I never said it was difficult. I just don't get how people can consider XIII challenging when there is one specific way to play it because the game doesn't give you the freedom to do otherwise. How can you call it strategizing when you have one strategy made available to you?

It's literally buff>break>attack>heal, rinse and repeat. You don't even get to choose how to go about the nuances of it - the game does that for you!

And I'm sorry, but halting level progression just to obscure how basic and dumb the game is underneath all the fluff is very much fake difficulty. In its purest form.