I'm enjoying it a lot and normal is indeed like you say. Renaming won't help, it sounds like they need to add an intermediate difficulty level.

I think the difficulty is fine, the battles don't really need to be longer, it would just get repetitive sooner. It's still a good idea to match elements to finish battles faster. Efficiency is just as rewarding for me as scraping by and nearly avoiding death.

Btw what happens when you die? I'm only on chapter 4, haven't come close yet.

Hmm, I think you are simply not good enough and you won't like to admit that the casual mode is indeed only for casuals and not for people who like a "normal" difficulty.

It might have an adverse effect even. Casual has a connotation of being really easy which the normal difficulty is certainly not. I've not tried hard because I don't really care for the challenge but I assume it really is hard.
People might start complaining that casual is not really casual because you do have to prepare yourself well and have a solid understanding of the system.

I don't think dying has any consequence though. I've died a few times at the start when I tried to take up foes that were way beyond my stats. You just get warped back to the last point where the game saved.

What they should really patch though are the crashes. The game already crashed twice on me. Once during a fight and once when changing localities.

I really like the game so far and think the naming of the difficulty levels is really unimportant. Everyone knows that hard will pose more a challenge than normal, same goes for casual and expert. So there is no real point in changing the naming.

What I want them to patch:

When you're crafting Oculi, you select a stone, add them to the crafting formula, and the cursor goes back to the same stone in the list... But as soon as a combination is possible, even if you only have two stones set for the formula, the cursor goes to "CRAFT"... That's just stupid. I've made a few Oculi I didn't want to make because of this. Because the way it's done, I just assume the cursor will go back to the stone list like after selecting the first stone... It's minor, but still very annoying.

So, decades of easy, normal and hard modes is now not good enough anymore? Now it needs to be casual and expert?

I guess it is time to focus on retro gaming only.

Do you want a penalty and if yes what kind of penalty do you wish for? And what exactly is the point in having a penalty?

When I die I know I failed. I dont need the game explain to me that I failed (I am smart enough to understand that myself.....)  
I mean some people like to lose EXP/money/items or even lose their character when they die in games but for me being forced to do stuff again because  I have to load from my last savegame/checkpoint which is from 10-30 mins ago is more than enough punishment. I hate doing the same stuff again (especially when its games where you have to watch cutscenes you cant skip)

Back to the initial post of yours:
I agree renaming normal to causal is pretty dumb because casual is more like "i have 2 minutes of time lets play a fast match of whatever"  casual has not really something to do with how hard a game should be casual is more of an indicator for accessibility and whether or not a game can be played in short bursts etc. Tetris for example is "casual" and "hardcore". Mario Bros also is or Angry Birds.

Man it still bothers me that the gaming industry has no clue about well the gaming industry. Like devs calling Ps360 next gen in 2009 or something and the same happens with PS4X1 again....

And even by todays strange definition of casual being some kind of indicator for a difficult...  normal in child of light is not really what people call casual.

No matter how you see it casual does not make sense.   Tbh why not name it "mainstream"? I think that would be pretty suitable what do you think?

Expect lots of complaints from playstation and xbox owners then.

Haven't started it yet, but thanks for your input since I was unsure after reading this news piece.
I was going to play it on normal, but thought that they might've made the normal mode too easy.

Seems like the renaming is extremely redudant.

As pointless a change as renaming difficulties is, Games have got easier and easier over the last 10 years, any RPG ran should be playing this game on Expert. The modes should of been called Easy and Normal, but yeah changing it is pointless unless its coming with a raft of other changes.