But there are about 50 mostly positive reviews.  One score won't make much of a difference.  

Well, it was at 85 the previous day, then 3 reviews came, an 86, a 90 and... a 50. And then the score went down to 84. It certainly made a diference, not even those 2 new high scores could avoid the downgrade of that low one.

Search for info in the city, some of that "yellow bubbles" will give you the position of these conversations. You have to talk directly to the person who's supossed to be in there. You have to do the first conversation, and then go on to the next, problem is you'll unlock maybe the second or third conversation before the first one, so you'll have to wait until you can unlock the first. Though, to be honest, in some conversations even if I did the first one I can't do the second one (it worked for me with Lin and Irina, but I can't find Elma anywhere). There are some weird information in these hexagons, like, "pet", I don't know if that has any meaning. 

Yea, I actually did give Nintendo a call. I reported the bug and they said they would work on it.

They first thought I wasn't doing the mission properly. They explained that after talking to his siblings there was supposed to be another quest in my mission log. They told me to try and switch missions, yet the other mission wasn't in my log.

After a few hours of watching tv I return to the game and sure enough, it was directing me in the direction of Koko!

So I completed the mission and continued my game..... Only to find another game breaking bug.

Yes, another. If you go into the character affinity and click on Irina, and then check her character profile, it will freeze the game. I did this after completing a mission and grinding for a few hours, I did not save. So I am right back to where I started, looking for Koko. 

Yea, I have extremely bad luck with bugs and glitches. If there exists one in a game, it will find me.

The key thing for affinity missions is that they must not be in the party, if you have a party without that character in you can find them in that segment at the given time.

This isn't just for Irina: it appears to randomly trigger for all party members. I had something similar to your experience when I went to look at Elma's profile. Adding insult to injury, I went there to see if it would post her schedule, since she was AWOL when I went to recruit her. There went an hour of progress. >_<

On a related - but broader - note, I'd say this game is quite good, but not great, with the key reason being simply that it doesn't respect the player's time anywhere near enough. Having to track down party members individually to recruit them is wholly unnecessary, especially since the bastards are often mobile. It does not help that days are now divided into six periods instead of two, so many characters - including bystander conversations - shift around long before you'd have time to stumble on them. Making you find a bench or resting place to change the clock was also a dumb idea, especially when the previous game let you do it at any time. I like the fact that collectibles are now largely located by specific regions, but once I've collected one please let me have a way of finding out which part(s) of the continent they're on, rather than simply referring me to a continent that takes fifteen minutes+ simply to run through if uninterrupted. Ditto for enemies: you've already divided the game into handy hexes, so it's not really necessary to limit the Enemy Index location to "IDK somewhere lol." And while I'm okay with Skells being something you have to earn, making me trudge back to the Barracks every time I need one repaired, or to buy more fuel, is a bad idea: part of why the original was praised so much was that it was an exploration title where you are never penalized for dying, yet they introduce these unnecessary penalties in the sequel.

Overall the flaws can be overcome, which is why it's still a good game. But I don't understand the reasoning for the above flaws, especially since the original game already knew that many of these things were stupid, archaic, and needed to be abandoned. It's not like the game needs filler!

Okay, I feel better now.

That's great. Thanks, I didn't know what that "pet" thing was about. And yeah, it's a bit weird that you can't talk with your characters if they're not in your team, but it's like their leisure time, so maybe it makes sense.

Progressing story is a super cluster fuck, all in the barracks i fail requirements.

This game is lacking some serious basic common sense in its design. Its a high 9s and a low 3 or 4 in some areas, haven't played a game that does some things great yet other in borderline broken ways.

Ugh, good point. And heavens knows some enemies have a LOT of patience when it comes to following you...

If it makes you feel any better, the latter parts of the story are, erm, "muddled"? So once you get to fly, maybe make story progression into a "when I get around to it" sort of thing.

The worse about that is like they are so obvious flaws that I don't understand why developers didn't realise about this, or why they didn't want to fix this. I mean, after a beautiful hand-made world, a complex battle system, class system... Is it really so much to ask to give an area to the collectives and enemies parts? That's a piece of cake! One entire continent is just too much to find anything. These and a terminal to recruit people to your party and I won't have probably any complaints. Well, maybe that pop-in that, as you said, makes you almost crash into the enemies, but it doesn't bother me so much. I don't care about high level enemies walking around there as it makes Mira more dangerous. The fact is the enjoyement of the game is as great as you can overlook these facts. But it could be probably universally acclaimed if they solved these little, but very annoying, things. And they'll take them about 1 week to solve that.

Game is not centered on the main story, but in the world, races and side quests, so you can't rush the story. That's the game's design, but I don't think that's necessarily bad. But it's obviously not everyone's taste, that's for sure.