I came into this game knowing full well what every character could and couldn't do, their growths, who was likely to be good, and their respective roles because I've been waiting for this game like for ever and I had a good year and a half to go over information on Serenes Forest before getting it myself. Therefore I already knew that for instance, Rinkah is the Hoshidan knight unit, and I've found her to be really good. One of my better units for sure on Classic Hard. I use her first and foremost as a wall, but get a bit of chip damage on her somewhere and you'll find that suddenly she's doing something like 20x2 with a steel club because her personal skill is so damn good. I dunno what anyone's saying about her being underwhelming.
If anything I find Kaze to be kind of underwhelming at this point, he was good for the start of the game but Kagerou's just better in every way.