Yeah. I get your point.

You probably have too many characters selected. Try deselecting people and starting the battle.

@178, remember that you can only have six members on your offensive team at the same time. And pay attention to the dialogue! Sometimes there are hints in there. For the first battle, the only thing you should have to do is make sure you have up to six pilots. Go through the pilots and press either x to toggle between offense and defense, or use up to choose offense, down for defense on the dpad. Remember that when a pilot is selected for the offensive team, an ascending tone will play and they will usually say something. When selected for defense, a descending tone will play without any dialogue. If you can't get the battle to start, set all the pilots to defense and the nchoose the ones you want after that.

Spoilers

Regarding the story, I don't remember exactly which section you're in... but remember to consider every keyword in your thought cloud before continuing. Also pay attention and look out for the sound that indicates you can use a word on someone. It's like the normal interact tone, but with a bit of an echo. For Juro's section, talk to her until you can use keywords on her, then use all the ones that are possible. You have to proceed by getting the "science room keyword", then use it to recall what happened. For Iori's section, when you say sweets I assume you're talking about crepes and soft serve. Same thing, talk to everyone as much as posible until it loops, then try and use all possible keywords.

If you click on a battle and get no error sound, that means you can play it. This includes the ones you've finished. Also, the prologue only has 7 waves, all others have ten except for the final area and and the endless mode that unlocks after you clear the game. You know you've finished the prologue because you can select whose story to play. So yes, once you finish the prologue, the first row of battles which are all tutorials is finished.

Good luck man. These things aren't that hard... they can be figured out. You can avoid the guard, you just have to practice timing for running past him. And at the shrine, there will always be somewhere to go once you activate it and look at the list of sectors you can travel to. And you can also look these up on youtube to see what people are doing. I'm happy to answer questions, but there's a lot you can do by experimenting and looking things up as well.

If I remember correctly, the menu is only one row in a menu which goes up and down. So you can just choose the first option and finish that part first. Then complete the next part etc.

Yeah... that is not a yes or no prompt. That is the list of sectors, as I mentioned in my previous post. Just try clicking on each of them, that's part of solving the mystery of the story. Also, remember in most menus, if you hold down one of the directional buttons, the menu will not wrap when you hit the edge of it. And a lot of menus in this game can be navigated either up and down or left or right. The difference is that going left and right in certain places, like in the voice log, mystery files or even archive, you will skip a certain amount of items. But in things such as yes no prompts, use any direction button works, and left and right will not wrap.

Regarding the event archive, yes, you can unlock things there. All you have to do is play the game, and you will unlock cutscenes and sometimes small sections of the game to replay again. These will appear either in chronological order or can be filtered by character.

The triangle button opens the sentinel upgrade menu if you are hovering over a pilot, and at the very end, the option to begin the battle, pressing Triangle opens the terminal customization menu. And yes, upgrading is important, at least if you're playing on normal. Spend some time upgrading the terminal first, so you can get more chips to use for upgrading skills. And here's some more information. This is copied from an earlier post that answers your questions. Hunt through older posts from earlier in this thread, that'll answer some of the things that we got stuck on as well. Hope this is helpful. Thanks to Zkline for these tidbits.

Team Organization Menu: This lists out each of the pilots and selecting one will play a voice line from them. When you enter this screen you will begin on the deploy button so be careful not to click that. Also if you click triangle and enter the pilot's customization menu, you have the option of clicking R1/L1 to advance to the next/previous pilot's customization menu. However, this will not play a voice line. I will now go over what you can navigate through on the skill menu.
Pilot's Customization Menu: There are three tabs that can be accessed in the pilot's skill menu and you will be at the tab you left off of. This will typically be at the Arms Customization tab (the most important one if you want to equip skills). To navigate through different tabs you simply click left on the D-Pad (these tabs don't loop if you keep hitting left). The tabs from left to right are labeled, Pilot Information, Sentinel Upgrade, and Arms Customization. You might notice there are four sound queues as you navigate the tabs but that is because this final tab is the inner tab of the Arms Customization menu for your equipped skills.
Pilot Information: On this tab this is where you can turn on your passive skills and there is no limit on how many you can have on surprisingly. So just turn them all on. You will know if it is on if you press it and hear a high pitch sound. Turning it off plays a lower pitch. Some of these skills work in really specific scenarios, so nothing really to get bogged over. I cannot for the life of me remember if there are equipped by default when you unlock them but you get them for each pilot every five of their levels.
Sentinel Upgrade: This tab lets you spend your meta chips to directly increase your stats. I honestly didn't utilize this at all in my playthrough and if I remember correctly you might not have it unlocked at first. I can describe this some more if you want.
Arms Customization: The final tab. Each of these tabs are navigated vertically just like the previous ones, and the farthest right tab is your equipped skills. If you hold the down button on the d-pad you won't keep looping through the skills, so that is a good way to know which skill you are on (however if you hit the down button again or in separate successions then you will loop through your skills. Clicking X on any of your skills will move you to the right tab to allow you to choose which open spot to put it in or which skill you want to replace it with. You can unequip a skill by pressing square in the equipped skill tab. If you unequip each of your skills (which surprisingly you can) then it would probably be quicker to know which skills you plan to use. If you have not unlocked a skill yet then pressing X would ask you to confirm if you would like to spend the meta-chips to unlock it (yes is on the left and no is on the right). Pressing Triangle on an unlocked skill will allow you to enhance it (this will also ask you to confirm it just like unlocking a skill).

Pilots being tired os called brain overload. Essentially, they need to rest between battles... so you have to plan who you will bring to which battles. If you want to reset, press square in the team selection menu. But that will also reset your streaks and any bonuses.
The sound you hear means you have completed 100% of a character's story.

Yep you can play the last scene for all fully unlocked stories.
I'm glad to read that you'll still playing the game. Never give up.

Which specific wave is it.. that would help to know.

Next time, when posting battles, please check and make sure the area and wave... that's much more helpful for people trying to help you figure out how to win.
As for the battle in particular, the rpf unit will continuously spawn new kaiju, so you have to take it down first before they will stop spawning. Both the RPF and drum mine kaiju have very strong armour, so you'll need the sentinels with the strongest attack power and armour piercing weapons, like the demolisher blades.