It dethroned 1 as my favourite game ever. It's a good time. Opinions do vary quite a bit on it, though, and I can understand why. Delving into that debate would require extensive story spoilers, though, and this is not the place for that, nor would I want to rob you of the opportunity to experience them in-context.
2 is... complicated. Once the battle system comes into its own and you've got all the tools to work with and you've done the necessary grinding to bring all the better blades up to the point of being useful and you've looked up some online guides to take the place of the useless in-game tutorials, it's got a ton of strategic depth and build versatility and is just plain fun to play around with. It just takes bloody forever to get there and nothing about the main story experience actually encourages you to explore it beyond "DOUBLE SPINNING EDGE!", plus it's not intuitive enough for anyone to stumble on that depth without seriously trying to study it (which just means watching Enel's videos, for most people, but still). In the same vein, the story gets really interesting once it starts to focus on developing the characters meaningfully and exploring their motivations and the philosophical themes driving the whole game, but you're like 70-75% of the way through the game by the time you get to that.
There's a lot of really good stuff in 2, but the pacing is terrible and the anime tropes are a little too heavy-handed for me to really enjoy wading through them. I definitely still like it overall, but by contrast I quite prefer 1's more straightforward storytelling and gameplay pacing.
I basically agree with all of this about 2. Once it gets going, it's great, but it takes a long ass time to get there.
Tell me, does X3 have the battle announcer that yells out OUTSTANDING and MAGNIFICENT and whatnot? That cab stay forever.