I'm about 30 hours into the game. It's good. The game is absolutely beautiful. It's a bit drawn out even for a JRPG. The side quests are pretty unimportant so I just skip the text on most of them. It's basically, "go kill X guys", "go collect the item", "go get some emotion and give it to me", that sort of thing. They have nothing to do with the actual story and most of them are sort of one-offs.
Another flaw in the game, too much dialogue. The beginning is absolutely annoying with the forced tutorials. Even outside of the beginning of the game I've found myself skipping through some regular story dialogue because....well...you don't need 5-8 pages of text (even if it's only 3 lines per "page") to say, "Hey we need to get that item that's over there for the main story". It's especially annoying when they essentially rephrase the same thing multiple times.
Don't let the fact that I think there are issues stop you from playing it, I'm enjoying the game and think it's quite good. One of the best JRPG's this generation. It's pretty telling that my biggest complaints are about the dialogue and not about something like "too many random battles" which most JRPG's suffer from. In other words, I have no issues with the gameplay.
