Fwiw, imho it does not fit with Aldo’s personality to be leading people on like that. I am of the mindset that he is just the typical JRPG “silent protagonist” style: he is focused on literally saving the world, and he cannot allow himself to be distracted by anything else. Irl people would notice that and not throw themselves at someone displaying that level of focus, or if they did at least not expect a positive response while the military action is still ongoing, and yet drama sells gacha so… here we are:-P. “Everyone loves Aldo, yet Aldo will not commit to any one of them” is a HUGE part of the reason why teenagers especially boys will throw tens if not hundreds of USD towards the game manufacturers, seeing a bit of themselves in Aldo, and wanting to fill in the gaps with their own waifu of choice (or better yet, from the gacha perspective, with every new one that comes along? -> why would they ever want the gravy train to stop?:-P). As someone said about politicians somewhere (in relation to climate change): “It is very hard to explain something to someone when their (short-term financial) best interests depends on them not understanding it.”

As far as in-game cannon though, there is the… well, since there are no spoiler tags here, let us just say that his ah… “origins” especially in relation to his family’s pet cat when sent back in time when Feinne was a baby and her brother was a bit older, may explain why he seems so neutered when it comes to all the chars wanting to get all lovey-dovey with him.

AE’s world is amazing. Check out Chrono Trigger if you have not yet - it is 10/10 fantastic afa the aspect goes!:-D Also there is no grinding whatsoever required, unlike just about every other console JRPG game of its era, it was really unique.

The battle stuff… yeah I get that - it takes me HOURS to delve deeper into game mechanics that I had not studied before, like what effects does AS Clarte’s Lunatic confer, that you don’t get from AS Milsha offering “the effects of lunatic” via her songs, and which of that is personal to him, vs. conferred to the entire team, and of the former which is unique to that skill, vs. shared by all of his other skills, etc.? And a large part of that is the absolute necessity to do personal in-game testing, because the global wiki is sometimes outright misleading or at least inconsistent in its handling of things. e.g., Clarte’s Lunatic offers an increase in the weakness damage multiplier, which for other characters such as RCF that is stated explicitly, yet for Clarte that goes ignored. Actually even that I halfway understand, as a decision for the past when (a) no bosses existed that were weak to crystal, and then (b) even when multiple of those were added to the game, to a veteran player those bosses were “behind” the bleeding edge of new content (aka with end-game gear + a fantastic roster they were outright easy), thus there was less incentive to go back and help newer players catch up by acknowledging such facts. Except that Jet Tactician was a complete game-changer in that regard imho, and made AS Clarte’s increased damage upon weakness relevant again, especially for someone who chose to farm his AD for the purposes of his Shadow as well as all that wonderful Speed-controlling Lunar gear.

Speaking of doing testing, I noticed that Milsha’s “effects of lunatic” do not show up as any of (a) icon on the character portrait, (b) words in the status screen, nor © animation sparkly effect on the character. i.e., this is WFS’s fault that skills are so notoriously complicated, and while the wiki is insufficient to the task (again, imho) of explaining all of that to a casual player who does not want to spend hours each week pouring over stat sheets and the minutia of every single frigging skill in the entire game, ultimately they can only do so much to counteract the trend of WFS to obscure things by making such complicated game mechanics but offering good avenues to explain them. All that said, check out game-info.wiki’s character summaries b/c they are freaking amazing to describing in a very few words (unfortunately needing Google Translate and thus not perfect especially character names) what is worth more time investigating, and like pairs of characters that work well together e.g. ES Miyu + Orleya.

As far as grinding… yeah. :-) You might enjoy Jade or Saki’s ADs, or Underworld AD, b/c the music does not stop during battle thus leading to a more “immersive” experience, but even that you can only enjoy so much of before it starts to wear thin:-P.

Fwiw, AE is the only gacha - & also the only mobile - game that I allow myself to play. B/c of my love for Chrono Trigger, I gave this one a shot, and do not regret it, but I also cannot really get into those, so I feel you there.:-D

You are putting much more thought into this than I did! I thought the word “Edit:” would sufficiently convey that this was a mere after-thought, basically a footnote to an existing story. Being me, I wrote much more than merely one sentence into that, so perhaps its length sends the message that it was a greater part of the overall message, but no, I intended it merely as a follow-up leading statement offering sommething to think about, going off on a tangent away from rather than summarizing or wrapping up the OP. That is why it is so disconnected from the OP:-).

Speaking of, like art, which means both what the originator intended as well as what the recipient receives, whether it applies to a more senior player vs. lurkers is a question best pondered by each recipient individually, aka if you feel like it applies to you, then it probably does? :-D

If you want to put out a more formal call to action, then I agree it would need to be much better worded, to help accomplish its purpose, than this was.

To respond to your own response: I do kinda like the gameplay aspect - especially I enjoy the optimization problem of designing 1TnoAF or even fully 1-click solutions to running ADs. Power Creep is often not sufficient to accomplish that really unless you happen to have the bleeding edge of the current Meta, as well as full equipment. For example, even AS Tsubame’s basic attack replacement could not handle alarmed foes in VH Otherlands starting in the 2-3rd area of Ratle, b/c they have such high HP (for me lacking grastas at least, although it being preemptive was really super helpful, at a time when I had no other source of that, being only at the end of Main Story part 1 or probably by then halfway through part 1.5 at the time). So there are ways to work within the constraints of Power Creep: for one it means that remaining behind the curve, the difficulty is increased tremendously, but also when you finally pull someone it opens up the ability to do many things that you previously could not:-).

And I think it is so awesome that you are willing to help contribute to Kbin’s development! I do a lot of wiki editing for the same reason - e.g. I just wrote a whole series of pages for Lunatic-users and Lunatic support skills, and did a substantial expansion of the Character Skill in Table Template that Bluezero and I are developing and using all across the wiki, to support the kind of table format that I wanted to use on pages such as Setting Poison and Pain. It is super-annoying when people create new wiki accounts purely for the purpose of trolling me - as usual, vomiting their emotions at me upon seeing that I said something, without bothering to understand that thing first (in the latest instance, I said that we should not call P/P “guaranteed” anymore, since barriers exist such that a “guaranteed” skill can fail to inflict, which seems to me like that might cause some confusion to someone new to the game and not understanding its jargon rooted in facts that are no longer fully true?) - but since it helps especially new players learn about the game, I wanted to offer what I could.