Final Mix Proud seems to be exponentially harder than Critical on any game I've played. I've died more times in this one play-through of KHFM than I have an any other KH game, and I'm only on Atlantica. Ursula is a *****. yep, it's official. I'm going to kill myself. o hey I did it.
They actually didn't make a higher difficulty, the new difficulty on KH:FM is beginner. Though there were some tweaks made to separate out the difficulties more, so it would be slightly harder than the original expert mode. Also I have to call KH:DDD critical the hardest difficulty. My god I hated it. Carrying dream eaters over is not really any compensation on that one.
O, well dang I must just suck then. Or maybe I'm just under-leveled because I'm rushing through this. I haven't played DDD yet, and what you just said is kinda discouraging. Though I still don't intend to not play on critical.
You actually have to unlock critical in Dream Drop Distance. But I was surprised at how hard proud was in that game. I died so much on the first world. By the third though I was in the swing of things mostly.