Nope. Your opinion seems more in-line with my own, and it's certainly not a bad thing to feel that way. Even on Hard, I felt like the game was easy (even with the stupid Hearts-designed bosses, and it's something that I can foresee happening with Tales games in the future, so the bosses probably mightn't get better; the R games aren't really a good indicator of boss design since other people have worked on them). I didn't spend as long with the final boss as kayos did, because I did the right thing and stole their healing gear.
Like I said before, I don't play Tales games for the narrative or characters and I never have, so this is certainly part of the reason why I don't think of Xillia as favourably as you guys do. I disliked that the systems were incoherent compared to Tales of Graces, much like you, because you
don't get that feedback after you're completing battles almost constantly, and none of the systems feed into each other as smoothly as Graces' did.
I suppose you're not taking too well to the more streamlined design, especially in terms of levelling, and on my second plat run, I didn't like it much either. It's so bog-standard and boring. Perhaps the Arrowcell Orb system in Xillia 2 might serve you better, where you basically equip amplifiers reminiscent of Capacity Cores in order to learn new skills. You get elemental points on the field and in-battle in order to accelerate your progress for certain skills. I am not, however, a fan of how SP is gained. It's grindy and dumb.
Either way, Xillia is a good game and I had fun with the battle system during normal battles, but a lot of it--systems, lack of regular Tales stuff, environments, dungeon design, last chapter, etc--screams wasted potential to me.
