Why is it so dull? How do I make it fun?

>remove battle soul from arts palette
>AI shulk becomes more or less competent
>mechon aren't present in every major area, and make up the main threat in a small portion

The combat's pretty on rails from what I remember. I switched up party leaders often to keep things fresh, but they mostly have a clear string of artes that you need to do. Melia's a bit weirder though.

Don't play games you don't like just to fit in. In fact don't play jap games we don't want resetera fags near them.

I'm pretty sure Xenoblade was a mmo turned single player half-way through with a rushed combat slapped in. Just watch the cutscenes in youtube and skip it, trust me you won't lose anything by not playing it. In XC2 they refined the gameplay to perfection even if they still missed the target on the sidequests. XC3 so far doesn't seem as good as 2 but play it I guess if you absolutely must.

>In XC2 they refined the gameplay to perfection

They did. I'm sorry if you like starring a cooldowns, but that's not my cup of tea.

>likes 2 over 1
>likes 2 over fucking 3
A game that spends 90% of its runtime dangling actual fun gameplay just out of your reach is not good.

I agree, that's why I don't like XC3 that much.

3 is actually fun before it even finishes showing you its mechanics, even if it's arduously slow to give you everything. 2 really isn't. And I'd argue that the tutorial does a much worse job at teaching you what you actually need to know about 2.

I tried it. I'm sure it's a good game, but I couldn't get into it even with all the QoL improvements. I liked 2 better (going through Torna now and the combat is pretty solid though I don't care for the side quests being somewhat mandatory since you have to gain community levels to advance the story).

>3 is actually fun before it even finishes showing you its mechanics
No it's not. It might seen so because you can keep swapping the classes to add variety to the gameplay but that turns boring quickly because you soon realize you're doing only slightly better than the AI, and gets tiresome if you do that every fight. The ouroboros itself doesn't add any new fun mechanic quickly, you have three arts same as any character and a special you rarely use in that form. The chain attacks take more strategy but they also take a long time to execute and you're mostly wasting time by using them every fight.
In 2 it takes a while to introduce combos but if you read the skills and deduce that chaining driver arts is useful you can have fun gameplay pretty quickly by chaining and swapping blades to finish in blade arts.

Every issue you list here is an issue I have in 2, but even worse.
Switching blades is way less consequential than it seems and largely a waste of time if you know what you're doing, and every blade has arts of roughly the same effects per character. I appreciate that they put in the effort of giving everyone something a little different, but I feel like the effort would have been better spent on making the arts stand out as much in 2 as they do in 1 and 3. The lion's share of arts in 2 can be boiled down to whether they have a combo effect, a directional effect, or healing/potions on hit/use. Buffs are largely relegated to automatic stuff done by blades and debuffs are virtually nonexistent outside of blade-specific effects. Meanwhile, 3 makes a point of putting a stance art, equivalent to an aura, on Sena, and giving both the 1-style and 2-style healer a pure healing art and an area-effect buff art. It also has effects like directional crit rate and bleed on your first hero class.