You forgot the most important part. This score doesn't count on Metacritic, therefore it's irrelevant.

So anyway you look at it Kotaku means nothing for the hardcore gamer. It's just another clickbait site.

You say that as if the predecessor got "universal acclaim", it didn't.  IGN UK(9/10) and Gamespot (8/10) called its story cliche and the side-quests boring at points. This Kotaku reviewer said that he shouldn't have trusted the internet hype with regards to Xenoblade Chronicles. Xenoblade Chronicles got its highest reviews from smaller sites like: "Quarter To Three", "Vandal Online", "Spazio Games", etc. I can see the same thing happening with Xenoblade Chronicles X. To expect a high number of 70's based off one Kotaku review and Amazon.JP reviews is ridiculous. We might as well  start using Metacritic's user scores to tell us the quality of our games. 

As for the story, that is the least part we can trust importers with. The Japanese gamers say the the story is fine, while the people who just import with very little knowledge of japanese are the ones describing how the story is worst. I've seen some major spoilers with regards to the story, and unless the execution is horrible (which seems odd considering how Famitsu's complaint was too many cutscenes) then I expect a high amount of story and a good story at that (considering the spoilers of plot twists.) If anything from what has been described by the developer and players its story is on the level of Xenosaga/Xenogears much more than Xenoblade's was. Which did, indeed, have execution problems, but also had more complex and more themes involved. 

All of the arguments presented in this thread against Xenoblade Chronicles X were also found by reviewers with regard to Xenoblade Chronicles, and despite that the game got high reviews. Your Amazon.JP argument is silly, because the site as a whole underrates games by a significant amount, the Japanese site especially. A linear 10 point drop on Amazon.JP won't directly translate to a 10 point drop in Western review scores. 

Seriously the Witcher 3 ruined open world RPGs for me, if you gona dable in this genre from now on you better know how to carft interesting sidequests, and since Im sure itll take at least some years for other devs to catch up with CD Projekt Red on that department I dont think I can play these games filled with meaningless fetch quests and worlds full of pointless colectables anymore. Witcher 3 set a new standard and its hard to forget what that game did when you go to play another game on the same/with a similar genre.

You can't ignore the actual content of the review though, because that is what you are using for your argument. They gave the game some negatives, and still gave it scores in the 80's and 90's. The same probably will happen with Xenoblade X, especially since it is a much more hyped game and reviewers tend to inflate their review scores based on hype. 

Well I found with this reviewer in particular that he didn't even finish the main story (he says so) before writing his review. Every Xeno game's story comes together into a package at the end, so that is a big no-no. But Tachikoma, a native Japanese speaker, did give this critique with regards to import reviews earlier. She said that it seems as if they are using google-translate or have poor Japanese skills in their reviews. When you say main character, you are referring to Elma, correct? From what I gather, the story of this game is much less about her even. A major event happens to a side-character and a revelation is made about the world of Mira and the humans in NLA. The story is about Mira and its inhabitants as a whole. 

Yet when the game re-released on 3DS it got an 86 metacritic, despite the 3DS version being worse technically. So we do know how people will react to the game today. A little bit less enthusiastically than they did in 2011, but still considerably well. With a new experience, unless something is worse (which nothing seems to be) I can't see them giving a score less than Xenoblade 3D. 

They did underate it, even if slightly - probably because it was a niche game at the time, the equivalent Amazon. JP score is  88%. The game scored a 92% on GameRankings and Metacritic. Similarly, The Witcher 3 has an average review score equivalent to 83% on Amazon.JP and in the West its score is a 93%.  Xenoblade Chronicles 3D has an average score on Amazon.JP equivalent to 79% and in the West it has an average of 86%. So how much of a change the 73% makes is really hard to predict. Japanese audiences and Western audiences are truly diferent in their tastes, and it is obvious that this game is trying to entice western audiences. 

Or it is just not the entirely new experience that Xenoblade Chronicles was. I expect there to be a drop, but not a ten point drop. Somewhere between 85% and 90 %. Western reviewers will probably be much more receptive to the changes, such as the open-world story pacing (side quests -> main event -> side quests ->  main event and the mixture of quest types (from the sounds of it the side-quests have been improved over XBC) and the online component. 

A good article on the Amazon.JP reviews. 

http://www.siliconera.com/2015/05/05/xenoblade-chronicles-x-not-quite-mmo-not-quite-like-previous-game/

"On the one hand, the above reviewer and many others like him hoped that the game would be closer to the first Xenoblade Chronicles, and that it could’ve been a higher quality single-player title if Monolith Soft had focused less on the online aspect. Meanwhile, there are others that expected a full-blown MMORPG-style game, but got what they’d consider an offline MMO, instead. The takeaway here is that RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles X aren’t common in Japan, and the nature of the game threw a few people off.

Once again, some may feel that an overall 3.5-star rating is on the lower side of the scale, but as previously mentioned, there’s an overwhelming number of 4 or 5-star ratings, and unlike other games with lower ratings, most of these come from misconceptions regarding what the game was supposed to be, rather than actual problems with it. On the whole, Xenoblade Chronicles X has been well-received in Japan, so let’s end this with one of the more positive reviews the game received.

“I’ve played countless open-world games from the West, but I just don’t think they’re for me; however, I’m also not very familiar with our recent [Japanese] RPGs, so I decided to buy the game upon learning that it is a Japanese-style open-world RPG. Following that, I’ve found it to be the proper evolution of Japanese RPG that I’ve been waiting for, with wonderfully made maps, and it’s very fun to explore. I’m so addicted to it. If you’d like to witness the true evolution of RPGs from the Super Famicom to PS2 eras, or if you like open world games but aren’t into Western titles, I definitely recommend this one.”

IGN's Import Impressions are probably going to be more typical for Western reviewers than Kotaku's. 

Is there a US release date on this yet?

Maybe certain posters think I'm just trolling but I'm not saying this from without. Like I said even Fallout 4 discussions raise this issue . However its clear this RPG exists on a different plane of existence.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/06/10/the-witcher-3-is-the-standard-to-which-new-aaa-releases-should-be-held/

[Insert Forbes 'contributer' remarks here]

The amazing graphics and exploration alone should keep me interested. He also may find it more interesting in English.