If anyone hits a wall at about the midpoint of the game, I found a really good place to grind. Right after you get Monocco, there is an area you can go to called Frozen Hearts. If you immediately go and start to explore, you'll soon realize this is a late game area that you are massively under leveled for.

HOWEVER, the first enemy you see is a Danseuses, and if you start the battle you'll fight 3 of them. It will take a little bit, but they only have like 3 different attack patterns, after a few tries you should be able to learn them and parry/dodge them consistently. Once you have that down, you'll be able to beat them without getting hit and they give a MASSIVE amount of exp. Then just head over to the nearby flag, heal up, and do it again. I stayed there for about hour fighting them repeatedly and bumped everyone up by like 10 levels.

The tricky part is memorizing their attack patterns consistently, I died a lot until I got it down. But the flag is really close by, so you can just keep throwing yourself at them until you do. Don't bother trying to fight any of the other battles in this area, all the other ones have enemies that will outheal any damage you can do.

This often happens to me in RPGs because I’m missing some combat mechanic or fundamental.

It’s made me want to design better optional tutorials for those games to help people discover certain strategies. Eg;

“Hey, you have many different tuning macguffins on this character, but it means their stats aren’t built to any one strength. For an example, try using 8 yellow macguffins to build them for taunting/defense so they can use their self-heal unique, and build up stun on enemies each time they’re attacked.”

Those things feel so witty to discover, but many RPGs now build up and prioritize so many systems it’s understandable people aren’t quickly attuned to them. What often gets me is thinking I’m not making the right decisions mid-combat, when my menu decisions around equipment/abilities are completely wrong.

What difficulty setting were you playing on? I think Story mode post nerfs should be manageable even if you get hit a lot - at least as far as main story goes.

If you want to give it another shot, invest in HP and Defense, bring a healer and build Maelle as a tank with Egide to give yourself a lot of margins and sort of grind out encounters safely. There aren't many DPS checks - if any.

Late game you can stack so much damage on Maelle that she one-shots everything, if you like.

Its a great game and worth trying to finish. Now as far as the optional superboss... Yeah, that's another story.

Another possible option if you're on PC is using the mod that makes dodge/parry window bigger or smaller. I haven't used it but I know people who have and it can really change your enjoyment of the game.

I self-inflicted some pain like that for me as well.

I got close to the end of Act 2 and my friend said that the difficulty was too easy and I was breezing pass everything and to switch it to Expert. Well guess what. I didn't level, upgrade or put my Pictos in a way to deal with it. So most of my boss fights turned from a close-win into 45 minutes of me dying a lot. Like, I'd be one-shotted so often.

I then took some time and then cashed in some Lumina for stories and then actually put some strats in and went through the skill tree. I think it was worthwhile in the end but it totally changed the experience for me.

I hit a wall at some point, the difficulty seemed to have ramped up or I was super weak.

Probably my stats and bad weapon and skill choices and I had not picked up certain items and pictos.

I left the game for a few months and picked it up again, started over and I just finished it now, about 30 minutes ago.

I'll admit I used some build guides and it helped me along, I wanted to finally finish the game without struggling as much as I did before.

No fault of the game but I just couldn’t figure out if I wasn’t leveled enough or lacked the skill.

Even the hardest boss in the game can be killed with one shot on normal difficulty with a correct build and the right turn order.

I say that because while learning how to parry and dodge are important, pictos and equipment can more than make up for inabilities in the middle-to-late game.

Overall, pictos are arguably the most important thing in the game.

I wound up playing the game through twice, once on normal difficulty and then again on story difficulty (I just really enjoyed the game and wanted to 100% it and had missed a couple of the only missable achievements).

Don't feel bad playing it in a lower difficulty level, and then try to learn when to parry attacks. There are often visual and audio cues.

A lot of the difficulty when playing the game as intended (at normal difficulty) is learning the pattern of when to press the parry button. You can learn this more easily on story mode because it's more forgiving. Counterattacks are very powerful throughout the game, and only happen if you learn how to parry.

Maelle being powerful also has a lot to do with the weapon she wields. If you didn't beat the last Gestral arena fight with Maelle, you might want to restart the game and do that, because that weapon will carry you all the way through the regular end game (though you might need a better weapon to 100% the game).

You can beat the main story using Lune's abilities for your main damage pretty easily. The one-two punch that I found very useful (after building around it) was using "Elemental Trick" followed by "Elemental Genesis". With Elemental Trick, you can produce 4 stains in a single attack if you get your critical rate up. One easy way to make critical high is to use the Critical Burn picto and make sure to keep around a burn on one of the enemies to attack with Elemental Trick. Once you have the stains you need (4 critical hits, one of each element), Elemental Genesis can one-shot a lot of enemies throughout the game. It's great because it's a multi-hit attack and a multi-enemy attack. It works very well before you can do over 9999 damage in a single hit.