Probably 30 hours into Tales of Arise. While there's no open world exploration a lot of areas have started to open up for you to explore and then giving you reasons to explore or do sidequests. They do a pretty good job of giving you measurable fundamental reasons to dick around.
I think you could almost do an analysis article on the differences between this sort of "fat" in Tales of Arise and Far Cry 6 or Breakpoint. In Tales exploring, questing and fighting monsters creates a sort of tandem upgrade delivery of XP, skill growth, item gain, crafting tools and money that each occurs distinct from each other, but then are combined to make significant upgrades to your party. It keeps it diverse enough to where you don't feel that tug of the treadmill quite so intensely. For example I want a new weapon, well I need to go hunt some specific monsters for that weapons parts, but that monster has poison so I need an artifact to help with that so I'm hunting gems needed to make it, but then to craft those things I need money which is only obtained through questing or looting or playing the fishing game.
All these things are "kind of" fun, but they'd wear on you if that were the only thing you were doing. Grinding monsters is fun because it's got that DMC style action combo system, but you fight the same monsters constantly to get all your xp, money, loot extra and that would get tiresome. Tales succeeds but forcing you to change up the game play so you aren't doing the same thing over and over for minute rewards. Instead making you do a variety of things for a larger payoff and feeling of reward.
You look at recent open-world games from Ubisoft and you really just do the same 2-3 missions over and over ad-nauseum. I remember putting both Breakpoint and Division 2 down maybe 5-10 hours in because I'd upgraded my kneecap armor 5 consecutive times inside of an hour because I kept finding one in loot that was a .2% upgrade from the last one. I just didn't "feel" like doing it anymore.
Aside from that the story is still fairly entertaining and I find nearly all the characters likable. I just wish these characters and story didn't feel like every other JRPG I've ever played. Again to it's credit at least its not being too intentionally obscure or vague with the FF gobbledegook dialog. I "get" these characters and this storyline.
I forgot to mention in my earlier post I almost immediately switched to Japanese with subtitles. When it comes to gaming I really don't like subtitles, but the dubbing for Tales feels like it was done using tools rather than a human translator. It's really bad and kinda nonsense. It's interesting how much the "intent" in dialog when translating japanese and korean can be so easily mixed up. Like the words can be directly translated a lot of times, but they don't "mean" the same thing without context. Very frustrating. Can completely change your perspective on characters or story.
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