Difficulty is highly relative the person playing obviously. Compared to most of what's out there though, especially the Japanese stuff, the game is fairly easy currently (though if you want it to be easier, remember that the clips are removable). It is indeed mostly a matter of swapping between the normal attack and the special, with an occasional re-up of energy, and unless you get unlucky with RNG the hardest part should mostly just be the slowness of wading through the encounters and making sure you don't waste items.
And I hate to be harsh, but avoiding combat is absolutely a valid and intended strategy here. It's a trade-off: You cover ground faster if you succeed, but if you fail you'll probably get swarmed and have to deal with several encounters back-to-back. So you can cautiously snipe everyone, or just open up a window and run through, the choice is up to the player. It's certainly not a serious stealth game with hiding mechanics and all that, but the enemies are actual sprites rather than random tile encounters for a reason.
If it's intended to be a valid strategy, that just makes the game even harder, because avoiding combat is near impossible in this game. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's literally impossible for at least a quarter of the combats.
I also don't see how difficulty can be relative to the person playing it for this game. It's not like there's any skillshots or real-time strategy. It's purely numbers. I guess someone who's bad at math could be bad at this game, but they would be even worse at most other turn-based RPGs.
Again, it's entirely possible to skip some encounters. Not all, but if you thin out the enemies in an area, you can often weave between them rather than fighting every single one. Whether you want to risk it or play more cautiously is up to you.
Difficulty is relative both because people prefer and expect different levels of challenge, and because people bring different degrees of experience and skill to the games they play. I'm not saying CS has any incredibly deep or complicated gameplay; it doesn't. But it does still have some basic rpg stuff going on: managing items and stats, deciding how aggressive to be, finding the right rhythm with the attacks and abilities you have, etc.
What are you having trouble with specifically? What's challenging or dragging in the game for you?
...What? Stats? I definitely missed something. I was not aware this game even had stats. That could be why I thought it was difficult.
EDIT: Okay, I loaded up the game again. Apparently it has six stats besides HP and MP. Not a clue what any of them do, though. There doesn't seem to be any explanation. I didn't even notice them at all on my first playthrough.
Jumping into this conversation, I'd say this is solidly middle tier in terms of combat difficulty for this type of game. Like yeah it's pretty difficult to lose unless you want to, but so is like, all of those types of games in the first level or two.
I think early versions of Grove were the exception where you pretty much had to grind to survive later on.
That said, I think adding some more moves, unlockable, "special", or otherwise, would help in creating a more dynamic difficulty if that's what you're going for. On the other hand, no one really seeks out these types of games for the normal combat anyway, so do what you want lol.
