Everyone says DQ5, for good reason, so I'm going to suggest some other options. Please keep in mind that these are 8-bit games, so their dialogue is less copious and their art style is more retro than anything else.
DQ4 is my favorite. Every version has its own problems, although the mobile version [sic] might have the fewest for someone who isn't comfortable playing in Japanese. It's broad rather than deep: it's got a big cast but doesn't go as deeply into each character as DQ8 does. If you like the Middle Ages parts of Chrono Trigger, DQ4 is a lot like that scenario at full game length.
If you're able to go even further back, DQ1 is calling. It's a simple and grindy game, but you will learn the basics of JRPGs and have a solid foundation for DQ2 and DQ3. (You don't have to play DQ2 before DQ3.)
https://archipelago.gg/ is not the same thing, but you can set up a multi-person, multi-game asynchronous randomizer that usually lasts for days because Link's sword is in the Marsh Cave, but to get to the Marsh Cave you need the ship and the ship is in Pewter Gym....
Crystalis has forced or near-forced grinding due to level requirements to hurt bosses, so it's on the fence. If its progression were a little smoother it would be a shoo-in.
There is a hack to remove boss level requirements but fighting a boss below the intended level may not be fun.
StarTropics on NES. It's a near-clone of Zelda 1, but harder. I've heard some really bad things about how LCD lag and emulator lag affect gameplay, though.
Faxanadu on NES maybe? It's side-scrolling, but otherwise fits. It does have a level system but leveling doesn't seem to affect your basic stats.
If side-scrolling works for you, Faxanadu isn't a million miles away from Castlevania II and the Igavanias, and those are closely related to the Metroid series and newer "Metroidvanias".
Sounds like point and click adventures might be your jam? Check out the Macventures (which had NES ports, although some of the ports go past your cutoff date): Deja Vu, Shadowgate, Uninvited.
Point and click adventures were a very popular genre at the time, although they had a well-earned reputation for difficulty and illogic. Someone who knows more about them could give you more specific advice.
I played a lot of JRPGs, and it's hard to recommend JRPGs of the period. They're rather different from both their 90s descendants and their late 80s WRPG contemporaries, and you look like you would much prefer 90s JRPGs. The 80s have two phases: the antique JRPGs focused on exploring the world with a simple plot, and the pre-classic JRPGs with a much heavier focus on plot not yet accompanied by much skill at storytelling or pacing. The best of the antique JRPGs is Dragon Quest 3/Dragon Warrior 3 (1988). It's a little complex to just jump into, so if you bounce off the complexity I would retreat to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior (1986). If Dragon Warrior's grinding weren't so slow, it would be easy to recommend as a tutorial game to anyone trying to get into JRPGs.
If you'll take a game from 1990 on the nose, Dragon Quest 4/Dragon Warrior 4 is the most polished pre-classic JRPG in your time range. If not, Phantasy Star 2 (1989). But these games are hard to recommend nowadays to someone with modern tastes because they're not as polished as Dragon Quest 3 and don't have a 1990s-sized storage device for better storytelling and writing. The one thing I'll say for Phantasy Star 2's writing is that it has the guts to go places that games even now rarely go.
Funny, just a few weeks ago I read a comment elsewhere about how Frieren's worldbuilding is unrealistic. Like its JRPG ancestor Dragon Quest 3, there's no obvious source of food to support the walled cities of the Northern Countries. Feeding all the people in Äußerst or Eiseberg would need miles and miles of surrounding farms, not forests. I didn't mind that on an NES, because a world map at its scale wouldn't show farms anyway. It's more of an issue in a manga.
Zelda 1 randomizer is popular, and it's all about procedural generation of dungeons and procedural assignment of items to locations. It's not as well designed as the original Zelda 1, not by a long shot, but it combines the familiar gameplay of Zelda 1 with the novelty of procedural generation.
The previous season covered chapters 1-60, so I'm going to guess that this season will cover chapters 61-119.
Season 2 should be more like the 2nd cour of season 1 in pacing and length of arcs, but I liked the material more to a lot more than the first-class mage exam arc.
Ending at chapter 119 because that's the end of an arc.
Sea of Stars looks as pretty as Chrono Trigger, but its writing is noticeably worse and it completely fails at one of Chrono Trigger's great strengths, pacing. In Sea of Stars' defense, it is generally better than Chrono Trigger at interesting dungeon design and its battle system has more potential. But those don't compensate enough for poor writing and especially pacing.
Chained Echoes tries really hard to fit a 32-bit plot into a 16-bit running time, and it doesn't quite work. Still, it left me interested in more by the same dev team, especially if trends and tech change so that they can switch to doing a game explicitly inspired by Xenogears and its ilk.
How is OnlyOffice's offline performance and support for Graphite smart font technology? I use Graphite fonts and no support for those is a deal-breaker.
Font Awesome is a font that uses codepoints in the "Private Use Area" for icons. (The Private Use Area is a chunk of Unicode specifically set aside for any font to put any image they want in there, instead of expecting a certain codepoint to display as a specific letter.)
To the OP: I don't know much about this, but if you use a different app, does Arch's Font Awesome show as the colored or B&W version? You might have to try a wide variety of apps due to competing color font standards.
I need local font support far, far more often than I need collaborative editing. Plus, call me old, but I don't like storing everything on a server in Virginia for Google to read.
If you were bored after that cliffhanger in the plot, I can't see much point to continuing Chrono Trigger.