There are the 3-star games that are "just okay", and 3-star games that average out from epic highs and equally epic lows. This is very much the latter. Loved most of the plot, best party in a Tales game bar none, and Velvet is a great protagonist. But it's also bogged down by an ending I didn't care for, oversexualized female character designs, and numerous mechanical annoyances.

The combat system is much-maligned, even (especially) among Tales veterans, who often find it "too easy" and "button mashing". This was also my opinion at first, but after engaging with the systems for what they are (instead of just "this is not like other Tales games"), I ended up finding a lot of joy in Switch Blasts, Break Souls, Mystic Arte chains, and derivative artes. I mostly played as Eleanor, who has tremendous AoE and a fun capacity to juggle enemies, and any time I was inflicted with a status effect I got rid of it by Switch-Blasting to someone else. Swapping in and out and perpetually changing playstyles made things more enjoyable and chaotic.

I still found the vast majority of the bosses quite easy-- way too easy, really, like they weren't scaled to Hard difficulty. I'm not sure if there is a way to scale it to a challenging sweet spot, to be honest--the way the combat works creates a snowball effect where the more staggers you (or the enemy) inflict, the better combos you can pull off. That meant that mobs were almost invariably more challenging than bosses, and most of the difficulty with bosses came from not being able to collect souls as easily, and having to chip away at their health until you perform one big combo. Bit repetitive. I don't think it's a coincidence that the final boss fight is the only dual boss fight (as far as I remember) and also one of the only tough ones.