While I agree that the difficulty needs to be toned down slightly on Challenging and Normal (perhaps a bit more on Normal), the mode is designed to be played through multiple times so you can unlock more and better guardians and consumables. The more times you play, the more bits and pieces you get toward unlocking mimic skins, story stuff, etc.
The mode is designed for collecting stuff over a long period of time, regardless of whether or not you think the rewards are worth it. I personally think that some of the mimic skins look awesome and I don’t really get the hate for the Astral Plane, but whatever. To each his own.
That said, I’d still like to see more, and perhaps cooler rewards added like more story cutscenes, bonus accessories, more colors, and perhaps maybe a few redone classic stages or, and I’m certainly not one of those that harp on this, but maybe Mira and Eyedol stages as well.
Either way, yes, you can shorten that period of time played with microtransactions, and I honestly hate that this option even exists in the game, but I don’t think that they’re steering you toward it beyond having the option exist. I’d rather play over and over again and get more and more stuff as opposed to cheapen the experience by buying my way through it. Games are meant to be played, after all.
You could say the same thing about getting to level 50 and getting the color 9’s for characters. You could buy your way in to triple XP every day if you wanted to, but why bother if you’re just going to play the game regardless?
As for the AI, well… That’s AI. I’ve fought opponents labeled “medium” that wiped the floor with me and I’ve fought opponents labeled “very hard” that took off less than 10% of my health. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that’s just me and my skills, so it might help players if IG went in and not only tuned the difficulty on the first two levels, but also perhaps tuned things a bit so that the labels applied more accurately.
Just my two cents.
