AP01 expedition dungeon is interesting. You can only do each stage of it once per playthrough it seems (I got to stage two, havent gone further yet), so it seems like more of a one time boost instead of an infinite grinding area like in some other AP01s (still better than himegari's), and even has the little minigame of trying to corner the treasure puttetos. However you can break the game without even technically cheating easily. Since you can retire and carry over data whenever you want, you can pretty easily loop the treasure putetto dungeons to give insane training points, since they dont scale hp very much, if at all. Clear the AP01 dungeon (even the first stage is fine tbh, capturing both puttetos might be difficult until you get Lily or Claus's capture attack, Helmina can only seem to do 33% capture rate each cast unless shes way overlevelled against them). Sac the putettos for points (i havent seen a reason to bother keeping them so far or summoning more, but maybe the abilities they get are good). Pump up Claus's level, retire with save data, start a new game carrying everything over, make sure battle skip and enemy uncapping are turned on, and repeat. Enemies will scale on Claus's level, and the putettos give much more training as they gain levels. Level 16 ones had like 12k points per and only 9hp, meaning instant capture if Claus or Lily catches them. You can probably just repeat this until Claus/Helmina unit is capped before even doing the first mission.
Dont know what to make of this game so far. Hopefully things will get a bit more interesting once I unlock class-ups at stage 21, but it seems a bit barren right now. Himegari had alchemy and magic, along with getting the ranks of those things up to focus on between missions. This just has training it seems. I like that they give the option of fixed stat ups, makes savescumming unnecessary since you know you're getting a fixed reward. No saving during battles (except with the support item) makes them a bit more tactically involved since you have to start all over if you mess up too badly, rather than being able to go back to a save right before a crucial blunder. No permadeath seems to be balanced out by the fact that you cant seem to summon/rez units mid battle, unless you unlock something for that later. Holding items is a good thing, seems they're trying to move away from the infinite healing item spam of some of their other games.
Does anyone know if stat caps get lifted eventually, or raised? Seems like a low numbers game so far. I assume the caps would be raised once you class change, but haven't gotten that far yet. Lily seems like her Kamidori incarnation right now, low start but good, even growth and even caps make her seem like she'll grow into a powerhouse.