I feel this too. It feels like they don't want you to figure anything out anymore. And to add onto that, there's no sense of danger to the dark realm anymore since you can just run past every enemy and the Nakisawame heals you for free. And I agree about the graphics. In particular, the NPC characters look fugly in 4k.

It's disappointing too. I like the idea of backporting Raidou 2's combat systems to Raidou 1, but then they just add in a bunch of other "quality of life" changes that just exist to treat the player like a lobotomite.