XIII's combat was only half there. Basically to hide the fact that paradigmed combat was not incorporated usefully into enemy designs, S-E gave enemies about two zeroes too much health. And then to make combat go quickly enough, it had to go about a third too fast for the player to meaningfully input commands.
Auto-battling resulted.
IF XIII had used smart enemies--enemies who have comparable HP and skills to your party and fight back intelligently rather than with brute force--if combat had been slow enough you could meaningfully do something besides "paradigm, do your thing" and if enemies had role-playing-like weaknesses you could exploit to gain the advantage, like mechanical monsters would freely sacrifice their allies whereas pack monsters would protect their wounded, then XIII's combat would have been the best RPG combat system of all time.
As is it was mediocre and tedious.
As good as Chrono Trigger is, I don't think it's the best Squaresoft did. That would be Parasite Eve, where you had an active time bar which had to fill before you could attack or use an item. While the AT bar is charging, you are free to dodge and move around the battlefield, but because you have to stand still to take a shot you might actually hold off on attacking right at the beginning of your turn. Besides the annoying invisible walls, which were needed because of hardware limitations, the only fault was that they made Aya run too slow because they had to pad the game out.
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