Too easy?

Games like this one (SotN, the Sorrow ones, RotN) are scalable in difficulty depending on how long you play them, on purpose, to a pretty noticeable degree so that anyone can beat them. That's the design intention of how Iga likes to make them.

If you grind, it's "too easy", if you don't, it's considerably more of a challenge. The option is there for the player how much time they need (or just want) to invest. The great part of that is it satisfies both types, and even the person that enjoys the lesser-powered challenge can still gather everything and grind post-game if they want.

Designed to be difficult regardless of the power of your character isn't and wasn't intended to be the name of the game here.

Alright, well this is my opinion, so keep that in mind, but a player with low-enough skill here is being unreasonable with how he's looking at the game. The grinding and powering up is what a lot of the joy is in these games, and becoming more powerful to overcome obstacles should be desirable - especially so with how attaining things is not so tedious in Ritual of the Night compared to the past titles. If they both do not want to become more skilled nor play longer to have a stronger character, then this game likely just isn't for them, and they should decide they just cannot adapt and move on.

Many of us here are probably the high-enough skill level players who need no grinding and all challenges are "easy" on the first go, but that's fine. The game shouldn't punish us for knowing/understanding how to do things well, and most of us took it as a given that the game would be designed with the curve it has to overcome challenges. In my case, I didn't have trouble, but I also ate a considerable amount of food/drank potions in the middle of bosses to not have to re-fight things. I beat most bosses "on the first try", but that first try often involved healing myself several times, and free of risk since heals are instant. You have to remember that many folks who brag about taking bosses down their first time likely did the same. You can't know an attack pattern before you see it.

RotN is good to go as is on difficulty levels. It has more than the standard we're used to (one, sometimes two) and with decent effort, exploit and sometimes research when necessary, I think even the newest of players will do fine. There's quite a difference with someone running around the castle trying to win with just a sword when they haven't discovered the help of such as Teps Oceus + Welcome Company yet. It's less that the game is being hard, more that they're not employing tools to trivialize what they currently think is difficult. Shards, food, familiars and stronger gear are all non-skill things that I'd say actually overpower actual skill things by a good margin, and that's fine, because it's a tenet of common Igavania design.

Why a "beefed up" Hard and Nightmare mode? I find Hard to be plenty challenging (though I do wish the more dense Hard Mode enemy placements were there on Normal, just with the enemies toned down a bit). Wouldn't it make more sense to either add a "Very Hard" mode, or change Nightmare into a more difficult mode and make the option to disable levelling a separate option? If we're going to be adding a new difficulty anyway, there's no reason to take existing levels of difficulty away.

aoanla I haven't tested this but it worked in the beta and I assume still applies - I was able to simply equip the gun and kill Vepar with gunshots using the ammo the boat gives you, standing/jumping in place. It doesn't get much easier than that. You can supplement those projectiles with the occasional shard as well. I think, with doing this, you would need to pay minimal attention to Vep's attacks.

I'll give it a shot (ha) tonight if I can remember after work. Also, keep in mind that Vepar can still take damage when it's in the background doing the sweep laser. If you can't hit it with the gun there, the claymore works well (and the water sweep attack is very easy to dodge if you stay in the air).

ROTN is easier than AOS?

Nightmare with forced Lv1 treated me pretty well. Also, even if the medals don't have a function, they're good for the sake of forcing you to not cheese the bosses completely with healing items.

I know you are not a fan of grinding but for OOE, you can AFK farm the attribute point to 65535 then the game will become easier

I didn't have time to do the Vepar test yet, but something I forgot to point out in my reply - the harder difficulties *are* available from the start with a code. I think that works out fine, since generally the people who are "core" enough to want to do that would most likely know about it. The code was given in the launch Kickstarter update, too.