Theatrhythm Difficulty

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy has three different game modes. It has a series mode where you play through 5 songs from a specific Final Fantasy game. The prelude, the ending theme, a battle song, an overworld map song, and an event song. It has a 'dark note' mode where you take the fight to Chaos. You play an overworld song and a battle song with the aim of accumulating all the treasure from the monsters. (I believe this is where character stats really come into play.) Finally, it has a challenge mode where you can play any previous beaten song on your choice of difficulty level. Easy, medium, or hard.

On the surface this all seems great but there's a real problem here. Series mode is entirely on the easy difficulty level. Dark note mode is entirely on the medium difficulty level. If you want to play on hard you have to go song by song in the challenge mode.

Now, I'm not a god amongst rhythm gods but I'm at least in the pantheon. (Especially in what essentially boils down to a one button game. Go Thumbo!) Easy mode is very boring. I love the songs so it's not the end of the world that I have to play them on easy to unlock some things but it feels like bad design. I should be able to play through all the songs from a game on any difficulty that I can handle right from the start. (I'd pick hard and lose some of the time for sure!) On the other hand, forcing dark note mode to be medium difficulty could be terrible for someone who likes the music but isn't very good at the game. I'm not sure what I did to unlock the Dancing Mad song but I did it in dark note mode. It's possible someone bad at the game can never get access to that song. And now that I'm getting practice with the game medium is pretty easy for me. I'd set dark note mode to hard if I could and it would be a lot more fun.

I want to be challenged. I want to risk failure and be rewarded for good play and getting better. I feel like I can't get that out of this game. I can only play the hardest versions of the songs by completely ignoring all of the extra frills and stuff which doesn't feel good. *frowns*