Exploring the world was a lot of fun. The way that NLA gains new citizens and structures as you complete missions and option sidequests was great. I explored most of the world on foot, then again on a skell with it's higher jump height, then again with flight and fucking loved that. Really loved the Probe system, it was really satisfying to come up with a probe setup to max out money or resources, etc. But I do wish you could trigger events just by finding Lifehold pieces through exploration.
The story was alright, but I will take any story that provides a decent setup for me to explore an alien planet. The character affinity quests were too grindy. I would have liked to get through those a lot more quickly, I didn't finsih them all despite wanting to.
I enjoyed the combat enough to not get bored of it entirely despite how long I played the game. Actual combat aside, the character building aspect was bad. It was much too fiddly, with many MANY small pieces of equipment (or skills, probe effects, etc.) and giving you little boosts that add up to make a huge difference. I didn't fully understand all the subsystems, like the pilot view thing while in a skell, or overdrive while on foot, and on top of the equipment stuff got overwhelmed. I did have fun experimenting with the classes and skill combos and building parties, that part was fun.
Overall I loved the game, but it got too grindy and fiddly to fully complete.