Xenoblade Chronicles 3 [July 2022]

It's really just a case of using your abilities at the right time. The most important being - inflict stagger, which makes the enemy vulnerable to topple and once they are under topple status you get massive damage increases. The Monado abilities also can give you iframes later on so can be used to avoid enemy attacks.

A lot of people just try to critical path the game and get mauled by the area boss. There seems to be damage scaling in these games where the closer you are in level to the enemy the more damage you do. You need to be at least 5 levels below an enemy to do any significant damage and maybe 2 levels below to be able to take them on comfortably. If you critical path to the area boss you will be underlevelled and do no damage.

People then think you have to grind enemies to get anywhere in the game but the xp gains from enemies are terrible. You get the majority of your xp from sidequests and discovering landmarks so just take every sidequest you can and go exploring and you will complete side quests naturally as you explore. It's like BotW in a way, more about exploration.

Honestly I find the battle system in these games one of the best JRPG battle systems of all time. There's a bit of a learning curve but there's a tutorial in every game that explains to you that what status to inflict on enemies and which to follow up with. There's a lot of nuance to it and it only gets better as you play more. If you think you can just auto attack and win then you will get no where. It's all about spamming the special attacks and knowing the best time to use each one.

You've not much time left. You really have to decide if you want to spend the majority of that playing Xenoblade.