Agreed, that is game breaking in my opinion, I've put atleast 20 hours or so in the demo. I completely avoid the Garula's now, don't even attempt to fight them. It's like they coded it in as soon as you fight them a drop ship will come drop off soldiers every 5 minutes hahaha.
I have to imagine this was just a demo thing to show off the mechanics tho? (I Hope) would of been pretty boring if all the fights were like the wolf things and you could just decimate them in under 60 seconds.
I agree with Pheesh about the lock on system, it's still seriously flawed compared to KH which is so weird. Just copy it! :S
I never hold the attack button down tho, (didn't even realize that was an option until months after it came out) The game actually rewards you for tapping it instead so I do that exclusively.
I would also suggest selecting the small swords as your CRUSH and RAVAGER weapons, one of my biggest issues when I played the demo was how slow the combat felt (I'm used to stuff like Devil May Cry) once you equip these it speeds up like crazy, made the combat 10x more satisfying.
In the end the gameplay has some issues but it's still fun, I'm sure once we have access to magic and even faster weapons (I hope) it'll be great fun!