As mentioned, mid-bass is incredibly important- without that, nothing sounds real. Without good/great mid-bass, human voices don't sound natural and without that, a sub won't make up for it.
If you don't have room for large speakers, I would recommend finding small ones that don't really need a sub for everything but they won't be tiny little Bose chicklets, they'll need at least 6"-7" woofers. Some smaller towers use two 6-1/2" woofers in a 2-1/2 way configuration and I can tell you from experience that they can sound excellent. I wouldn't recommend playing pipe organ or synth music with strong sub-30Hz content, but if you do play that, use a high pass crossover to minimize modulation in the bass/mid-bass. I experienced that when I played some tracks of the pipe organ in Atlantic City, which has the ability to produce frequencies around/below 20Hz and the modulation was easy to hear.
However, if you don't listen to music with synth/pipe organ in this range, they should be a decent choice.
Now, integrating the sub and satellites can be tricky. I don't like or recommend subs that only have an either/or 0°/180° switch because it only allows correcting problems that occur by coincidence- sometimes, speakers need to go where they need to go because of WAF (or whomever) door/window locations and furniture placement, so that creates a situation where the sub and satellite bass crossover region is between 0° and 180°. If the sub doesn't have a variable phase control, the response will have a dip at the 'crossover frequency', or worse- it could cause more problems that can only be solved by moving the sub to its optimal location. Sometimes, that means it could end up in the middle of the room, or just away from the walls.
It can be done, though.