I finished Xenoblade the other day, it deserves the praise it gets. Here's a bunch of text.

The zones are massive, climbing to a high area and getting a good look at all the spots you can actually walk to gives a nice idea of what you're in for. There's a day and night cycle which you can control or let the game handle (1 minute = 1 hour). The time does play a part as each NPC has a schedule they run and tougher monster come out at night.

The combat is pretty good, it's real time and uses cool-down based abilities, think MMOs without MP. There's no healing items so HP is restored using abilities or regenerates outside of battle. During a fight, you have to watch your placement near the enemy since some attacks have bonus effects if used on their side or behind. As you fight, a blue bar at the top of the screen fills up and when it's full, you can use a chain attack to rack up combo damage.

At times there will be a pause in battle and you'll be shown a glimpse of the future, in this case, the monster's next attack. You then have anywhere from 6-16 seconds to change it by canceling it out, dumping aggro to another character or killing it. You can warn another party member during this time and use one of their abilities to improve the chances of surviving at the cost of a third of your chain attack bar. If the attack goes through, it'll most likely kill the target at early levels and dead characters can't be revived until the battle ends or you have at least a third of the chain bar full to use.

Characters are fairly customizable you can make all but two of them into a tank or fill other roles like healing, DPS or pure damage. One of the first characters you meet is a medic but she's also a sniper. At first you'll want her healing but once everyone gets better stats, gear and healing abilities of their own, you have the option of turning her into a long range damage class.

They each have three skill trees to learn with two bonus ones later on. Characters can use coins to select skills from the trees of others if they have a high enough affinity with them. Affinity is raised by just using characters, as they spend more time together, they start to like each other more. This gives bonuses in battle as friendly characters will react more if their buddy is in trouble allowing your chain bar to fill up quicker. There's also an increase in banter during fights, it adds nothing but it's a nice touch.

The A.I. is surprisingly decent, it controls the other two party members during battles. When it comes to tanking and healing, it's best to let the computer handle it cause it does a really good job. DPS, on the other hand, is its weak point, it'll take characters with high damage potential and waste them by using support abilities. You can give it one of three commands and it follows them well enough but sometimes it'll keep attacking when I told it to stop or get characters stuck on a piece of scenery. Thankfully, you're not chained to the main character so you can figure out what abilities to assign to everyone's action bar which greatly helps the A.I. in the long run.

The story's good, I'll leave it at that, the main character is a bit of a dork but it works to his favor. The actual plot plays out pretty fast but there are tons of side quests to do that will eat up a lot of time. I was well past the 30 hour mark before I was even half way through from doing side quests and exploring. Overall, I was happy with it, the ending even managed to be satisfying which is rare these days.

One things for sure, use a classic controller, I picked one up after the first day, it definitely makes a difference.