various amorphous mascots weren't funny, so they added this foppish swordsman in a vain attempt to recapture the humor of the first game. You probably recognize him as Mitsurugi Hanagata from Saber Marionette J if you've ever seen it. Which you you should do like, now, if you haven't yet.
Radius: Older fella who fights with a walking stick. He used to be a backstabber but it's okay to trust him now. Or maybe it's just the one from the other dimension you have to watch out for. The parallel dimensions thing gets confusing.
Zappa: Beefy, brawny, and sort of reddish looking, Zappa the Blacksmith is actually useful in the respect he can whip up weapons for you while traveling. Still, I'd expect a huge guy like him to survive a feather touch from an enemy.
Riddel: She's a goth! She's a White Mage! She's the incredibly pale daughter of Lord Viper. Suprisingly, she doesn't disintegrate in the sunlight when you take her out of the castle.
Viper: The well-meaning but easily manipulated master of Viper Manor, who helps Lynx, then feels bad and helps you. He's another old guy, but he's nice and tough.
Mojo: He's a straw idol that comes to life, dances, and teaches children to love. He is also kind of stupid, wearing a pair of candles on his highly combustible head.
Pip, NeoFio, Poshul, Funguy, et al.: I collectively refer to these things as 'The Mascots.' Tiny, amorphous and seemingly sexless, they sort of try to be cute or funny, but it's hard when they're not ever in the party.
Starky: A tiny alien with a big Earth Worm Jim blaster. This, combined with his enormous power Ranger-like robot(!) makes him sort of like a mild-tempered Invader Zim. "Dooooooom!"
Orhla: Bepigtailed cutie who makes her drinks hard, the guys mushy, and her enemies pulpy. Pity you don't get her until practically the end. I think you can infer that Orhla is the girl I attached my 1 fictional-girl-per-game infatuation to. She kicks high.
Steena: Silver-haired dragon priestess with a dull sword and a pair of bellbottom panties. She has the usual paranormal abilities one gets from practicing chastity (healing, purification, etc.) Used foul play to get where she is today, but needn't fear as the apparition told her "No man of woman born shall harm Steena!"
Van: I have no idea who the hell Van is. I can only assume, from his hat and glasses, that he's the love child of Harry Potter and Cap'n Crunch.
Korcha (and family): I can't complain about Chrono Cross without expressing my unfiltered, mentholy hatred of Korcha and his family. A spear-toting, gangly Aborigine of some kind in a mohawk, Korcha's main contribution to the group is his boat. His little sister Mel tosses a boomerang, his mother is simply uglier than sin, and his father is a mad chef. And they all have this strange Guldove accent, don'tCHA know.
Captain Fargo: Big pirate guy, smokes, once loved a mermaid. Is apparently the father of Marcy and Nikki. Cheats at gambling, steals from enemies... Nice guy, though.
Doc: Even among the other denizens of Guldove, Doc is a loathsome, annoying twerp. He's a sort of depressive surf bum who wallows around in self pity between miracles.
Sneff: In the top ten of loathsomeness, this aged, lisping illusionist. His powers? He can turn people into cats and shuffle hit points around. Not a pretty man.
Glenn: Not Frog. It would be cool if he was, but he's not. Please bear in mind that Frog lived in 600 AD, and CC apparently takes place in 1020 AD.
Guile: Not the burly American Street Fighter we all know and love, but a foppish masked magician. May or may not be Magus, but I can't see Magus with a little pointy mask and a dumb smirk. Actually he looks like the bird guy from Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture.
Lynx: Finally, our villain. He's a pretty badass take on the traditional Squaresoft villain, really. He fulfills all the base requirements (long coat, vague but plainly malicious intent, severely injures a female character, meets his doom while fused into a biomechanical form) but since he's a demi-human, it's all very novel. Also like most Square villains, he has a perverse fixation on the hero and specifically his weird past. He made that hat himself.
40+ characters was mind-blowing to me at one point. It still is considering this game was intended as a sequel to a game about a small tightly-knit band of time traveling heroes.
I do realize compared to Suikoden, 40 characters is pretty tame. And the abritrary story branches that determine who you get or don't get aren't quite as random as Star Ocean: Second Story, where exiting a screen to the left instead of the bottom will change the entire course of the plot.