Playing through Cross for story : First Full Playthrough

I’m committing to playing through Cross for the first time as I’ve started it numerous times throughout the years and never could get very into it. I just want to experience the story and nothing else really as the battle system is very bad in my opinion with the weird status fields thing.

My question is, is there anyway to make this game less of a drag? Like a mod or an emulator type situation that allows faster gameplay or quality of life stuff?

All the encounters are so slow and the loading times, animations of characters, and character text are all so mind numbingly slow that it makes me crazy. The game needs to be bumped up to like 2x speed.

I loved Chrono Trigger and it’s my favorite game of all time and so I’m committed to playing Cross regardless but I was hoping there was something out there that would help make the experience a little better for me personally. Any suggestions would be great.