Combat / Difficulty
Difficulty, and how far down it goes
Further than most games. There is a Narrative mode that performs the dodges and parries for you, and nothing in the achievement list is gated behind a harder setting — so the slider is a genuine choice rather than a trade against completion.
Narrative mode
how much you doDodges and parries are performed for you. The combat still happens on screen; you are not the one timing it.
Lowered difficulty
how much you doDamage stops being a real constraint. The parry loop is available but no longer compulsory, which is where reviewers argue it hollows out.
Default
how much you doThe loop as designed: parry or dodge to stun, then land the critical. Timing is the hard part, not the inputs.
Raised difficulty
how much you doSame systems, less forgiveness. Nothing here unlocks anything that the lower settings do not.
What the slider does not fix
Difficulty controls how hard the fights hit. It does not control the one achievement you can actually lose: buying every skill in the six mastery branches costs 15 + 20 + 25 + 30 + 35 + 40 = 165 of the 200 Resonance Points, and those have to be collected inside a single run.
Why that one is different →Accessibility, measured
The store entry lists adjustable text size, camera comfort options, colour alternatives, contrast controls, custom volume controls, adjustable difficulty, subtitle options and play without timed input. Narrative mode is the headline, but the list underneath it is long.
And yet the combat asks still go unmet
With all of that available, the rarest combat achievement — Adaptable — sits at 0.7%. Making the fights survivable is not the same as making players want to engage with them, and the gap between those two things is most of what this site measures.