expert difficulty just poorly designed for late game?

[toxic yuri]

I've been playing on the hard difficulty and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience, up until entering the monolith. Where it was once fun to learn how to tear apart basic mob packs and learn their patterns, every fight has become an infinite chore due to the fact that enemies either have the speed to have multiple turns in a row, or get buffed to attack twice per turn. When those two worlds collide, its even worse. I'm no longer learning harder and harder patterns, I'm being worn down until I make one or two mistakes.

I don't mind learning hard strings and having to be perfect, that's why I picked this difficulty and found it engaging. But when I'm doing the MAYBE one turn of each my characters before having to go through 6-9+ of the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attack strings having to be perfect every time, I don't feel like I'm being challenged to learn, I feel like I'm being forced to fight mental and finger fatigue.

I feel like each character takes at least a turn or two to really setup and then another to get real big payoff, and that feels unbearably slow and weak when each step of that process has multiple dozens of correct quicktime inputs or I'm setback by having to revive. Am I just bad at builds and there's ways to have each character pop off turn one and mitigate this issue, or is anyone else experience this frustration with the way difficulty is applied to the late game.

[Phishfood]

I think I made it easier on myself before entering the monolith. There is a boss that's just wandering around in the water called Sprong. When I beat it I got an extremely powerful picto that made the rest of the game much easier. The Sprong fight was difficult though, because it has like 4 million hp at a point in the game when your max damage is 9999. Took 30 minutes to beat

This was also in hard difficulty.

[Ratsplat]

So, this is probably the point in the game where you really need to pay attention to your build. I was running a very basic, lazy one on all my characters since it worked for so long. Even if you can parry 80% of all attacks, if you can't do much else, you're still gonna lose.