Is story mode supposed to be kicking my a** so hard?

I finally got my hands on this game, was excited about it since it came out and the reviews were good, most complaints were about balancing for online which is not a subject I care about at all, I was excited for the successor to those old ps2 games filled with Easter eggs,quirky mechanics, and fun gameplay. The kind of game that is fun because it is by necessity very broken in many ways if you want it to competitive. So I was not expecting my face to have a cinderbrick driven through it every battle, this isn't the fun I was looking for. I barely have time to get my bearings because vegeta keeps rushing me down, I only do decent damage in sparkling mode and vegeta knows that and shanks me every time I try. Even fights where I should feel overpowered like freiza vs goten and krillen are more exhausting than fun. Those gremlins whittle me down till im down to a sliver of health with the last fighter coming in at full health. Its like every fight is balanced to be one of the hardest fights from the ps2 games and even tho I eventually liked the fight with the blue twink in the ps2 game, I would have lit my Playstation on fire if every fight was that hard. This seemed like a game for my demo of casual fan of fighters with a large cast of surprisingly fleshed out fighters and a robust single player and couch play scene. In some ways it hits the nail but its just too aggressive to let me appreciate the details and expirement. It doesn't have any soft rpg systems either to grind to success or make an overpowered chaoistu saibaman tag team and if you admit defeat and turn on easy mode then you are locked out of the alternate conditions thats one of the selling points of the whole mode. This may be a skill issue but this wasn't a game I bought to be a darksouls level of frustration game. Anyone else have anything close to this experience or am I uniquely bad at the single player mode, or possibly both?