That's certainly encouraging. I was looking for a bit more detail, but I'll take it.
If you like taking your time and exploring, then get it. There's a lot to see and do, there are places you won't want to leave, and there's a lot of variety in the gameplayassuming you occasionally switch your main character.
The combat is more complex than FFXII without being as deep. That sounds confusing, but basically:
-there are no gambits to play with, and once you set up your arts there will be relatively little tinkering with your general battle strategy with any given party
-there are numerous arts that depend on or give bonuses based on position; whether you're in front of the enemy, behind it, at its side, etc
-because your various skills have a cooldown meter rather than MP, the combat is much more focused on time management
-each individual character's possibilities aren't very deep - there really is only one proper strategy for certain characters - but the party makeups add several layers of complexity to battles
If you like the futuristic/mech stuff of FFVII and Xenogears you'll probably like the setting and story of this. Saying much more would spoil it, but there's a lot of that subject matter to chew on.
There are plenty of downsides, but I think they're mitigated by the game's strengths:
-There are hundreds of quests (literally!) and many are quite interesting, especially if you like exploring the backstories of incidental NPCs, but most are fetch quests of little consequence. They will also leave you overleveled if you try and do as many as you can, and finding NPCs can be an absolute pain. On the flipside, you don't have to return to NPCs when you're done with most of the quests, so it goes much more smoothly.
-The scale of the game gets much more limited towards the end as the overall scope increases.
-Combat can be repetitive if you use the same team/setup, but simply switching it up once in a while alleviates this problem.
-Item management can be a pain, frankly.
If I were you, I'd recommend getting a Wii for many more reasons than just Xenoblade. Even if you're not a fan of Nintendo's first-party stuff, there's just so much weird nonsense on the system that it's definitely a worthy $100 purchase.
