You are making me want to play Icewind Dale something fierce. I actually beat it back when it first came out, but never again since. Though I did fire up another session back in 2009 or so, but got distracted.
I'm currently trying to wrap up Xenoblade Chronicles 3. My feelings towards it have soured significantly the further through it I get. I feel like it started off much stronger than previous games, but fundamental game design decisions they made did not work out well past the mid point of it.
Like, they managed to make a job system boring. The hard caps they put on jobs until you fully unlock them are pitifully low, and super easy to reach. Then you are just wasting progress if you stay in that job. Aha, but they thought of that, so you can always spend silver nopon coins to upgrade jobs, actual experience be damned! Except now that cheapens the whole process of building up a job.
You can see an evolution in reducing the tedium of side quest. The original Xenoblade Chronicles told you to go hunt certain animals, or collect items off animals. Except animals are named so bizarrely, and items as well, you have very little intuitive sense where to go to accomplish this. Assorted re-releases added map icons for this. But making it easier exposes the tedium of it. To help with the tediousness, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 let you send your blades on mercenary missions to accomplish assorted "Kill X Creature" objectives. Now you don't even have to after you've unlocked that functionality! Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes this even further, and I don't recall a single "Kill X Creature" side quest the entire game.
Unfortunately, they came up with remarkably little to replace that tedium. Instead you are left with rather hollow side quests that singularly involve fast travelling to different NPCs and speaking to them. You spend more time in loading screens fast travelling than anything else. Sometimes they throw a boss battle at the end. It's rarely exciting.
All in all, combat is underwhelming. At first I was hopefuly, and had thought maybe they improved on it from Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The Golden Country. Unfortunately, the wheels mostly come off it. In the beginning of the game, you can only chain certain arts with certain other arts. This adds an element of engagement. Later on, they fully remove all those caps, and anything can chain to anything else. This makes combat far more rote and boring. Enemies generally feel like they have way too many hitpoints, especially bosses, only adding to the roteness of it. I'm 20 levels higher than this creature, it is not going to threaten me. And yet it can still take minutes to slowly grind down a boss, and what feels like prohibitively long to take out random mobs. My gut instinct is that if you outlevel a creature by 20, it should be a "1 round" combat encounter tops. In real time terms, maybe a few attacks of your party, no more. This is not the case in XC3.
But they thought of that too! Since combat gets annoying and boring, If you are a high enough level most creatures won't aggro on you! Except, once again, like most "solutions" in this game, it only exposes more problems. Void of combat, exploring these wide open spaces also gets boring. This is not Breath of the Wild's open world, with fun little korok seed puzzles around every corner, larger shrine puzzles over every hill, and lots of hidden sidequest that don't draw an excessive amount of attention to themselves. The world of Xenoblade Chronicles leans more into the Ubisoft style of open world where there are icons for collectibles you can find in the open world... and that is more or less it. I guess there are lots of optional boss monsters that are occasionally tucked away. But that feels way less exciting than it should be due to the aforementioned problems I have with the combat.
I donno. If you are a fan of the series you should play it I guess. The story is a brilliant homage to both the previous games. I think these are actually my favorite characters yet. The nopon aren't annoying in this one either! Shit, there were a few story beats that actually had me fighting bad tears. I don't recall a game doing that before. And while actually playing most of the sidequest is incredibly boring, each sidequest hub often ties all it's quests together into a fulfilling cohesive narrative. But mechanically, the game is enough of a mess that if you are predisposed to like it, I wouldn't suggest it.
Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS