The game still took 9 hours. Even rushing through all the combat in the back half, it took a while to play. The bosses aren't tough either. The solution to almost every one of them is shoot it with the charge shot or run around in a big circle until it loses interest in you, then shoot the weak spot. It just takes forever to kill some of them.
There's just a point in the game where they stop advancing the story for 3-4 hours and you're stuck with the worse half of the group doing nothing but fighting over and over and over. I enjoyed when it picked up again in the last hour, even if the ending wasn't great. There were just so many times where I would think, "alright, HERE is where it's going to get good", then just did the same crap again and again.
They had a neat idea trying to apply the Dead Space style limb removal to a more traditional TPS, but there's never any reason to do anything but shoot their heads.
edit*
One more thing. I thought it was so damn goofy how they handled the dialogue responses. The other characters will have these long conversations with you, but you never have the chance to respond with anything more than, "Sure", "Nope", "God Damn". It's even weirder that the response isn't voiced at all. I guess that's because they hoped you would use the voice recognition stuff. All that stuff sounded to stilted because of that. That entire trust system was pretty pointless as well. You just agreed with whatever everyone said, then very high trust with everybody. It would have been more interesting if the responses were zero-sum in some cases. Then I might have actually thought about my responses, rather than just choosing the positive response every single time.
