Obviously "PS2 remaster" is being hyperbolic, but I do think there's tons of space for graphical improvement from what we saw in the treehouse stream. Compare the foliage to BotW's, for example. I was watching my gf play that this weekend and I was blown away at how good it looked and I couldn't help but remember I wasn't terribly impressed with the graphical fidelity we saw in the stream.
I'm expecting some of the "polish" they mentioned was missing from the game during the stream to account for some of the textures and pop-in we saw, but still, I see why people would be a bit disappointed about how low-res it looks for now, I'd definitely grant it's one of its weak points atm, even if I do like the artstyle they're going for.
You mentioned the two main issues here: the first is that the stream quality was terrible, the footage was compressed as hell, so i don't think that what we've seen was that representative even of what they showed live (for example, the trailer on the Switch screen looked much better than on youtube). The second one is that by their own admission the game still needs a lot of polish, which they'll do until the game comes out.
About Zelda, it does look clearly much better, but keep in mind that both games were born on Wii U, and Zelda had a much bigger team/budget behind it. Takahashi said that development for the game started in 2014-15, and there were no Switch dev kits around that time, which means that we could see more improvements than usual in the last few months if they really focus on taking advantage of the Switch hardware to improve stuff like pop in, some of the textures, add some post processing, hopefully bumping the resolution to 1080p docked (like Splat2), etc. This also falls in line with the awful showing at E3 2015 and the lack of meaningful first party support for Wii U since then: many of the games in development were supposed to be moved to NX eventually, so there was no point in showing them on Wii U.
No flood of awesome gifs. Hopefully is just because they made a rather poor selection of what to show in the Treehouse.
Edit: just to clarify ... remaster of PS2 is obviously hyperbole.
I'm pretty sure that's the reason, you may not like the characters but the world design is in line with the predecessors. If you look at those X hype gifs, they were mostly from the exploration trailers, with the characters running around (or flying with the skells) in gorgeous landscapes with an impressive sense of scale. We didn't get that with XB2, except for a small section of the latest trailer, which I thought was pretty great (although not as good as what they've shown about X in the aforementioned trailers, but that could be because they showed very little of this game compared even to the E3 2013 trailer of X). I'd also say that the direction of the cutscenes seems better in XB2 compared to X if the part where Rex and Pyra battle that guy is indicative (incidentally, we have an hype gif of that moment and another one from the exploration bit of the trailer).
So hopefully they'll do an exploration trailer for this episode as well, as i have little doubts that the landscapes will be amazing here too. The setting of the game (people living on giant, constantly moving titans) should also help if they played their cards well, but judging from their past games i think there's no reason to worry about this.
Is they're not foreigners who know how to type in japanese, then yes : P.
I hope it's just a tiny amount of ridiculous fanatics or another company.
Haha yeah, i guess that's likely.
Eh, not sure it's going to be a much of a looker in handheld mode either, but it looks acceptable to me, aside from some.. Obvious stuff we've been going over for a while now. All I want is a massive sense of scale, which they seemed to have nailed, and nicely directed cut scenes.
If you have a Switch you can get a sneak peek of how it looks portable, they uploaded the trailer in the news section. Like i said, it looks much better there.
You mean the MMO-like fetch/kill quests? If anything XBX was worse about that. They haven't really talked about sidequests in X2 yet.
XCX actual sidequests and the affinity quests were fantastic and much better than the main quest or their counterparts in the first game. Fetch quests were unnecessary, unless you wanted to farm stuff.
Nintendo should though. I absolutely expect a translated version of the website to show up eventually.