whine whine whine
Indeed, suck less.
The key to this game is to continually fuse the strongest possible demon available to you. That plus a little grinding (always do the free battle a least once to crack some skill) will see you through most battles pretty easily.
Don't like grinding? Too bad.
The better you are, the less you have to grind, really. So far i'm finding you get a ton of macca just from doing story battles. Which is enough to buy demons to use, one story battle then I fuse and buy more. So far so good. Beat day 2 without going to free battle yet.
Granted I think playing the crap out of DS1 greeeeatly helps me formulate strategies with what little demons are available so early on. The biggest thing I had to overcome is that I always hated when my demons died. I tried as much as I could to avoid that, and I never had backups since my strategy was "don't die". But once I finally got over that and realized death is pretty much inevitable, i've had a much easier time of things, and plenty of backup demons.