https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53673
--- Comment #2 from NM64+bugs.winehq.org@PM.me --- Just did farther testing using a live session of Mint 20.3 and Mint 21.0 where, immediately after booting into the live session, I installed either wine stable or wine staging (depending on what I was tested for that session), and then launched a pre-existing copy of AE VN Tools that I had previous downloaded.
7.0 stable: always worked
7.17 staging: only ~15% chance of working
So it does in fact turn out that AE VN Tools does in fact sometimes work even on wine-staging 7.17, but I'm not kidding when I say that there's only like a 15% chance of the program actually launching - out of 22 attempts to launch the program, it only ever actually launched 3 times. However, on a different session, I had a bit better success rate of 5 out of 18 times.