Just finished my play through, clocked around 120 hours with close to 20 hours afk. Overall I enjoyed this game very much, I would say it is one of the top contenders for GOTY along with Bloodborne.
I'd like to share my spoiler free impression of my play-through in some details:
What I liked:
Gigantic and beautiful world, there is literally too much stuff to do, enough that I spent 80 hours before I reached half way of the game. The game takes a huge shift in game progression and story telling, but I equally enjoyed this game.
The world design is magnificent, I would say this is the best open world game out there, much better than GTA, being able to visit everywhere you can see is huge, climbing up that high point and seeing the whole landscape really gave me the feeling of adventure and accomplishment.
Class and character customization, being able to reach the max rank of a class allows you to switch to another class and keep the skill/weapon loadout allows some pretty unique character customization and combat style. I initially started out as Long-Lancer and I used to snipe enemy parts to do massive damage and change battle outcomes, then I switched to Galaxy Knight while keeping my sniper rifle which allowed me to use heal and force saber to do good melee damage and still keep my ability to use sniper skills.
Huge customization in Dolls and equipment with the Arms Company. Everything is socketable in this game, and you can create devices in the Arms Company to further customize your play style.
The customization options for Dolls is amazing, for my first Doll I literally recreated Gespenst MK-II Kai. The Dolls themselves are like another character, you can choose what to equip for every slot, maybe I'm not familiar with the system but it seems choosing a Heavy Doll is always better compared to Light.
Segment Map and Gamepad integration, I feel this game really made sense with using a companion devices along with your controller, looking down onto the Gamepad to access map information and quick travel felt like looking at your personal device as if you were the in game character.
The characters are well developed, you get to know the characters better when you start doing their kizuna quests, and learn their past trouble and eventually help them overcome those troubles. Lao is one of my favorite characters in this game and I hope you guys get to experience his story soon.
What I disliked:
Combat mechanic and the weak lock-on system, I got quite frustrated near the end game where everything is huge and the lock-on ability doesn't lock on to the parts of the enemies and just the enemies them self.
Silent MC in dialogues, its not as bad as White Knight Chronicles where your character is just a tag along, but I hoped they would make it more like Bioware games where your character actually spoke in story instead of just choosing options.
Bad party AI, when combat starts, it seems everyone just goes on to do whatever they want, and you have to manually tell them to focus fire every time, there wasn't alot of choices in the battle menu and the fights get quite messy when you're in tight areas where your party member would randomly pick up extra aggro.
Party selection is mostly locked for story missions, which leads to less time to develop kizuna with other characters.
Mandatory Gamepad usage, I don't think you can access quick travel or any other segment features without the gamepad, its a shame I had to put down the Wii U Pro controller and permanently have the Gamepad plugged into the power adapter.
Other things worth noting
Reused models of armors and weapons every tier, this doesn't become a problem later on when you can transmog the appearance of your gear into other gear, but there were some armor pieces that I avoided because I didn't like the appearance of them even though they gave better upgrade.
Dolls were awesome when I got them, but fuel costs and long cooldowns wasn't something I really enjoyed, I personally prefer human sized combat more.
I missed most kizuna talk because it seems I didn't spend enough time roaming across NLA in the right time of the day, but I did like doing kizuna quests which has high production quality and rewards you with unique skills from the character's kizuna quest.
I realize I may have spent too much time on the negatives, but this is mostly because I remember these more than the positives, and I assure you the game is excellent in developing the characters and story while at the same time letting you explore and enjoy the battle mechanics (Bioware can learn alot from this game I believe)
