I would have found the plot twist you mention more impactful had you actually been forced to spend more time there; you make this huge revelation, you wander around for a little while, and then you're focusing on the World Tree...

Zeke is an awesome, hilarious character but once he joined the party I just kind of found him to be a poor man's Dunban...

He provided insight but remains a very two dimensional character, whereas Dunban found a sense of purpose in leadership and mentoring the next generation...

I will acknowledge that they put more effort into Zeke than Morag; she's more robotic than Poppi...

In terms of quality I reckon it goes Xenoblade > Xenoblade 2 > Xenoblade X.

The first game I rank above 2 thanks to having a better art style, far fewer cringey scenes, and none of that Field Skill BS.

X comes last due to it lacking a compelling story and characters and having too much filler, though it's still not a bad game as it does get a lot of things right, like providing an awe-inspiring world to explore and how badass it feels to pilot the skells.

would be damned the day they pull even darker, serious stuff than Kirby in their games.

Good news for Xenoblade, not the biggest fan of 2, but that means more titles with potentially  higher polish and structure, so bring it.

And in the spirit of Super Boom with fanart, more Morag x Brighid.

The budget shows in the performance at times. I have a feeling that with most of their key players back from BOTW, we will get a more optimized game. 

There is a trick to sharpen the visuals, which I hit on in a video a few months back: https://youtu.be/IWaORkp1t4Q

Curious, does this trick also help with other Switch games like Doom?

I hope it continues to sell well. At 10 hours I thought it was pretty good, at 20 I was a bit unsure due to an overload of gameplay variation, but from 25-130 hours I was completely in love. It made me fall in love with the Jrpg genre again. I plan to revisit the new game+ soon but this time with the Japanese voice acting and docked instead of handheld. Well deserved.

A lot of what you list is fairly par for the course in many open worlds.  X had the same resource re-use, though some areas masked it quite well.  Pine forests in particular in games often have like 2 variants, maybe 3.  Shoot, Breath of the Wild - one of Nintendo's biggest productions - has like a grand total of...10 trees?  I'm pretty sure that's fairly accurate.  The standard oak tree has only a few variants.  Skyrim also has an ultimately fairly limited number of actual, unique trees.  It's very common for two reasons:  1) building a ton of trees takes a lot of time and 2) file size.  The latter of the two is quite important for Xenoblade 2.  

And Xenoblade 2 still has a wide variety of assets cause it creates...8 distinct environments?  Plus some other little areas.  That in itself brings more unique assets to the table than a lot of games.

Animation is another very common area for a lot of open world games to step back.  A few recent ones have really upped the animations but a lot still avoid having too many unique ones.  With 2, I would honestly say the budget in animation is pretty darn healthy just balanced differently because the cutscenes that get serious - which happens pretty often - are very well animated and very elaborate.  Best in the series, frankly.  And the animation re-use is also bog standard for Xenoblade, with 1 and X doing the same.  And to bring in another big example, Skyrim has not a single major cutscene with full, unique animation.  There will be one or two unique ones, but 95% of all cutscene animation is standard game animation.  

That said, 2 does likely have a smaller budget than a lot of your AAA boys but that's not new.  That's just Nintendo.  Xenoblade 1, X, Zelda Breath of the Wild, all three are in the same boat.

I think the polish issues are felt most from their lack of time with the hardware.  They got some great use out of it in some ways, upping the graphical capabilities of the engine with great features. But it's clear that only having  1.5 years with the Switch limited their abilities to polish and optimize.  But I do think rough edges is the best way to describe this.  The game has a few areas that could use some refinement but is on the whole quite solid.  Certainly more polished than 90% of the "AAA" stuff that comes out.

Xenoblade X was the 2nd game, XC2 is the third game, unless you think they will make XC3 instead of XCX2 or XC (something else) next?

And if we are counting port sales, XC original sold .92 million on Wii and .55 million on 3ds making for a grand total of 1.47 million copies sold. And if Monolift leader gets his way, they will port X to the Switch and push that game over 1 million sales as well (easily).

Excellent. Very glad for Monolith!

Technically Xenoblade is not the same franchise as Xenosaga and Xenogears.

The first game was a new IP originally titled "Monado: The Beginning of the World" and was only changed to "Xenoblade" at the last minute as a tribute to director Tetsuya Takahashi.