I sometimes wonder if it is just me getting worse at games but when I see these spikes I don't really think it is me. I can understand a boss being hard, and I don't expect to win the first time or the first couple of times that I get to it, I'm not that fussy of a gamer, but for the boss in the middle of the game or in this instance the first 1/4 of the game to just absolutely wax you to the point where you feel like it should be a final boss, that's just wrong. Especially when after you do step the difficulty down to get past it, then step it back up for the area after said boss and you are just breezing through everything, including later bosses and sub-bosses, somethings is clearly wrong with the game and it should have been detected or removed or at the minimum turned into an optional boss like they did in Hollow Knight and a myriad of other games.

Thinking about Nintendo, I don't recall any game having a difficulty slider in the earlier stages like NES or SNES. Some games were notoriously hard and this was well known before purchase.

I look online and see from people that are presumably a lot better than I am complaining about this very game that I mentioned and how infuriating it is and how it gets much much worse as the game goes on. It's quite disappointing to me because the first game in this series I was unaware of it even having a difficulty selection... i'm not sure that it did.