Different Peoples Art Methods

[Sketchasaurus]

It's often commonly accepted that less colors in a palette is ideal when working with sprites because it creates more work for the spriter to keep the color and shading style consistent in every frame. it also saves up on memory space to have smaller palettes, but this is a limitation that is no longer common. However, Palette optimization is still an important part of making readable sprites. It's easier to draw hundreds of frames of a character and color them in when you're moving less colors around; if you have more colors, you have to keep worrying if a few pixels of a shade match up with the ones in the previous frame, so having an optimized palette alleviates a lot of that nit-picking and stress. it also overall makes the sprites crisper and more visually appealing and simply easier to 'read' from a distance.

also, protip: when working on sprites, it's important to check how they look at their normal viewing distance(not zoomed in) frequently, because more often than not, a well blended sprite zoomed in looks very muddy and flat when zoomed out.

With Chrono Trigger (and a lot of games with higher amounts of detail) backgrounds would typically be drawn and painted in full color before being converted down to fit the hardware limitations of the SNES (or other console) it's worth noting that the actual sprites in Chrono Trigger use maybe around 16 colors per sprite (the example here is a collection of background tiles and doesn't qualify as a sprite per sé)

When an object is further away, less detail overall is visible. this, combined with atmospherics, causes objects further in the distance to have a bluer look (usually) so, the inverse of your answer would be more likely. ( Less shades when farther away, more shades/detail closer up )

I can't stress enough how much solid design and drawing skills will only help improve one's spritecraft, I recommend using references outside of the pixel world and looking at photographs and learning from life, it'll allow you to see the basis on which a lot of professional spriters derive their work.