Am I the only one who has found an issue with star / stat raising? IE that it is impossible to get a single character to 5 stars or even 4 stars for that matter? And that is with a character that specializes in something which makes training a stat easier, the "average" characters seem to have even harder time raising up than the specialists.
The issue that I have found seems to be inherent to 'how' training raises and lowers stats. Instead of having a system where stats drain from lack of training / usage, the game for me at least has a system where when you train one stat it lowers a different stat.
Originally I tried training just one stat per 5 weekdays and swapped out which stat I was training each week. I began to suspect something was off when I realized my only real overall gains were from purchased music store items and even then I was ending up with less than the full value. So I began changing up how I trained to try and find some system that worked.
First I tried training 1st stat on M, Th, 2md on Tu, Fr, and 3rd on W, Sa and it failed miserably to go anywhere thanks to losing points as fast as I made them or even losing faster than I could train them. I next tried dumping one stat and just training 1st stat on M, We, Fr and 2nd on Tu, Th, Sa and it failed miserably as well.
I experimented by using a save scumming method. I had all 4 characters train the exact same stat each day, and just rotated which stat was being trained on different days. Any time one or more of the band members would fail to train up / have the frustration bubble popup I would just reload the save for that day and retry until 4 trained up. After 2 weeks the end result was my band's total number of points across the 3 skills had gone _down_ from non-stop perfect training.
The only training path seem that seems to work for me is focusing entirely on one stat (writing) until it gets to 200 and just using the music store items to get free extra non-droppable 100 music / 125 fame, but even that way leaves you missing 175 points of overall ability. And the moment I start trying to raise either of those beyond that revised default point I take huge drops to my main writing stat.
And it isn't just an endgame issue either. Even when you just start out you can notice this declining stats with training issue with characters that start out initially even in their stats such as Robin.
I do not really understand why this flawed stat training issue has not been pointed out before this. Unless I somehow downloaded a flawed copy of the game, or a change was made to the code at some point and no one realized, or people just never noticed that the only real way to gain a higher total points value was to let two stats fade to default and/or buy items from music store.
My suggestion for fixing this is to remove the stat drop from training successes. Instead you can move it to either occur randomly as a penalty for the "failure" days and increase the chance of failure or else have a daily or weekly check for "time since last trained X stat" and subtract points if it has been subjectively too long, and perhaps a second threshhold which makes the drop even bigger if the length of time becomes too large.