Part of it is that the tools to learn how things work in this game are freaking terrible. Whenever I or anyone tries to speak about this the anti-facts crowd rises up strongly, offering sea lioning and every other form of resistance, and this seems to fairly effectively prevent things from getting better in any kind of major way, imho.

That said, things are getting better nonetheless - e.g. the Characters page recently got several new filters added, and while many of the absolute best features in the game are still missing from it (e.g. to beat Gariyu’s True Manifest fight, one method available even to early-game players is to stack sufficient Anti-Fire resistance from equipment onto any Chrono Cross character at all to reach 100% immunity that fully zeroes out all incoming damage; but how many people are aware of THAT trick!? especially with the wording being so highly confusing b/c is it from a “skill” or from “equipment”, if that “skill” is given to you by wearing the “equipment”?:-P that trick is not even mentioned on his manifest page nor anywhere else that I’ve seen, unless you read through and absorb the entirety including all the subtle nuances of the Damage Formula page and dig into the math itself; and the only chatter I ever hear about it is from people using it to ridicule noobs for not knowing that yet, as if somehow mere ignorance of a thing that is both highly confusing and never really told is the fault of a new player who simply does not know? i.e. it has much more to say about those doing the ridiculing than those who they are ridiculing, I know you know what I mean).

Even as other things stay the same or get worse (e.g. Vivilerie is deleting multiple of my pages again - I find his attitude to be extremely repulsive, rude, and condescending, especially that Karening where just b/c he does not enjoy the fact that a page exists, somehow that translates into nobody being able to enjoy having the information that it used to offer? the arts of both compromise and working together to achieve a common aim to best serve the needs of the community seem entirely lost when facing up against someone who simply is not engaging in good faith to begin with, as I have found time & time again to be the case there).

Fortunately the Seesaa pages exist, which should help tremendously with this Astral Archive (AA) content: by offering ready-made theory-crafting solutions like “who goes best with Sesta” (or Yakumo, or Minalca, or any of the other top Meta), and “what gear works best on them”, etc. It is not 100% complete I’ve noticed, but it is a damn sight better than the complete & utter lack of that type of info on the Global wiki, and reportedly is significantly better than Backy’s Battle Tips also that are fairly basic. I hope that those kinds of tips (from Seesaa I mean, not the latter:-D) will help when I eventually start in on this content, once I have better gear, especially if I am not aiming to “maximize” the score so much as simply achieve the threshold to get the reward:-P.

Speaking of, I managed to finish the Cradle of Time today so at least I never have to go back to that again:-). Yay!:-D One day AA will fall by the wayside as well I suppose:-P… if I even bother to do it, which is something I hoped I would never have to say with this game but these days… I do that more & more often it seems:-(.

Rod fishing is relaxing and offers great variety in the different ponds, it’s a whole optimization problem in and of itself, and best of all the non-strategizing parts can be done mindlessly while doing other activities - working, sitting in meetings, watching TV, on a treadmill, whatever. I enjoyed it - not the last bit with Rinde Sunfish but the large majority of it was fun:-). It helped me to keep a spreadsheet to know where I was at, although nowadays the need for that is virtually eliminated with the QoL allowing you to see how many of a particular fish you have already (and yet it may be more fun that way:-).

Whatever you do in the game moving forward, I hope you find it enjoyable!:-D