Punishing: Gray Raven has its own variation on a common mechanic in party-builder mobile games where you build gear sets for each character you use in content. In PGR, each character has a set of 6 "memories" you equip to give them various bonuses. You might pick a set of memories with an offensive focus if you plan to actively use a party member during combat, or pick a set of different memories if they are going to spend time off the field acting in a support role. (In PGR, while you have a party of 3 characters, only one is active at a time, and the others can be tagged in to assist.) As is common in RPGs, these memories have set bonuses. It looks like this:
This allows a player to build up a set of memories for each purpose and eventually be "done" building memory sets, because you have everything you need for each element. The developers came up with one solution for this, which is the introduction of character-specific memories - in the above screenshot, the 4-piece set bonus mentions a specific character's abilities.
But this isn't enough! It's too easy to just build a 4-piece set for each character. There needs to be more progression. So they added something called Resonances:
The idea is that each memory now has two upgrade slots on it called Resonances and you can put a random effect in the slot by burning an identical memory. So to create a good setup for a character, you end up wanting to collect at least 12 copies of their signature memories, not 4. And if you want an ideal setup, it can take hundreds in order to reset the slots until you get the combination you want. These Resonances are locked to a specific character, so while you can still swap memories around as general-purpose sets, only one character gets the full benefit of a given set. Now you have a reason to have multiple copies of each set, with each one being customized for a given character.
But still, that's not enough! So they added something called Hypertuning, which builds on Resonances. You spend an additional time-gated resource to enhance a given resonance slot, and the result is that the memory's stat bonuses are amplified, like this:
But still, that's not enough! Hypertuning is basically just a limited resource, it doesn't meaningfully increase the amount of stuff to do in the game or add depth to character building. So they added yet another mechanic, and it is Weird. Players colloquially refer to this as Super Hypertuning. You may have noticed that the little grid of 6 memories has orange arrows and orange outlines in my screenshot. The orange indicates that the memory has been Hypertuned for the current character, and if you do it for a full set of 6 memories, you unlock Super Hypertune, which gives a staggeringly inconsequential permanent bonus once you do it:
At its core a lot of PGR's gameplay is about openings - you come up with an ideal way to initiate each combat engagement, and you refine your skill so you can execute on a given opening quickly and consistently. The actions available to you are randomized though, so each time you enter a fight you might have 6 blue actions available, or 6 red actions available. Super HT allows you to lock in a fixed 3 actions of a given color, which makes your openings less random and allows for more consistent high-level gameplay.
But it takes a ton of resources to do it! So players figured out a trick: You can create a full hypertuned memory set for a character, spending all those resources, and then bounce it around to all your other characters and (at a very small resource cost) attach that set to each character to unlock Super Hypertune for them, bypassing the enormous amount of work it would normally take. Only after you've done this for like a dozen characters do you finally take that painstakingly assembled set of memories and lock them to the character they're actually meant for.
I'm 99% sure the developers didn't intend for this, so it amuses me that they never patched it out.