I thought the combat was great and I was consistently involved in the battles given how important positioning is. Creating chains was also a lot of fun as you got to use all of the character's abilities at once.
And I didn't really mind the town quests being somewhat simple. The dialogue tended to be pretty engaging and reactive as you interacted with more and more of the townfolk. Probably one of my favorite parts of the game, especially as certain NPCs would move from town to town and depending on how you completed their quest the dialogue would change a bit. Seeing all the threads connect really made the towns feel alive in a way they usually don't in jrpgs.
The story was definitely the most disappointing aspect in terms of feeling safe given the pedigree of its successors but the stellar voice actor made it engaging enough. I do hope X is more ambitious in that regard.
It's the most fun I had with a JRPG last generation and certainly the first of the 3D era to actually replicate the sense of scale you got with the earliest 2D jrpgs in a modern way.
you know what i would've really enjoyed? being able to swap characters in the middle combat
but i duno, i had a very different experience with the combat being super repetitive thorough. i constantly swapped characters to keep things fresh but clearly the more aggressive characters were much more fun, but tbh i got tired of them as well
i did a lot of questing until i gave up a bunch of hours in because i couldn't stand any more of it. i enjoyed very few of them, at least the actual questing part, and when i grew tired of the combat i stopped doing anymore. there's a few fun ones but most of them felt a slog to go through, in no small part because everything is so gigantic and it's not always clear when people's around or whatever (and in any case you have to memorize where they are).
i don't disagree with the whole "sense of scale" thing and it's the one element that it's an absolute triumph about the game but other than that it was exactly what you'd expect of a single-player mmo, very repetitive and grindy with a pretty by-the-numbers story
specially in direct comparison to xenosaga that i had played a few months earlier it felt like a million steps backwards in ambition, specially in story, but also combat.
Xenoblade looks like garbage on the Wi(it has the opposite program of games looking far worse on a TV)i so if that's your only option I think the 3DS version is comparable enough. The existence of dolphin makes it hard for me to think about spending too much time with the port though, it just looks so good with AA and higher resolutions. Not to mention the high resolution texture/ui mod.
yea i didn't bother with the mods or anything and had some serious sound issues at first but fixed them somehow and cruised through it at a decent-ish framerate (i think it's capped at 30?) and game looked pretty great
lots and lots of lovely grass
