A Brand New Start

BUT

Surf? A giant wave of water that your pokemon can ride. A thunderous tide. Invokes the ocean.

Thunderbolt? Arcing flashes of electricity zap you.

Flamethrower? Fire breath, fire throwing, an arc of propelled flame is classic.

In the Acid Tunnel of Love, you can never say It's Nice that Ralsei is Ralsei.

You can go the entirety of Chapter 3 without a positive Ralsei conversation.

In Chapter 4, whilst the room scene always has Kris affirm them, you can (and later on can) just avoid the scene entirely.

Most importantly in Chapter 4, you can choose the Keep Smiling option.

In chapter 5, whilst the Flowery scene always happens (albiet also potentially skippable from the Player's pov), the Hot Spring with Ralsei, too, can be skipped, and the right options are quite evasive to a lot of players.

Like, that's an entire ass main character you can avoid the development of almost wholesale. That's quite strange. Susie always unlearns her bs. Kris is always going to do the same things, Noelle always goes to the Festival with Susie and resists Carol's call. This is something unique to Ralsei.

And there's no consequences in either direction to this. In the positive side, Ralsei always gains their assertiveness. On the potentially negative, they're always the same with Kris. Do they understand that's not their words? It's all a bit inconsistent on what matters and what doesn't.

That said, however, I think Ralsei is kinda the biggest victim of the main cast (though they all kinda suffer from it) of the game letting certain scenes be optional, because it's like you said; so many scenes must be mandated to have no serious consequence in the story. The last dialogue with him in 4, in hindsight, is unbelievably egregious in this way, because Kris acknowledging Ralsei's pain and sympathizing is huge for making them grow closer, while saying "Keep smiling" pushes them far apart... but actually, since it was optional, neither of them means literally anything past that point. Telling Ralsei to smile changes precisely zero text in Chapter 5, but at the same time, I don't think picking the other option does, either. It's such an important moment for his development, us either encouraging him to help him find footing or pushing him down even more at his worst, but now I'm left right alongside you asking why in a story context this is even here because neither choice does anything and you could just walk right past him in that hallway anyway.