Based Straley.
Yeah.. in the first region maybe. Good luck fighting Ronin and late enemies without the proper stance and top tier reflexes, given you have something like 3 frames in duels later on.
I think it's a very weird opinion you have, the game was way more challenging than any open world sword based combat i've ever played. Also, in Lethal mode enemies die quicker.
dude i already completed the game, i know how the full game goes.
And you have:
ultra OP stealth with mongoloid enemies
OP challenge mode when you encounter groups that when upgraded make you kill 3 enemies for free
OP super moves who let you kill 2-3 enemies with a button press
OP bows
OP bombs and venom darts
OP armours and OP amulets that with the right combinations make you almost unkillable
OP killer mode when you fill the rage meter (or what the hell it was called)
you have to completely forget that this stuff exist or you can just kill most of the enemies in every encounter with that, so the game is poorly balanced at every difficulty level and it's not the player's job to balance the game by itself because the devs can't do it.
and no you don't need top tier reflex for a game like this, i'm trash at parrying in games and i had far more difficult with parrying in sekiro or any other game with a lot of parrying, tsushima is child mode compared to that game, enemies are not many and it's easy to memorize the timing of their attacks, also you have stuff that you can equip that make the parry window bigger.
The stances are really not that important when enemies die in a couple of hits, i forgot to change stance a lot of times, the system is deep as a puddle anyway, nowhere near the stance system in nioh.
I said lethal mode because it's the last one they introduced after launch, i played 95% of the ganme on hard before thay patched lethal mode in and the music doesn't change at all, enemies are more resistant but so is jin, so you don't really have an advantage compared to lethal.
The biggest challenge in tsushima is the camera being shitty most of the times, and this speak volumes imo.
and this is not a brag post, i'm a bit better than an average experienced player, no champion here at all, i still die hundreds of times in other (actually difficult) games.
And mine is not a rare opinion at all, a lot of people think that the game is a joke in term of challenge, even in this forum that is kinda of a sony centric forum you can find people in the official topic talking about lack of challenge.
Most if not all of sony open world game are cakewalks after 10-15 hours, and it's not only a sony problem, i'm playing cyberpunk now on the latest difficulty mode and it's even more easy than tsushima.
But i don't wanna fight with you dude, if you enjoy tsushima more than me more power to you
I still greatly enjoyed my time with it.