So what you're saying is... most of the game!
(I jest.)
I know you're half-joking, but the game's problems in nutshell are that if you play 70-90 hours until post-game and you're doing most of the sidequests (a % of which is required to advance the game), about 35-45 of those hours will be spent:
1) Going to a place you've already been and running around collecting gems
or
2) Going to a place you've already explored and fighting enemies who die in 20 seconds and present no challenge.
That's just busywork and is boring. At first the quests are cool because the world is unknown and each quest is taking you someplace new to explore. But by a certain point you've seen most of the world and then quests become going to places you've already explored and doing busywork.
Additionally, the Doll part of the game feels unfinished. When you're a human there's always that leveling up incentive of getting higher levels, better stats, better equipment, better drops. There's hundreds of pieces of equipment for humans.
When you get the lvl.30 Dolls, there's like 3 heads with slightly different stats (and no visual difference). Same goes for each body part. And there's a dozen weapon types and that's about it. This is no armored core, you don't have a plethora of parts to constantly be building and upgrading your mech. Your mech basically stays about the same until you get the lvl.50 Doll and then lvl.60 doll. Since mechs don't level and they don't learn any new skills/arts, once the lvl.30 dolls are introduced the combat and character progression kind of falls flat.
While the first time you take that lvl,30 Wels Doll out and kill an enemy in 1 hit with its big huge 22k damage BB Sword it's really cool and satisfying to see the power difference between your lvl.30 humans...20 hours and 500 battles later when you're fighting lvl.45 enemies and you're still just doing 1-3 BB Sword slices and killing all the enemies....it's boring.
Basically going by those 4 things I listed in my previous post. The game is at its best when it's mixing 1) Exploration rewarding experience with 2) Fighting higher level challenging enemies while 3) Watching cutscenes that progress the story or develop the characters and 4) While you're messing around with equipment/skills/artes character progression as you level.
The game needed to keep the leveling and upgrading progression exciting from lvl.30-50 because that's exactly the portion of the game where players will start to have explored the whole world map and the exploration rewarding experience fades out. So you lose #1 fun factor, So ideally you want lvl.30-50 to be getting that same lvl.1-30 character progression of constantly learning new skills/artes, getting better equipment, getting strong stats fun factor to transfer over to the Dolls. There should be hundreds of doll parts and for the next 30-40 hours while going from lvl.30-50, you should get getting rare Doll drops and buying new Doll parts and constantly customizing and upgrading your doll. There should be skills and either artes or a good influx of new and better weapons with new and better artes.
But there isn't. After a while you notice that there is very, very little customization you can do with Dolls besides swapping visually the same parts as soon as you can for ones with better stats that are available right away from the store when you get your mech and swapping weapons where you rarely get anything stronger. Basically the Dolls stay constant and by the time you're at this lvl.30-50 point your characters have maxed their first job line and though you might find a few cool skills in other job lines, you've basically reached the peak of your human character progression too.
So in a lot of ways it feels like the game stops character/doll progression in the lvl.30-40 range about 50-75% through the game. At this point you've lost the fun factor of exploring, the fun factor of character progression and customization, and all that's left is the story and character development. And while that does move a lot more in the 2nd half than the first half, there's still not a ton of it and it's interspersed between hours of same old, same old.
It feels like they ran out of time and that the Doll customization should've been closer to the human customization and closer to an MMO or Armored Core with tons and tons of parts to mix and match and make your custom mech. That would've helped a lot for the fun factor of the second half of the game and kept it engaging while going between story points.
I keep saying lvl.30-50 because since I haven't finished the game I don't know if this changes post-game. I know there's a lot of big strong enemies to fight in your dolls, so maybe there's a lot more customization and pieces to choose from in the post-game. But for lvl.30-50 there really isn't.
Also I do want to stress that this isn't 100% of the time where it's a problem. Even in the 2nd half of the game there are still times when quests take you to new areas and it's exciting to explore or you fight challenging enemies and it's fun or once and a while you get a good piece of equipment or weapon. There just needs to be more of that stuff after lvl.30.
