The first five to ten hours (first three chapters) are a very long tutorial pretty much. Most of the character development features are not accessible, either because you are too low level, don't have enough battle-points, or it just wasn't introduced yet. After chapter 3, you are able to freely explore any continent you want (which is very rewarding), choose your class type, gather collectibles, kill tyrants, gather miranium and money in more efficient ways , bolster your arms manufacturers and develop your gear, choose which characters you want in your party, do affinity missions which often have decent character stories, etc, etc. The world feels alive when you consider how many things there are that make your character yours, and the world has a lot of depth you can find by exploring it. Plus, until the end of chapter 5 you cannot use overdrive. And then after that you have skells and flight module to look forward to.  Each class upgrade also feels great and new, without discarding what you've already accomplished. The focus of this game is role-playing, and the more involved you get into the dozens of systems and the detail of the world the more enjoyment you'll get from these aspects. 

Basically the more you play the more involved you are with the world, in both gameplay and story. 

This perfectly exemplifies something I said before about the game. The music is pheoniminal. The problem is the sound design.

Well except for the NLA theme. That isn't very good. 

Looks like I'm the only one who love NLA theme.

I dont like the music itself, not just the sound design, I know this is 100% opinion but it just doesnt sound interesting at all, it doesnt anoy me but it could be much better. Its Ok tough my original concerns where the music wouldnt fit the moments they play (as in evoking the wrong emotions or faillingto evoke emotions, there is such a thing as out of place musics) and thats not the case.

I have a very wierd relation with this game, it does some amazing things on the one hand, but on the other it does some pretty dumb boring unexplainable things, more specificaly the mission structure is atrociously bad, plagued with fetch quests and MMO like tasks, and 99% of the quests/missions have some super shallow plots with no real emotions on them (wich is only acentuated by the total lack of facial expressions on the models). Also because they wanted to shove some retarded uneaded online down our throats we play a souless doll that isnt realy the main character, thats Elmas place, our character is just this bystadnder whos realy good at fighting and pilloting skells. And even the characters in the main plot have very little development, you enver realy conect to any of them.

Now the great things are obviously the amazing world that feels more alive than anything else I ever played, it completly craps on Fallouts 4 world that is build of repetitive interior enviroments you enter to shoot a couple of badies and actualy manages to feel more alive than even The Witchers 3 (wich is a jaw dropping well build world), it looks amazing, its awesome that youre on a lv 1 area and all of a suden this lv 98 tyrant just strolls by, its enormous and when you get a Skell they did an amazing job of changing the scale of things, you realy feel like youre pilloting a giant mech, sudenly everythign is a lot closer and you can reach places you never dreamed of reaching. Every tiny bit of progress you make feels earned, the combat system is top notch and exploring is just pure fun. Only critic I have about the world in this game is that the ecolog dont interact withim itself, Id love ot see a Grex hunting some of those ostritchs or a sud, and some of those giant creatures just showing up at random and start rampanging trough an area killing the samler ones, and other stuf liek that.

To resume how playing this game has been for me, every 5 minutes I get frustrated at least once cause I have to do some dumb fetch quest, facepalm at least once cause someone said a super badly written line of dialogue delivered wiht no emotion to further a totaly uninteresting plot, get amazed at least once by something I find on the world, enroll on at least 1 amazing combat against somethign thats probably too strong for me to beat but I try anyway and get a hughe grim in my face at least once when I walk past a mountain and said mountain steps up and attacks me. Id give this game a 7.5 but itd be the wierdest 7.5 I ever give cause I feel like the game is a 10 at times and a 1 at others.

So you don't like the soundtracks of Kill la Kill or Attack on Titan? I know it's opinion, when it comes to composition, Sawano is a much keener musician than any of the guys who worked on the original. The bolded is a sound design issue. Even the way the voice actors were directed is a sound disign issue. Sawano's soundtracks are meant to complement hyper-melodramatic acting and exadurated emotions. AKA

and

Almost everything in XCX is delivered in dryly and most of the situations the characters are put in don't merit the gravetas this type of soundtrack demands. Even during battle where these songs should shine they fall flat because the battle animations are so stiff and, more importantly, the voice clips are so tame. Sawano's soundtracks are meant to amplify emotions being portrayed, but there is rarely any emotions that are over the top enough to warrent such music. But that it's the soundtrack's fault. It's the game's. I actually think this soundtrack would have fit way better on the original XB than this one, where the story is frankly much more lively.

I want to see Sawano return for the next XB game, but only if they get a better sound designer and fix the presentation of everything. The only thing that's almost as bad as this game's sound design is its presentation. The camera functions terribly and snaps to the default without reason randomly. There are too few actual cutscenes, and to many instances of dialog where the player just stares at a group of immobile NPCs. Even XB was better in this regard. Animations for everything is incredebly stiff and awkward. I'd give the game a C+ or a B-, and I've been playing for over 80 hours. It has heart but there's too much done wrong. That being said, there's enough done right for me to be excited about the next one.

I cant say if I like the soundtrack of those animes cause I didnt watch them (I know Im probably the only person on Earth who didnt watch Attack on Titan), I can see what you mean tough. But to me it realy never was the problem of the songs not fitting I didnt realy like them that much, even before the game came out. I usualy go listen to the battle and bosses osts of most RPGs before they launch (when theyre avaliable on youtube, its not always they get uploaded before a game comes out) and I dindt like them without the game runing either. On the game itself I cant even tell the difference of a battle theme and a boss theme, they all sound similar to me and I forget them as soon as the battle ends. And I dont like vocal themes on videogames and/or movies cause I think they attract too much atention, I feel like Im being pulled out of the imersion rather than imersing myself more, a soundtrack should highten your senses and keep you focused on the action/emotions being displayed, not distract your atention to the song itself.

And ye the presentation is terrible, I feel much of that is because of the WiiUs limitations, lots of corners had to be cut, this game wouldve probably done much better if it was a PS4 or XOne game, you can almost see the WiiUs cogs spinning, strugling to make this game run properly. And as I said on my other post this is a wierd game cause the things it does right, it dos realy realy right, like better than most other games, in some cases better than any other game, but the things it does wrong, it does realy realy wrong, worse than a indie game done by 1 dude with a budget of 100 dolars, so my experience has been a complete roler coster of feeling awesome followed by feeling total frustration in an endless cycle.

Wow, Chapter 11.

Not really because of the events, but where the hell did that sudden boost in cutscene quality come from!? It's literally night and day. Downside being that I've never wished so badly for the player to talk then in this chapter. It's so awkward. Other than that, just wow. So good.

Oh, and I was on Elma's side, so Cross doing what he does was... defiant to say the least.

Also, Ghostwalker + Overdrive = incredibly OP. Just wow. And I haven't even leveled it up yet.

When I say presentation, I'm not talking about art direction or graphics. I'm talking about the lens the designer gives the player to view the world. Animations, camera tricks, cutscene quality, UI, HUD, font and font size, etc. 99% of that wouldn't be helped with more power. Wind Waker on the GCN had way better presentation. Even the original XB had better presentation. The Wii U could easily handle better presentation.

The camera during battles is one example of absolutely awful presentation. When you look at a battle in WW, locking onto an enemy reframes the camera. When you intially lock on, the camera pulls back to a dramatic angle. It frames the camera insuch a way so that Link and the enemy being targeted are always in view no matter where the player rotates the camera. A slim letter box frames the scene to make the battle feel more intense without obsuring the player's view. The nature of the camera is untouched, meaning the player can still organically move, rotate, and zoom the camera in and out to better view the object in question. Because the camera is so good, it doesn't need painstaking customization options.

Considering the battle system XCX has, it could have and should have used an identical form of presentation. Instead, you have one button dedicated for zooming the camera, one lock on in which you can't rotate the camera or it stops locking on, a camera with too many customication options, and an extremely boring locking battles because the fight's camera work during them is boring and terrible at framing the action in an interesting way.

XCX didn't need stronger hardware for that. It needed better designers. The game is littered with issues like that.

Prone's structures here and there are fuckin ugly. Their barrack's facades ruins every continent's scenery. This is the most bad design in 2015.

Honestly, fuck this final boss.