Dark Souls being called hard was a sign that a lot of games were becoming too easy overall in my opinion.
one of the complaints over dmc2 (besides genreally being kinda bad) was that it was piss easy. so for the north american release of dmc3 enemies do 70% more damage and you do 20% less.
Oh yeah my friend (who's in love with dmc) told me about that. I thought it was funny that they'd do something like that.