Is this game supposed to be so difficult?

[olwatshisface]

Everything seems to be RNG but it seems like every failed roll is basically a game over. I'm in the misty forest and every check is very difficult and failing even 1 check leads to an almost impossible fight. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. If any failed check leads to a fight with more than 1 enemy, half my party will be dead before I can even act. I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong

[olwatshisface]

Every fight seems like it's either no challenge at all, or there's no possible way for me to win. I constantly feel punished for trying to explore because I am constantly getting annihilated.

[Sel Und Irae]

It's just early game, This is the kind of game you gotta grind hard if you want to first time steamroll stuff. It's all do-able, Try rerolling character into Dark Knight & unlocking soul hunting then progressing till you get Berserker and unlock the augment that uses Health instead of mana and slapping the spark that leeches hp onto soul hunt.

I'm casually sitting at 1,000 HP right now while rest of party has maybe 260ish, My main character is broken beyond belief SSS Curse S Rank Cooking, S+ Rank Swordsmanship, ETC.

To me Dark is easy mode, I struggled early but once you get it going game is fairly easy. Use and abuse the rest early it's just more awakening points you can farm them instead later instead of gimping yourself to try and get maybe 3 extra points.

Another thing you can do early is sell your orange orb for 10000G then go train at the feller in the lower area of human city, I spent all my starting gold to get all my stuff to B Tier at lowest.

It really made the game a lot more playable early, Craft as much as possible too early you can get some combat traits and sparks aswell from crafting one of my OP skills that i'm using on Soul Drain / Soul hunt is from the cooking tree + most of my high tier defensive gear is all from blacksmithing.

[Zzyl_tsw]

i played around christmas so before the recent update, but i do not remember the fight in the forest being hard.
I played in "hard" difficulty, the one after normal, with the "nameless" base class character.

Therefore, i assume your party might be "very tired" (dont remember the exact game word)
You need to rest in that case to get energy again. Because you get massive debuff when your party is tired (what may happens if you failed many check in the forest to get the correct path)

Otherwise, you might have a low level party or bad build, but it would seem strange as you did not have so much choice till then. At worst, go back to the plains, do all the fight you can, do the big optional spider fight in early game mine/cave (i won it with only 2 characters in hard mode, so it should be easy with 3 in normal mode)
(Losing one bonus about not using much rest is not so impactful)

[чуча]

So far, I have only finished first city, but clearly can see that game is 'somewhat demanding towards grind' or at least it gives it as an option - I clearly on hardest difficulty, no modification, found way to generate infinite amounts of money - with the usage of some bush at mine & alchemy ( how I also do basic survival/alchemy skill grind ), it's super easy to level up certain skills and gain boosts
Honestly, I may not use it, but my experience of JRPG's tells me if I want to 'win' on hardest difficulty, I will definitely have a need to grind like this. Makes it unpleasant, but whatever
I suppose there's some way you can exploit area around you to get needed boosts in power if you're outpowered which can resolve your struggle

[thefollowingcharacters]

I'm playing with most of the hard addons first time. Yes, the forest is tough. I suggest at least two AOE abilities on your characters. Also, run. Combat XP sucks. You really only need combat to turn your potential points into stats, and you can get that off of the easiest enemies in the game.