This game's balance is so weird. I'm looking for the
right now, and so far I've been doing every errand and bounty before moving on, so I haven't really experienced all those difficulty spikes people mention when entering new areas, however, I usually had a bit of trouble in the first few bosses till I found a strategy that has worked on every boss so far. Basically I've noticed that if I use my familiars they end up getting hit way too much so all my boss fights have been won by using Oliver only while spamming magic, and he pretty much never gets hit since magic works regardless of how close or far you are to its target... So now I'm basically finding this too easy even on normal mode.
Also how is everyone handling their familiars? So far I'm trying to get to their second stage/evolution all familiars I manage to get, but I'm not sure if that's such a good idea.
EDIT: By the way, I think someone mentioned that the standard retail version of the game has a black and white manual IIRC, well, the PSN version's at least is in full color.