(giving up on kbin b/c it has such enormous difficulties)

AE will take a very long to fail that is true, and perhaps it will reverse its course and not even, I was just saying I did not like the direction it was heading in now.

Part of what gacha-style Power Creep entails is that the free characters are not CAPABLE of doing content, either without enormous effort or sometimes even just flat at all. AE always stood out from the crowd b/c it included the story characters into the Power Creep curve, so e.g. Aldo was made to be substantially more powerful, compared to how he was in the past. However, part of what this new direction means might entail him being left behind in the dust, where even the powerful gacha characters are not enough to handle the content, unless they are Stellar Awakened. So yeah, it depends on how the feature is rolled out, not precisely on today’s status.

I 100% agree about the menu UI - especially the grasta one, but also even those that have already received their redesign efforts. 100% of the time when I pull a new character, I will eventually want to put them into a team, you know? But I do not have them memorized yet, perhaps not their name even, but definitely not their weapon type + element. Also, they did not add a nonelemental filter (e.g. Feinne?), nor did they do anything at all to combat the problem of having left a character with multiple weapon types (e.g. ES) in a different form, nor did they help with finding alter chars, nor did they do anything about how sometimes when new chars are added, they don’t appear all the way at the right at level 1, but perhaps they are 30, or 50, or 60, or something else. And this doesn’t even begin to cover when the name is incorrectly ordered, according to the JP rather than the GL spelling! I STILL have to open up the wiki and find my character there, then use that info to try to find them in the game, and even that typically involves more than one or two or three or five or whatever screens full of scrolling, for overloaded weapon types like sword-wielders.

No, it is obvious that this is a STORY game, and that BATTLE is by far a secondary aspect. The ways that the characters move and interact with one another - you can really tell how great care and attention to detail was put into those. Many CQs are amazingly detailed, and fun - obviously not the early-game ones but e.g. Eva, Iphi, Melissa, and many ES ones. WFS does many things right… just not menu UIs, for some reason. :-(

When I started this game, I was unemployed and so remained entirely F2P. I looked forward to helping support it financially, at a low level. However, when I got a job I was super busy, so I told myself that when their next QoL came out, that would be the trigger for me to start spending. A year and a half passed then iirc, where they did not release one, and what we finally got after all that time was this horrible character filter screen that ignores half the aspects of the characters, and especially wanting to make use of NEW, just-pulled characters that you really have to put forth some effort into even finding at all.:-(

i.e., this game specializes in LOOKING good, to a casual inspection, like when you are new and your total number of characters is <10. But the longer you play it, the more problems you see with it. Especially SA, which over on Reddit is making a huge uproar - Bamiji even crawled out of Discord and made a post complaining about it, with some good analysis points imho (https://www.reddit.com/r/AnotherEdenGlobal/comments/18ujber/consider_sending_feedback_about_your_concerns/ - sorry for the direct link to Reddit, I tried to get the internet archive to store it so that it would deny traffic to Reddit, but apparently Reddit is preventing such captures nowadays beyond a small segment of the article at the top, anyway it’s there if you are interested).

As you say, we shall see how the game goes forward from here…