As I didn't follow the development of the game, I can only assume here:I appreciate this circle's artist and a lot of the features of the game (field items getting a keybind, difficulty options that make cheating pointless, battle sex scenes that are mostly player driven). There are a few problems like the fact that movement speed resets every single time the game does any kind of cutscene where the character moves or changes facing, being inconsistent with the event skip option (will skip new variations of some repeat scenes, but some scenes will never be skipped at all), but most egregiously adding a horny party member who you can't even get a scene with (not to mention all the other named/drawn females with no scenes). I really wanted to find something once I had a full female party even though the one assassin isn't implicitly as sex crazed as the other 3.
Overall still looking forward to more from this circle in the future and hope we get real translations for them instead of just MTL.
I think that, at some point during development, the game was supposed to be about an all female party. But the developer realized that it would be a huge amount of work to make bascially 4 different scenes (1 per girl) for every event/monster and dropped that idea.
Aria following you around/monitoring you constantly to comment on things might be relic from when she was a party member.