Gotta get my hands on this game. Thanks for the reminder.

If you end up liking the game, buying used hurts the developers in the long run and doesn't encourage production of titles like it.

I think I'd be more inclined to agree if the game hadn't been so heavy handed about forcing the player to scour every corner of it before allowing them to proceed to the next story mission. Giant worlds are cool, but less so when I'm exploring them not for my own enjoyment but so I can find the next probe installation point.

I still don't agree with you, so its a fundamental disagreement I'm afraid (not trying to pick a fight btw just contrasting my point of view against yours). The Skells are big in relation to the players when you are in confined areas. Skells also feel giant close to the creatures you normaly face on foot, and even sized x the biger ones youd dare to fight without a Skell, but they are still dwarfed by a bunch of enemies. When you are on the open world they pull the camera back and widen the shots when you are on a Skell exactly because they want to show you the world is so vast even the Skells are quite small in it. To be fair Skells are not even close to the bigest creatures, vegetations and structures in the world.  

I sorta agree on one point tough, the game 100% have a bunch of technical shortcomings, it tries to overcome them with some not so fancy shenaningas, but saying its world is a "not so big arena" and that making you feel small in it is not a stylistic choice is wrong in my opinion.

It's shocking to realize that this game runs on Wii U...

The story's definitely aimed at teens and up. There's not a lot in the way of explicit gore or sexuality, but characters still get stabbed/shot and themes such as genocide are touched upon.

I'm not arguing view points. This isn't an opinion. I'm talking about the technical trick XCX uses to make the world seem 5 times larger than it actually is. The world isn't that big at all. It just looks big because the player is shrunk in the over world. That's why moving across the world in the Skell takes no time. Because the world isn't what is big, the player, enemies, and NPCs are just shrunk inside a normal-sized map to create an optical illusion. Oversized enemies that dwarf the Skells are also there to add to that optical illusion. It's all a parlor trick. None of it is real.

I never said that the game has short comings. I'm just saying it cheats to make its game seem much bigger than it actually is, which it does, and it isn't good at hiding it.

Still haven't got it yet. How is the story? And are the pop-ins as bad as people say?

In a virtual world there is no standardized measure of size, so there is no practical difference between a small character in a big world or a normal sized character in a vast world.

There is scale, though. The overworld isn't built to scale equally with the humans. That's why the bridges are so wide and stuff like the vines are so massive when you're in your skell.