It's actually kinda interesting playing FFXIV now which is an MMO and the genre originator of these giant open fields. In FFXIV they actually fill the world with lots of little settlements and locations, you can auto-chocobo travel between settlements, and along the way there's hunting log enemies, places to fish/mine, on the map quest events (FATEs), usually a bunch of sidequests, and generally with fast travel you can get anywhere you want to be within a minute.
Meanwhile Berseria has bigger fields, with absolutely nothing to do in them besides fight junk mobs and the occasional chest (which is junk because like Zest it's all random stat equipment) and you often have to backtrack back and forth over them which takes like 3-5 minutes of running each time and even when you get quicker movement on the hoverboard it's still about half the speed of a chocobo mount in FFXIV. Also Berseria has basically no sidequests until the endgame. It's completely linear.
Basically it's interesting seeing how hard Tales keeps fucking up doing open fields. FFXIV's fields aren't amazing or anything, but at least they aren't tedious boring junk; if Tales is going to keep doing giant open fields it'd be nice if they could at least copy some of the stuff that makes them decent.
