Tested the game thorughly, finished normal (guard was in fact quite easy to find since, well, I'm kinda meticulous

) and hard. The last being... well, sort of easy. I expected something like Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, where hard mode was... well, REALLY hard. In MX it looked like the difficulty of enemies didn't rise at all - and with the amount of chips I found to finish the game (70-ish), that means they were kinda pathetic, including the uber-horse.
As for the changes, it's a good thing you've at least normalised the droprate of chips. Previously it was insanely hard to get the first 2-3 (it literally took me 2 hours to do so!), then they used to start dropping at an insane rate, making it almost impossible to get other items. One thing I must note is that I'm not sure I like the stat rebalance you did - previously it was enough to get 6 chips from wolves to kill a horse (easy - 1 point in dex and the sword stunlocked him), now... Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I get 3 str and 3 dex (net worth 21 chips) and I kill it just barely.
And as a side note, I was trying to complete hard as well, but found that the swimsuit icon is missing. Is it intentional and meant to prevent completing hard mode, or...?