>Though a lot of the time it felt less like a case of having to really learn the boss/enemy patterns and more a case of just grinding up enough
Here comes a rant about the combat in SOTN ...
The first issue is mobility. At first i thought that having a inhumanly slow turning animation but adding a backward dash button was a good way of teaching the player to be mindful of distance and pose a combat dynamic based on unidirectionality. HOWEVER, most often than not you are required to dodge attacks on both sides and god forbid you failed because that means knockback + stunt. The most notorious examples are the boss fight against the Castlevania 3 protagonists and the clock tower section of the inverted castle.

On top of that, the combat as a whole can be cheesed easily. As soon as you get the poisonous mist you basically have a button to disengage at will and still cause damage. For that reason, the best course of action when you can't get passed a boss isn't studying the patterns and devicing a proper strategy, but rather buying MP restoring potions and going into mist form as much as possible