I've not long been on disk 2 (out of 3) long now and I've got 19 hours into the game and I've not done much of the side stuff, so like you I'll probably go back and do them.
The plot and the game play are both very good - sure it's the same game play throughout, but I've not got bored of it so far. The setback for it though is that the voice acting is pretty bad, some say the voice acting is worse that Resident Evil 1, but I played through that again recently and I can say it's nowhere as near as bad. There are a couple of annoying voices like Sarah, Lymle and Meracle, you get used to it after a while though. And of course you can tell the Japanese audience for these games are perverts, I mean they went as far as animating Myuria's boobs so that the jiggle everything they move, I think that kind of 'close' attention to detail is nothing short of 'get out more often'.
Maybe it's just al the general anime theme, I don't watch the stuff, so maybe...
As far as difficulty goes, it's not unbalanced (unlike the previously released Square Enix title, The Last Remnant, though Tri-Ace had their hand mostly in this one), though the bosses can be quite a challenge at times, though at the moment I am stuck at the boss right at the end of the Purgatorium, and he's a mean one to be fair - he leads you into a false sense of security with weak attacks and takes hits pretty badly, but once his HP is down to half he'll start unleashing a very deadly set of attacks
The game itself has some varied settings, given you're going out on space exploration, you visit plenty of Earth-like planets (including Earth itself) and each place you visit will be in a different stage of existence - the first place you visit is similar to the Jurassic Period and the one I'm on now is medieval.
There are also some emotional parts of the game, which JRPGs can sometime strive themselves on and they don't deliver themselves too badly, though I felt Edge a little too whiny at one stage, though you probably can understand why he's so messed up, but even Faize gets annoyed with it, so his 'whining' is obviously a part of his way of dealing with 'x' problem put there on purpose. Of course I won't say what 'x' problem is.
You get some good character development as well - the game actually reserves time for character development each time you warp to a new place, so whilst you wait you can talk to characters and events will happen where different characters interact...or if you don't care, you can just go to your room and sleep until you exit the warp.
The maps and dungeons themselves are quite good and though some are long, I've not found them boring, because they don't drag on for too long, at least not without anything happening, but there is a sign of relief when you get to the end of it, particularly when there's quite some distance between save points. Also, you don't have random battles, so you can see your enemy before they attack you and they're not too difficult to evade (there's even a 'boost' button that'll make you move a lot faster for a couple of seconds)
But those are my thoughts on it anyway, I'll probably right a full on review for my blog once I've done more.
