So I finished Xenoblade yesterday, first off I will say I was pretty pleased with the ending:

With that said as far as actual gameplay stuff goes I have to say I am slightly disappointed. The game is far too easy for its own good. I literally killed the final boss with 2 almost back to back chain attacks despite being very under leveled. As reference I barely did any side quests the entire game (mostly just the time sensitive stuff) so every mob in the final dungeon was either yellow or red to me but despite that I only died once because a certain boss along the way randomly one shot me and I did not have a gauge full to res.

In addition as the game continued to add layers of depth and party members obtained more abilities the combat as a whole fell apart for me. I had to resort to playing my tank myself because they refused to use their lock-on aura when a fight began even if a character stole hate, and would use multiple single target abilities before an AOE when fighting multiple mobs. It made playing as Shulk nearly impossible since I would open up with the side attack to lower defense then use back slash and immediately steal aggro. Shadow eye (threat reducing ability) sometimes wouldn't even drop threat since Shulk was a beast critting back slashes for almost 50,000 or so at level 70. All of that was solved by simply playing the tank myself and using a lock-on aura which gave me a pretty much unbeatable threat lead by the time it had worn off.

On the flip side though regulating Shulk to AI was embarrassing as he would rarely use his positional attacks correctly. I can not tell you how many times I heard him screaming about backslash while standing in front of my target. On the whole the lack of control of my party was pretty annoying, as a game that is often compared to FF12 I have to say I am really sad they didn't bring over the ability to pause combat and dish out commands on my own. Would of pretty much fixed any problems I have (other than the game being a bit easy) with the combat.

All in all though a solid game, I look forward to going back and doing some of the sidequests now that I don't have to worry about over leveling but I am not entirely sure I want to do any of the high level/hardest side bosses, I always go to those for a challenge but considering the game had very few for the ~65 hours I plunked into it I don't have high expectations of finding something that will kick my ass, but who knows.

@Zenaxzd said:

I literally killed the final boss with 2 almost back to back chain attacks despite being very under leveled. As reference I barely did any side quests the entire game (mostly just the time sensitive stuff) so every mob in the final dungeon was either yellow or red to me but despite that I only died once because a certain boss along the way randomly one shot me and I did not have a gauge full to res.

How is that even possible? Spent about 5 hours total on the final boss (last save was at the "point of no return") because I could not for the life of me defeat the second phase after trying almost every character combination and shifting around gems (I even tried a all tank group once with Riki, Reyn and Dunban lol). I was level 78 and did pretty much ALL the sidequests that were available to me at that level.

How did you kill red enemies? I tried attacking one of the Gogols near Raguel Bridge once that was 7 levels higher than me and all my attacks missed or did barely any damage.