defeating dalton without collecting gear

[=SKF= TheOvermind]

so, i've been playing through this game again after many years and just tooling around trying stuff i didn't think of when i was a kid ... one of which has lead me to a weird discovery that i'm really not sure what to make of it

basically, i wanted to know what would happen if you defeated dalton but got none of your gear back -- not even the inventory chest the game dangles in front of you before heading out onto the wing

with ayla in the party this is possible by getting her really low on hp and timing 2 back to back dino tails at very low hp ... my ayla is level 44 and i'm not on ng+ yet ... it took a few tries with the bookmark helping to facilitate timing the win ... but here's what happened:

ayla got to under 100 hp and then immediately hit the first dino tail doing about 2k damage, then got iron orb'ed as a retort, and then got the 2nd dino tail in just before dalton's next attack dealing another 2.3k damage ...

dalton then goes into his portal with ayla sitting at roughly 34 hp ... neither of the other two party members (frog and robo in this case) were active the entire fight and were sitting at full hp ... but for some reason when dalton gets sucked into the portal the entire party wiped and the story did not continue ...

now the really weird thing is, that when i tried to load back to my last save file the game soft locked on a white screen ... so i had to alt-f4 ... when i brought the game back up i went back to an older save file which did open, then i was able to open the most recent save file, and i was even able to open the bookmark right before the dalton fight ...

i was wondering if anyone else has tried this and gotten this behavior before ... if somehow knows whether this is a bug or a "developer intended crash" ... it was also weird that killing a turret out on the wing dropped me an mid-ether but that it didn't show in the inventory ... it feels like the death was meant to happen, but not the crash ... idk

i have yet to try this all the way from the save point to see whether the utilization of the bookmark helped to cause the crash ... idk if that might make a difference

i tried to search this but wasn't coming up with anything that seemed relevant/knowledgeable about it so i thought i'd post about it ... if anyone knows of any other chrono trigger community places to try plz lmk

edit [15 min later]: so after posting this i went back to the bookmark on the wing of the blackbird and tried again using dino tail at a slightly higher hp threshold since online resources say dalton only has 2800 hp and dino tail dmg is based on how low on hp you are, so i only needed them to hit for 1.4k on avg ... with ayla at higher hp (roughly 100 hp after the iron orb in between dino tails), the damage dalton does at the end of the fight did not kill ayla and the game just continued with some lines of dialogue about missing our stuff ... then when we landed, all of the gear and inventory were back, but my money was reduced to 2k from 453k (technically up from 0 since i didn't grab the chest) ...

sooo ... ultimately, it was not a developer intended crash, and you very generously are given all your stuff back (minus a potentially large amount money) should you decide to forge ahead recklessly as far as i can tell ... in any case, i'm going to leave the rest of this post intact for science