Nintendo marketing is pretty much ass for anything outside their biggest draws really.
It's hard to demo a giant JRPG. But Nintendo gave this game the opening spot at their E3 presentation and it has, I think, come across that it's a big open world game -- the only one on the system this winter apart from Zelda and Skyrim.
If we're talking about technical aspects, I think the game certainly looks unimpressive. It's not a step up from what Xenoblade X showed, and for a third game in a series where the main visual selling point is "omg look at all that scale" I think the luster has sort of worn off. We have more and more games like that these days, and while this is keeping with the series traditional, it no looking feels unique or particularly impressive.
Considering how the series started out on a Wii, and has had an entry for every Nintendo hardware leap, I'm not surprised people think this looks like more of the same rather that a jump forward. The game will probably be good, and I'm looking forward to a return to a linear story packed with cutscenes and characters, but there's certainly no "omg this is pushing the series to new heights" feeling at all. Which could also be good because it means we are actually getting efficient games released in 2 year windows.
Well, the Switch really can't provide as big of a leap from Wii U as X on Wii U did from Wii. That's just a fact of the hardware limitations. However, a game like this is impressive just by nature of being on a portable like the Switch, even though it's not really a leap from X.
I think conceptually that placing the world on the back of multiple giant monsters (and apparently inside some of them as well) is interesting and a new twist from X's alien planet or the original's stationary giant robots/gods.
Obviously we're going to have a way to get around between these monsters, I'd imagine, which could be a very good opportunity to create a new type of sense of scale. Though they haven't shown this off yet admittedly. But they have talked about how areas will change as the monsters move within the sea of clouds, which is definitely new from the previous two games.
Ultimately I'm okay with there being a lack of a more significant jump in graphics/scale if it means faster turnaround on dev time and thus more frequent games from Monolithsoft.
I yearn for the days when there was at least one big new Square game coming out -every- year. If Monolith can get in a groove to do one every 2-3 years... that's great in my books.
Compare Xenoblade to like the PS1 FF games graphically. XC1 = FF7, XCX = FF8, XC2 = FF9. There was a big leap from 7 to 8, but 9 was more or less the same as 8 and built on the same engine. And yet it was still a fantastic game.
