As a veteran of the entire Xeno franchise, my take is that I'm really not a fan of how hard this game holds your hand for so long compared to X or 2. I loved the way those games gave you a lot to work with early on, and then continued to add new systems/tools throughout the game. It continuously gave you a sense of exploration in the combat, which for how long those games are and how each Xeno game can take a little while to get going with the story, made it feel so much more engaging early on. Meanwhile in 3 you're stuck with almost nothing for the first few chapters to the point where auto-battle is as optimal as just naturally playing the game, and then as soon as you open up class switching it's only relegated to switching to your allies classes, but with your characters performing noticeably worse in their roles. This game's combat was obviously designed for people who never played a Xeno game before and I respect that cuz I'm probably in the very small minority of people who actually played X through it's endgame as well as interacted with the postgame challenge battles in 2, but I think they could've found a much better middle ground early on.
The AI is about as middling as they've always been in a XB game. Constant frustration with AI sometimes doing break combos and other times ignoring it, more frustration with where they place their buff circles, and the most frustration with how tanks never like to stand in the heal circles so I have to manually move them into it. The game's not really that difficult early on though so it's whatever.
That being said, now that I have access to ouroboros forms, chain attacks, and starting to finally see hero quests to unlock more classes I can finally see it starting to open up some more. The combat itself does feel noticably better too at lvl 20 where I can finally equip a 5th art/2nd fusion art so that I can actually get my interlink level up higher for longer fights to make the ouroboros form feel more useful. You definitely want to take the game's advice and rush for the chaining talent arts and reducing heat guage for the Ouroboros skills asap.
Imo if I an experienced veteran of the series asked me the best way to tackle this game early on, I would just tell them to move to ch4 as fast as possible before going back and doing more exploration and non hero side quests. Oh and definitely play on hard mode because this is the easiest Xeno game by far, especially with how easy it is to be overleveled in this game when you consider the unique monsters and how you can stack exp modifiers with overkills to get a stupid amount of exp (and that doesn't even include the bexp). The bosses are def more of a damage sponge, but it at least keeps the game much more engaging early on.
Oh and make sure you do your tip drills, they're very good for teaching you things you might not pick up on naturally through combat. And eat at every canteen you can to get new recipe's too.
Can't really speak much to the rest of the game as I'm still only about 10 hours in. The soundtrack is fantastic and the cutscenes are very well beautiful to look at though that's to be expected by in a Takahashi directed game, so no surprise there.
The tactics wheel is practically useless. 
I guess this game still has some weird UI stuff from 2.
