I used the map coverage stat to avoid spoiling some of the areas/bosses in the title.

But wew, this game gets pretty tough huh? I feel it's really stingy with doling out equipment, unless you wanna spend hours farming obscure materials to get a +2 on a new weapon.

I just finished the Desert, which was an absolute fucker to get through in one piece. Let's not talk about the incredibly ill-conceived water area where you cant fucking shortcut Deep Sinking, so you need to go into the menu EVERYTIME you want to get a chest, which contains a fish finger butty or something.

I just made it into the area where you fight the Doppleganger. What a boss. I've been wrecked about 10 times so far, and that's going in with 3 Hi-Potions, trying really hard, optimising my shards and everything.

Am I just stupid, or is this game getting tough as nuts?

I don't know that I found it quite as bad. The game definitely becomes easier if you prioritize managing your shard loadout. There's a shield ability that essentially blocks 100% of the damage in front of you that I ended up finding super-useful towards the end of the game. Likewise, some of the fighting game-style weapon abilities like parry are useful and easy to pull off, which also helps to minimize damage.

No, not really. I certainly wouldn't call the game easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly isn't anywhere near as difficult as Order of Ecclesia. You certainly cannot just run through mashing attack and auto-winning almost everything like in Aria of Sorrow.

There are only a handful of bosses I had any real trouble with (Zangetsu, both times, and Alfred). Most of them, I either beat the first time or beat after only a handful of tries.

Some areas are kinda tough to get through, but as long as you're not rushing your way through them you should be able to make it without much trouble. The fiery volcano area - I forget its name - is the exception to this, I wouldn't walk in there without a full stack of potions, your best gear, and a lot of patience.

You can get up to 8 loadouts that you can quick-select from and you're almost certainly going to have at least two of those available to you, probably more if you've spent some time exploring. Use these! There is no loadout ideal for every situation! Experiment and play around with them, too, don't just settle on one or two things.

I wound up finishing this game on Normal and then going back and finishing it on Hard right after and I enjoyed it a lot both times. The Hard playthrough definitely did get pretty tough in some spots, especially in the beginning where you can get killed in two or three hits and you don't have many strategies available to you (hey, game devs, your hard difficulties should not be almost impossible at the beginning and then level out to reasonable after five or so hours). I still don't know if I'd call it Order of Ecclesia hard - up there, but definitely not quite there.

Why do you ever need to turn off deep sinker once you get it? You can keep pressing jump in the water to float, and the swimming shard still works, although you probably won't need it anymore.

Desert is a slight jump in difficulty, but the game's power progression pretty much depends on crafting and shards enhancing. It is a chore to farm drops and gold, but you should have access to 8bit dungeon already, and farming it is quite lucrative. You get your choice of 32 bit weapon and then combine it with corresponding weapon shard and rank them up. I don't remember when you get access to the lower mp cost shard, but that one is also useful.

How much food have you eaten, though?