so i was confused by th combat at first and it seemed pretty challenging at first but to make the most of ur combat the very first thing u should od is increase ur defense, open the menu with x and press z to go to your spirit menu its the shield up and to the left of the heart in the middle, after defense is increased the combat gets much easier, by the time game ended i had a ton of excess spirit energy so dont worry too much about the high cost of some things so here it is in bullets
1- INCREASE DEFENSE TO 16 ASP
2- get the slash ability on the bottom of the spirit tree for a fight u'll have a little after the first boss dont waste ur SE on other things yet just trust me
30- get the resilience buff its pretty Poggers, haste is useful too but i only feel the need to cast 1 buff in a fight unless its a boss
17- after this is done upgrade ur pierce ability with 50 SE
44-increase ur speed and willpower bar intermitenly
7-after you've maxed speed feel free to increase strength to its max
30- everything now is probably totally optional for the game, if u feel like it, make ur spirit and then fully upgrade blue flame cause all the bosses are blue i think it does some sweet damage,
6000- at this point if ur still having trouble with combat on the casual difficulty idk what ot say except i think u can make some ghosts respawn either by save quitting or by back tracking into some areas if u did what i did and put your points into a lame ability early on then id say just restart, the whole feeling of like enemies hitting you 7 times before ur turn starts comes from low speed and defense, have fun reaping