I've been playing this the loong way, with an hour or two every day, trying to complete every quest as I go. I'm somewhat ashamed to say I'm over 100 hours in, and I haven't finished the game yet. I'm about level 80-81, and a bunch of new areas have opened up with higher level monsters.
Major problem: I've got to finish by Friday when Zelda gets delivered.
I'm worried that if I finish the story arc, parts of the map will be locked off that I might need for colony 6 reconstruction items (already happened once). Or even worse, upon finishing the game I might not be able to go back and finish all the stuff I unlocked.
I only recently realised that you can tell if you have found every landmark, since the blacked out areas of the map are filled in once every place is discovered in an area. I wish I had realised this for the large bodies of water, swimming is boring.
One of the best games I've ever played. Wish I had it years ago when I had more free time.
This game needs:
1) Better documentation of where NPCs are - even their closest landmark as well as their active time of day on the relationship connections screen would have been very helpful
2) More collectible inventory space. Cleaning the fridge is no fun at all. I assume that items with a star over the bag may be quest items, whereas the ones with just a bag are ordinary and can be sold without any danger? It's a rule of thumb I've used for a while and I haven't ever sold anything important.
3) Better loot management. Pressing plus twice to work out what a gem will do is cumbersome when there is plenty of real estate on the screen to display that information. It's annoying that base stats aren't compared when swapping out armour, so my better armour without gems looks worse than it really is once I've swapped out the gems into my new threads.
4) Better gem management. Needs the ability to 'favourite' types of gems for easy selection. Sorting by attribute etc. isn't very helpful to find the one cool down gem or debuff gem you want to use. Or better yet, stack them, because the 7 or 8 Strength Up gems filling the row are just a pain to scroll through for the one Slow gem appearing after them.
5) Reset arts points. It inhibits you trying out new builds because once spent, the points are gone forever. The new skill that may or may not be useful once levelled up a bit gets ignored in favour of improving the ones you use all the time.