There are end-game spoilers in these spoiler tags.
Ok so I beat the main story, the plot became pretty decent after Chapter 5 I think it was, there was one chapter between then and the end of the game that I thought was poor but the rest were pretty good. I had to do some grinding for the penultimate boss so I could purchase a Level 50 Skell but that was about the only time I needed to grind, however I did have a lot of trouble with the Chapter 9 boss. I didn't grind but I managed to get it done barely after a few tries.
I became more accepting of the player character after Chapter 4 since that was the point where they decided to stop using the characters missing memories as an excuse to spoon feed you tutorials and exposition that were all pretty self-explanatory.
As for side quests, I did all the ones that didn't make me go and farm enemies for certain materials or run around collecting blue diamonds to complete, unless I happened to already have said items or managed to get them some time after I'd accepted the mission. I didn't grind for affinity for the missions, except one of them that I needed to and that was about an hour of boring mindless slow grinding with very little progression which each battle. I did manage to get Elma, Lin and Alexa to max affinity just from using them a lot. A few others had one heart of affinity, Celica had two.
Skell combat wasn't very enjoyable compared to the grounded combat to be completely honest, ground combat is just so much more fast and fun. I used the Full Metal Jaguar set for the whole game, swapping to the Mastermind since the name sounded cool but kept the FMJ weapons/arts/skills. I liked the positioning attacks with bonus damage a lot. I used the Verus model of Skell since I liked evading attacks, also it wasn't too expensive.
Uh uh anything else to say uh
I finished at 75 Hours, probably something more like 70 Hours since I left it on occasionally when I went out for lunch or just went on reddit or something. I think the grounded combat ended up being more fun than Xenoblade Chronicles, with the Skell combat lagging behind. The story wasn't amazing in comparison to Xenoblade but it did get me interested closer to the end, Side quests were handled far better to the point where I actively ran around finding them because I wanted to do them, exploration was really fun and the world the game took place in was great. Worth the time and I have an interest in trying to get 100%, however that will have to wait until after vacation when I have time to spend farming for good equipment.
I think that is about all I have to talk about after playing for the last ten days. Sorry for the wall of text, it's better to just type this all out than keep it floating in my head whenever I try to play anything else. I believe I kept everything crucial to the plot in spoilers.
Oh and the music was amazing, besides the cut scenes sometimes being poorly handled by making the music either too loud or too silent. Tons of good tracks and I can honestly say that I really liked the background tracks for each area, which is something I never really take notice of when I'm playing a game usually.
