There's nothing quite like slowly menacing your way through a Ganglion base on foot, climb the tallest tower, and prepare to take out the top Marnuck there. And then suddenly, have the Marnuck be knocked off the tower, causing an area-of-effect art to attract another enemy. You jump down to finish the fallen Marnuck, only to attract more enemies and a tyrant. Wait, make that two tyrants. The opening riffs of "Uncontrollabe" start to play. You order the rest to board to Skells as you race to get in your own to tackle the new crowd. You ignite the ultimate in crowd control as your Phoenix Wings burn all enemies in the furball as your party's health goes in the red. Somehow, you make it through the mess with your party's Skells intact and a whole lot of spoils to sift through. Now, I'll grant you that I was over leveled for the area, but it was so thrilling to have all that happen.
Also, I dinged BLADE Level 10 (the max level) as a Mediator at the 160 hour mark. This is not a statement of pride. The last set of decals you get are cool and cute.
Past the many little annoyances of the game, my biggest disappointment with Xenoblade Chronicles X is shaping up to be how disjointed and slight the story is so far. Counting the 4 characters that were DLC for Japan, their are 18 potential party members in the game. From what I can tell, at most they have three Affinity Missions for each of them. I've yet to complete a character's arc ('cause I'm being stupid and grinding and wandering a whole lot), but I haven't seen and don't see a great story coming out from so little time. It is very possible that the final Affinity Missions for the characters (as well as the Story Missions) have things really popping, but then it's still a bummer that the big narrative pay offs are held back for so long. I'm past Chapter 8 (that's the big siege of NLA for those that have dogged the preview coverage) and, due to the technical limitations of how the game presents its story as well as the story itself, I'm kinda bummed that I'm not really feeling it from the grand story or some of the Affinity Missions as much as I would like. So far, the best narrative moments of this game have been from a couple stand-out Normal Missions that get the bare minimum of production values.
My main and most consistent enjoyment of Xenoblade Chronicles X has been watching my numbers get bigger, my databases being completed, my map being filled out, and my kill board being more marked. That's fine with me since I'm clearly wired for that. But looking back on how much a love the story and the characters of Xenoblade Chronicles... it is a letdown in that regard.
Also, I will totally concede that I'm spending way too much time between Story Missions and foolishly grinding level 3-4 Affinity Levels. The Affinity one is especially egregious of me as you get so few from completing Basic Missions and the post-story end game has Support Missions at the Network Console that drastically boosts Affinity gain.