Yeah, I definitely don't think hard is meant for a first playthrough. You'd have to really know what you're doing to survive there. I restarted once and managed to get midway through chapter 4 before I gave up because I just ran out of resources and it was a hard fail. A middle ground difficulty between hard and normal would have been nice. It was basically pushing me toward increasingly cheese strategies like stacking all my units in the basement at the ether core room so no matter how many enemies there were, there is no space for them to push through eventually. Compared to how much I struggled to make progress in hard, normal feels comically easy.
I did hard as my first playthrough and I agree, it's not actually a very good idea. Venus Blood games are actually pretty challenging as you ramp up difficulty, some of the boss fights are essentially impossible if you simply don't have the right units/teams to deal with them somehow, which can easily happen if you don't recruit the "optimal" units on your first playthrough with your limited resource pool and are left stuck with weaklings. You *can* do it with a lot of trial and error but save yourself the hassle and play normal first, then when you have some gear and some better units unlocked from completing the game once, you can tackle the harder difficulties.
Did finish the game on Hard during 1st playthrough, I didn't play blind as I use cheat to see what's ahead and plan accordingly (tried my best not to cheat items/HP as best as I could).
And I believe I got every unit available? Not sure tho lol
I wish someone made cheat table like previous game, Frontier & Hollow, where you can even edit unit skills.
Just in case tho. Sometime I want the game to be harder. That being said, not fond of this game after playing Hollow sadly, new player should start with Frontier, GAIA, and Hollow. The UI and aspect ratio really ticked me off.
(not to mention it's tower defense, far different than the previous 2 international)
I know there's cheat for GAIA but it requires Mod Engine. Sorry, but no. I'm still trying to make my own cheat table but keep failing, yes it's been years. And yes I've completed the game multiple times.