I’m hoping so.
I’m actually wondering if these shots are from a Switch 2 build given how much more detail the models have than XC2 and 3, and how much bigger the environments are for this game.
Probably a different artist/art decision, but I noticed they dropped the detail down for the character faces. Lips and textures look way more cartoonish/saturated. Not like XC2 bad, which was so saturated it looked like something between N64 and Cube. Takahashi has been searching for a new character art director who can get close to the style of Xenogears character art director Kunihiko Tanaka—someone Takahashi worked with since his Nihon Falcolm days back in the 1980s, through his entire career at Square in the 1990s, and on the foundational team of Monolithsoft. Kunihiko Tanaka retired after Xenoblade Chronicles X, after some minimal input into XC2 as a “guest artist”.
But, IMO, he was their best guy. I don’t know if he’s replaceable. He had that distinct visual style that I found was the best version of Xenosaga and Xenoblade - some people were put off by the “plasticky”/synthetic quality of XCX, but that was more of a console power issue, as that (IMO) is superior to the cartoonish quality of a lot of games from that era. I’m not against the cartoony style and find it fitting for Dragon Quest and Animal Crossing, but not so much for more serious RPGs. A synthetic look fits synthetic characters (Realians, Mims, and nano-machine lifeforms). And the plasticky/synthetic look was pretty big in the SNES through PS2 era (first games that used it were DKC and Killer Instinct), but a lot of younger gamers grew up with cell shading and such as the hot new style.
My guess is Monolithsoft is putting this on Switch as a bit of a demo for a new game in the open world style with online features. They’re adding some kind of online multiplayer feature to XCX DE - which they kinda did with the original; a very half-baked version where you got updated with the progress of others without really interacting much. Xenogears remade as an open world game would be the tits.
