>>13690698
IIRC there's an in-game manual in the menu.
You should at least read it to get a good understanding of the mechanics.
Anyway, in gist form:
There's a bunch of enemy types namely: human, beast, dragon, undead, …
Everytime you hit a human, you train your weapon to be stronger against humans, but at the same time it gets weaker against the 2 types below 'human'.
There's also 3 different weapon and element types which different enemies are weak against.
Usually, you'll be training 3 types of weapons to cover all enemy types. It won't cover all, but it will be good enough to progress.
Learn their QTEs.
As you progress even further you'' need to use combos to: max weapon's HP and Phantom Points
When you have a bunch of weapons with both HP and PP maxed out, then you could pretty much just use the PP to deal damage to all bosses.
ALSO: learning about the crafting system makes the game easy.
or you could just do what i did as a kid: master the QTE of the crossbow and pretty much combo everything until they die
dealing miniscule, but ascending damage, eg: miss, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … per sequence