spelling error in title (possible)

Upon first arriving in Pulse, most of the wandering enemies will be more powerful than you. The last three stages in the Crystarium will have the most dramatic character leveling, and by the time you max stage 8 you can handle most of the mobs in the Archlyte Steppe

You should skip fighting in Pulse until post game. It's way too hard, and when you come back most enemies are very easy to kill.

is it time i focused on upgrading the weapons?  I read somewhere that it wasnt as important, that if you leveled your characters smartly you would be ok.  the weapon and accessory system is the only thing I dont like about this game.  I like that it lets you use "optimize" to best equip your character but the upgrading ..... I need to read the forum about that and write some stuff down.  too much work.

You can get through the game without touching upgrades. Really the key is to just identify the enemies that are out of your league and stick to ones that you can take down.

 
@ricetopher:
thanks , that is what I needed to know. 

"  
@ricetopher: thanks , that is what I needed to know.  "

You will definitely try to want to make more defensive Paradigms when you first get to Pulse. At first the enemies may seem like too much - I reccommend first fighting as many Gorgonopsids as possible. They are probably the weakest out of all the enemies in Pulse... just remember to have a great team with you with a mix of offensive and defensive paradigms. This is where you'll need to think about the battle system more than before. 
 
For that part of the game I had Lightning, Snow and Hope in my party. I later on switched to Fang Lightning and Hope. My friend got through this part playing with Sazh, Snow and Hope too and he said they were and awesome team.

" @Zenaxzd: those robot dudes that summon more robot dudes.  that first fight took me like 10 tries.  Didnt realize that the robot that looked like a gate was the robot summoning other robots. "

There are some enemies that you can't beat (like the stupid giant turtle), and there are some that takes effort to kill or with Preemptive Strike (Behemoth king), the enemies on the main story route should all be killable, there are some that takes forever to kill (jaggernaut took me fucking 20minutes and he's just some stupid normal enemy at a corner in a cave), so in general it should be normal if you could take on just any normal enemies, some are just there to challenge you, and some are there to waste your time for no reason, choose wisely.

best way to level up in ch 11 is to go to Yachhas Massif (sp?) and run the loop with the munchkins in it, they're easy to kill with relentless assault and they give a decent amount of exp for that point in the game