man i'm pretty sure i got filtered hard on the second set of guardians. i'm at lv 40 and i didn't expect to have to fight 4 lv 60 enemies in a row. the best i can do is fire pillar but i end up running out of kronheims.
can i get out of this with grinding or am I stuck?
Sorry about missing your previous message. Arcturus is extremely finicky when it comes to window resizing, so I'm not sure how to fix it.

Also, yeah around the half-way point of the game comes a huge spike in difficulty, and the fact that they immediately toss you into a fight with 4 guardians after the previous fight is brutal. I remember just grinding my butt off until I did decent damage for my first playthrough. For the second playthrough, however, I found that throwing items deal fixed damage, and any Staurolite either does 300 or 450 damage. If you don't have those, you might have to use other throw-able items, or if you're super desperate, stall them out with poison. Not to spoil anything, but after the 4 guardians, you'll be stuck in a dungeon for a bit, and there's even harder fights in there.
It's important to point out that every single enemy in the game, including bosses AND the final boss, can be afflicted with status effects. Bosses are immune to confusion though, but petrification and poison work on them.