I genuinely hope they'll explain the whole battle in finer detail in the full game, especially in regards to attacking given thatball they mention is holding it for continues strikes without even mentioning tapping most of the time.
Tired of the Hold O meme.
The hold O meme was tired the moment it started.
There was a moment during E3 where people misunderstood something in the options menu they showed (They saw three options for combat: Active, Wait and Default) where people were pointing to this option thinking it was a new game mode where you have to tap instead of hold O. They were celebrating like it was this great victory and showing video of people happily tapping away feeling like everything is great.
Only problem is, there is no "default" option. There's a button to reset that option to default. There is only Active and Wait, and the controls weren't changed. They just tapped away thinking everything is normal. They had no idea.
And it goes back further. As no one complained about the hold O thing back when Episode Duscae came out, either. Why? Because people mostly just didn't know that was already an option. The ONLY thing that has changed is in the Platinum Demo, they advertised that you can just hold the button instead. It's never changed, but all of a sudden people had a problem with it.
I talked to a bunch of rational people who complained about it, and they bring up some great-sounding points about it being more responsive to have the 1:1 controls, and I'm sympathetic to that notion. However, it's still a faulty argument in this sense, as the responsiveness of the controls isn't anything to do with the ability to hold O. It's just an alternative to rapid tapping.
This isn't that radical of a thing. I think we've all played the 3d Zelda games, right? In those, you tap tap tap and you perform automatic combos much in the same way. If you notice, it doesn't actually matter how fast you tap at a certain point. You can tappity tappity tappity all day but the combo performs exactly the same way. All SE did was add an optional way to do the same thing with less wear and tear, lol.