It’s been a while, but I recall most attacks having an obnoxiously long animation, and that animation being set in stone once you trigger it. There is no aborting a sword-swing midway through to dodge or block. And if you make the mistake of pressing the attack button twice, apparently there’s a built-in ability queue that can’t be disabled, so you have to wait for the first animation to completely play through, then wait again for a second animation to play from start to finish.
It makes it extremely unresponsive. That unresponsiveness seems to be what most folks are talking about when they’re applauding the game’s “difficulty”… but you could make any game that flavor of difficult by obstructing the controls.