There's a ton of activities to do, some of which are story heavy, some are puzzles, some will test your skills in particular areas of combat and some are nice quick easy stuff you can do if you don't have much time. And I'm glad for the downtime because this game is heavy on dialogue. There's so much of it, and the fact a lot of it comes from dialogue trees makes conversations feel really unnatural most of the time. It doesn't help that the main characters voice has exactly 1 emotion and all her lines are delivered with the exact same bored voice regardless of context.

The story is decent, and it sets up a sequel perfectly. But I just really think the game is too exposition heavy which bloats the amount of time spent listening to long-winded conversations. Then there's hundreds of datapoints to be found and read which is something I never like in games, much less in one that already has you sit through this much talking just to get through a side quest. They obviously like world-building and it's nice to see how they differentiated all the tribes and whatnot, but...damn sometimes I just wanna play the game without worrying I need to read this small villages entire history before I can go save random NPC from a machine y'know?

Battle system is really fun with dozens of ways to approach it. Especially when fighting the truly huge machines. It really feels like an event to take them down, more so if you're trying to shoot off certain materials.

While it's been a long time since I played the original game, I know there's at least a few QoL additions, especially being able to gather more material than you can carry as the extras go into your stash. You can also fly on machines now in the end-game. It is at the core the same game though, just bigger.

I know the "checkbox" open world games get a lot of flack, but I find them quite fun to go through. Plus going through skill trees as you get rewards for the checklist items is satisfying.