Has anyone else experienced this?

I find the fights with the regular enemies pretty easy but then all of a sudden boss fights are 15x harder! It's incredibly frustrating. Both my party members keep dying far too easy and they burn up all their MP 3 minutes into the fight.

If you have any tips for beating bosses in this game it would be greatly appreciated.

Well for one pay attention to what drippy tells you. I don't know what boss your on but drippy stops every single boss fight to feed you a tip about its weakness at some point. If you've got the All Attack/All Defense commands available yet then make sure to put party members on defense at the appropriate times. You might also just have to flat out grind a bit. There are difficulty spikes in this game and if you aren't leveled appropriately you'll get worked.

The game has problems I noticed with this yeah. I was at a boss once where Drippy told me that the boss was weak against lightning, but I had no one with a decent lighting spell at that point so it was a long and boring struggle to survive while both my party members were dead. I just ended up running around, blocking until a yellow orb appeared over and over again.

Also I don't know where you are at, but a good chunk into the game they give you a completely game-changing ability; the ability to order your party members to block!! Haha, I found this insane from a design point of view. I just don't understand why they did not let you do this as soon as you got your first party member!! The were a number of times before this that I would just simply not even bother with my party member, because every time a boss (or a strong enemy even) used a special move they died. Ugh, and the prices of resurrection items is a killer.

Also one thing I found is that before the block command my party members would always die when they ran out of MP, but with the block command whenever a boss does a big move and hits everyone the "block effect" (?) will cause blue orbs to spew out of it, making MP management a lot better.

Overall though I really like the game, but man... it's very Dragon Quest in the grinding bits :s

I've conditioned myself to grind like a madman in JRPGs so I didnt have much trouble with any of the bosses.

Where are you in the story? Once you have access to Alchemy and the All Out commands the game becomes significantly easier. The 30 MP recovery item is really easy to craft as soon as you get the pot, and the 70 one comes an hour or two later.

Your companions are going to die until you get the All Out commands, so until then just set Esther to keep you healthy when you're running low on HP and guard all of the big cinematic attacks yourself.

You might need to get some new familiars as well. You can find Monolith on the way to Castaway Cove he's the stone tablet. The guy has insane defence and has a taunt move that draws all agro to him. Really helpful if you have a glass cannon like Purrloiner (Found in the same area) on your team.

Sadly it might just be a case of you needing to grind a bit. Companion AI is unreliable at best and aside from having a familiar that is effective against an enemy fights largely come down to attacking away and killing stuff purely because you have leveled enough, rather than any sort of mastery over the systems in place.

Past few boss fights (about 30 hours in) i've just been ignoring Drippy's advice and instead using mite for warcry then swapping to purrloiner and spamming attack till healing is needed. (well, it is their second forms but I can't remember the names off hand). It tended to do a lot more damage than what Drippy said to do anyway.

The randomised on acquire stat growth along with the rarity of tameable pets + dual sign ones for that matter make it near impossible to come up with any concrete party compositions.

Also, bear in mind everyone has restrictions on familiars. Oliver uses Milites, Vermes and Dracones. Esther Aquatic, Aves and Flora, etc.

Using a familiar they specialise in grants a 10% bonus to it's abilities, so there is no reason to use ones outside of those genuses.

I enjoy the game, but the combat system is rather shallow and lacking in strategy. So the best I can suggest is make sure you have the right familiar types equipped to people and that they have good stat growth along with covering all the signs and elements that you can. And if all that fails, you might have to resort to side questing and grinding i'm afraid.

Well to be fair...characters aren't restricted to just that genus but they do get a bonus for using it.

Buy and use a lot of items, that's my tip. Lots of sandwiches and coffee.

I was stuck on the Jellyfish in Mam's tummy. I eventually beat it with some of your tips thanks guys.

I still find those spikes rather annoying I find myself just waiting and hoping for the gold orbs.

30 hours in and I didn't really have to grind once.

Of course I died a few times at a couple of bosses, but once you figure out their patterns, you can pretty much defend/dodge most of their attacks. It was probably pretty helpful, that I did 95% of the sidequests I encountered so far. Maybe you might consider that grinding, but I don't think I'm in any way overleved or using overpowered familiars.

If you struggle with specific enemy weaknesses, you could also equip weapons with certain elemtal attributes and just use mite or whatever melee-fighter you prefer. Also tanking bosses with defensive familiars, "parrying" their attacks by attacking at the right moment or luring them away from the group while healing, are also helpful strategies in combat.

I hate to dig up old posts, but I just bought this game and heard about the difficulty spikes from various reviews. Should I play on easy, or is too easy? In RPGs I generally never avoid a battle and clear out every enemy in an area/dungeon. Is this enough? Or is it like Persona 4 where it expects you to grind each area 3 or 4 times?

Normal mode was fine for me, they arent really that difficult just maintain your monsters levels. Some fights are more ridiculous than others but I never had to go back and level up except for the last boss. You should be fine on normal.

Don't worry man eventually it will just turn into casting Mornstar over and over again until you are low on MP, then you just spam the random effect spell that sometimes gives you MP

It really is kind of shitty that this is how the combat works for the last 15 hours of the game.