Okay, I was excited before, now I'm sold! It's an actual GAME!

Details:

- "The world setting, story and other elements have no relation (to past Xeno games). It's a completely new title." - Xenoblade director Tetsuya Takahashi
- Takahashi feels that past Monolith titles have focused on events and scenarios, and this development path was a dead end (So they learned last gen what a lot of developers don't seem to get now. Although they had the fortune to learn it on less expensive development systems)
- Xenoblade started off with the dev team examining the origins of the RPG genre, and creating a game that was simply fun (The critics are going to "love" that... unless they get smart by the time it comes out)
- Why does this game have 'Xeno' in the title? "I wanted to to have some sort of common point with the games I've made."
- "Xeno" has the meaning of "different nature" or "uniqueness"
- the 'blade' portion of the name is explained in the game's ending
- background story involves two gods that fought a great battle tens of thousands of years ago
- the end of this battle resulted in two giant corpses, which happen to be the setting for this game
- "It seemed like it would be enjoyable to adventure on top of the body of a giant god."
- Mr. Takahashi was inspired by Soma Bringer for his giant god idea, and started to work on design documents right away
- a model of the two gods (one with wings) was created in order to better give a sense of what's going on
- the two gods are frozen in battle, with swords clashing against one another
- the model was created before game development began. "It was of great help when explaining the project to Nintendo."
- the entire game takes place on the two gods, and you'll find nothing but ocean surrounding them. There's not even any outer space to speak of.
- the game world is about the size of Japan
- areas of the world open up as you explore
- you'll be able to go inside one of the gods
- verticality is a big part of Xenoblade. "From the start of the project, we thought it would be interesting if we could make use of a vertical construction."
- Areas of the world correspond to parts of the gods' bodies
- you'll also experience different weather and varied monster ecolog
- you can head to the top of one of the gods to see an aurora
- the people that live on the different gods are fighting with each other
- one god is a home to organic life (where the main character is from), and the other is home to mechanical life
- story beginning: "It's simple -- the fight against mechanical life that threatens the peace of mankind."
- the game kicks off in a cave on the foot of one god
- your aim is to make it to the god's head
- the game keeps track of where you should be going for both the main quest and side quests
- use warps to transport back to older areas
- specific systems in place to keep you from getting lost
- seamless world movement: "We've put effort into this, because we felt that in order to show a living world, we needed an overwhelming sense of scale, like that of an MMORPG." (Translation: Streaming areas. This means that like Crystal Chronicles, the graphics are just going to be slightly above 6th gen level instead of significantly above it.)
- gain experience for exploring special areas that include monsters that can't be defeated at first. Level up and return to take these foes down.
- enemies visible in the game world, encounter one and you seamlessly transition to battle
- nearby enemies can join in on battles
- journey with two AI-controlled characters
- select special skills (called Arts) for your AI party members
- your character performs attacks automatically
- Arts - attack skills, recovery skills and more
- 50 to 60 hours of gameplay
- Takahashi promises you won't spend endless amounts of time grinding or engaging in event scenes

Source: GoNintendo