I found the hardest fights those optional duels against your party members. Hubert was just beating me to hell for so long. Think I eventually snapped and seriously dropped the difficulty setting. I swear Hubert and Malik only stepped up their games when trying to beat me up
. Thus any time the fights got hard later in the game I kept looking at them and asking why they were holding back so much
.
I couldn't really bring myself to play the card game too much. Suppose I should have just given into cheating and that would have worked fine.