I’ve played Symphonia a few times, might be able to help you out with the combat, im guessing theres gotta be something you’re missing cause it’s not meant to be particularly hard. They dont tell you a lot of stuff, especially without the instruction booklet but that’s generally more advanced stuff that only matter later on in the game. How far did you get and what are you having issues with? Off the top of my head, are you going into the menu and telling your casters what spells to use manually or letting them do whatever? Have you set the AI? I usually kept Raine at heal below 25% and sometimes 50% for big damage dealers and Kratos to heal people at 10. You can also go through their list of techs and select which ones the AI can use, that way when say Genus gets better spells yku can make him stop using wussy ones. There is a lot of pausing and doing micro stuff in menu during more major combat. Characters also get different skill trees based on their exspehere setup but you can switch branches whenever, so you can level up and unlock an ability in S setting and then if you want the A path for a different move you can grind with a set of exspheres to do so. Usually getting tech upgrades is fone by using the same move over and over. Doing this strategically for Lloyd can give you some sick combos, Lloyd is a combo guy. So midway with a thought out build you should be able to do your 4 hit standard, do a sword rain into tiger blade and then beast, huge combo and knocks down the opponent.

Im general, I recommend playing with a guide, there is stuff you can miss that then gets locked behind story progession all the damn time