i got slaughtered by dark green because i did not grind enough. i can not grind by going back to an old save and as a result: i have to start over. weeks of play time straight out the window.

While I think you are right on that the fixed save slot/autosave feature wasn't a good idea, specially for a RPG game like this, I think this game is more forgiving than original VII (It had manual saves and was way more grindy than this one).

From what I've read on the other post, you had the 4 CPUs at low level. From what I remember the game auto levels up some characters to a minimum acceptable level in some parts of the story, In example, when you lose Neptune at the first part of the game, when she comes back she is on an higher level (It happens on original VII too) and with extra BP to spend. So before staring all over again, the best you can do is distribute BP's to boost your chars and If you have any weapons from the free or paid DLCs equip them before the battle.

no characters gets auto leveled after i get them the first time. when they rejoin, they are at the same level as they were last time i used them. at least that is what happened to me. it would have been possible to have autosaves and manual saves. autosaves is practical when the game crash every few battles, which it does some times. what i am going to do however is just pull in the 4 main main cpus for their special attacks and the use the now overleveled others.

With autosaving games i've learned to use GIT. It's meant for programmers, but it works just fine with every game i've tried it with. Allows cross-saving easier for games that do it. Think of it as cloud services without an actual cloud and also gives you save history.

What is this 'GIT' you're referring to? The only 'git' I know of is the software development fora, github.
Could you please post a link to the 'GIT' you're talking about?

One in the same. Git is *meant* for development, but it works just fine for other things. The downside is that if it views a file as "binary" instead of "text" it won't do it's usual line-by-line compare analysis for space saving. Unfortunately, some games with XML format have a BOM which gets the file marked as binary (i see you stardew valley). I've tried it with a few games already, and so far I haven't run into one that causes problems. GIT was designed to acccept the possibility for binary files, so it's only natural that it would work.

For example, I have cross-saving working automatically with stardew valley with my computer and android tablet. I use the Termux app to get it on android, and cygwin on windows. Do you need help with the setup?