Adjusting battle difficulty

Welcome back! And... sorry for disappearing?

I'm going to open by saying I may not know what I'm talking about, since I just went back to the first battle in the newest version I could find on my hard drive and discovered that the pirats only do 1 damage to Aika now (15 WPN vs 14 ARM). Didn't they do like 10 per hit before, to the point where you had to do some funky positioning with Shizuka to stop them from getting in melee range? Did you buff Aika's starting ARM, or nerf the pirats' WPN, a few updates ago? Did you change the damage formula on basic attacks from WPN*2-ARM to WPN-ARM? Regardless, the early parts of chapter 1 are much much much easier already, even without an easy mode. (I went back to the version which initially added chapter 10 and discovered that pirats used to have 22 WPN, not 15. That would be it)

I understand both the "get gud" mentality and the desire to give people options. I think the problem with explicit difficulty options like this is it just kind of feels bad to pick Easy, which is largely a matter of presentation. In a game like this, I'm not sure of any subtler way to implement a difficulty selection mechanic (the subtle way is to just let people grind as much or as little as they want, which unless people are stuck before the point where they even can, evidently isn't working out), and honestly, just adding "easy" and "hard" options might be okay -- some people are unashamedly going to be here for the story, others will want to be challenged by the battles.

I agree, any approach you take to making it easier has some problems. I think I'm going to suggest:

• Make easy mode lower enemy levels to the point where they're beatable without repeating battles or using stat-up items, and/or make more powerful equipment available in the weapon/armor shops earlier, with a similar goal.
  
• If chapter 1, in which the above changes would not be apparent, is too hard (I'm not sure this is necessary any more), raise Aika and Shizuka's starting levels (for all difficulties; not drastically, just maybe from 1 to 2. If that makes the higher difficulty too easy, raise the level of the pirats and catfish a bit too; it will hopefully even out eventually)
  
• Possibly reduce the number of enemies in some stages on easy mode. Not to make the stages easier necessarily (I'm not actually sure how much it would make it easier anyway, since it's kinda hard to lose to attrition unless you build your team as a bunch of glass cannons), but just because people who play on easy mode are probably people who want to see the story, and don't want to wade through a pile of 20+ enemies to beat the stage. Which is honestly something I can entirely sympathize with. I wouldn't personally worry too much about the loss of XP, but that and the bounties thing makes this not my first choice. That said, if people want to fight more enemies, they could just repeat stages more times.