Question: just started climbing the world tree, will I have any chances to use the inns for bonus leveling from now on?

Really liked the Land of Morytha, between its haunting music and its desolate backdrop, it was very atmospheric. The strings in the score and the greenish "under the sea" aesthetic gave me Bioshock vibes.

Don't worry about that. There's no real points of no return. One place does become inaccessible, you will no longer be able to travel to Indol, but everything like quests, market advancements, stores, and salvage point treasures will be carried over to Fonsett.

Yeah, the boss battles at the end of chapter 7 are the end of difficult story bosses in the game =P

I was a little surprised at how easy the final boss of the game was considering that XC and XCX were closer to Xenosaga Episode 2’s Patriarch.

Good news as far as I'm concerned; I like making progress without getting roadblocked by difficulty spikes.

Just finished Chapter 6 - heard this is where the game 'streamlines' into a quick finish?

There's still the underground cave in fonsett mate. It's pretty long.

I break the game down into three sections.

1. Chapter 1-6 - sort of the wacky adventures of Rex and co, focuses on small loosely linked stories. Very unpolished feeling. But a lot of charm.

2. Chapter 7 - Story picked up a lot, but the gameplay is still kind of messy.

3. Chapter 8-10 - Xenosaga Chronicles, the game resembles a Xenosaga game with a Xenoblade style battle system.

Its at chapter 8 actually.Or if you really wanna get technical, chapter 9, since 8 is still somewhat lenghty.

If you think about it, it's not dissimilar from Xenoblade Chronicles.  Early game is disarmingly simple and kinda vanilla with regards to plot, you spend several chapters/acts adventuring with the cast and picking up more party members, then you cross an invisible threshold where the story starts accelerating and changing faster and faster til the end, getting more and more serious along the way.  Not that early parts don't contain serious moments, but the ratio of seriousness to levity dedinitely starts leaning to the latter and ends leaning towards the former.  It really reminds me a lot of Chrono Trigger.  

In fact in many ways Xenoblade 1 and 2 feel like modern continuations of that traditional grand, evolving epic that jrpgs used to go for by default.  A lot of JRPGs these days have either narrowed their focus to character centric plots or westernized to more closely resemble wrpgs, but Xenoblade feels a lot more like those older, traditional JRPGs. Not knocking any of those approches, just pointing out the differences.

But 1 to 6 aren't filler by any means, a lot of it is actually set up and is relevant to 7 through 10.  4 is the biggest example since it seems like silly nonvense but is quite relevant to chapter 6 and especially 8 and 9.

At 180 that is nuts. I am still grinding for cores to get some of the random rare blades and a boat load of unfinished side quests at 210+ hours.

Seriously the RNG of this game's blade system is cruel. So many common fodder, I had to start releasing them for space and boosters. Yet KOS MOS, Newt and Zenobia still alludes me.