Only if you combine both...

The Last Story will do well since Sakaguchi's name is involved. Xenoblade will probably flop though.

Didn't help Lost Odyssey.

It has something like twice less sales than most other 360 JRPG's.

Last Story will for sure. Depending on how it's handled, it could even be a million seller. But that involves a shitton of "if"s.

Xenoblade is iffier, but I could see it. Probably will now that they've more blatantly tied it to the Xeno games.

He was talking about 3rd party games.  These are both Nintendo games, who's "game-like games" tend to smoke everyone else.

I won't tell you what my hope for The Last Story is

I basically want it to be nintendo's biggest RPG franchise like FF was back in the day

obviously this is silly optimism but I am very hyped right now, I will get to play a sakaguchi RPG after 10 years!

Graces was huge disappointment sales wise, just like Vesperia 360, Innocence and Hearts before it.  The fact that it only sold as well as a low budget Symphonia spinoff still boggles my mind.  I bet Namco'll never launch against a mainline FF again...

At this point, Xeno is probably stronger IP wise than Tales even (lol).

But it did help Blue Dragon.  The other thing is, those games had Microsoft promoting them, not Nintendo...

BD got advertised out of the wazoo, and until SO4 there was no higher selling game on the 360 in Japan. Even if it's MS, these games will need some serious promotion.

Its pure speculation at this point. We haven't even seen gameplay footage, let alone marketing or publicity from Nintendo itself.

My take is that, if Sakaguchi couldn't help sell XBOX360 and DS units in Japan, then he may not be as strong of a force as people believe he is. His Wii offering may be just that, his 'Last Story' to prove if he can deliver a game to satisfy the masses beyond just Final Fantasy (or a game similar to it).

As for Xenoblade, its a sequel of a sequel series of a game that was on Playstation. There's really no way to gauge how well it'll be received. Frankly, I feel its gonna be an uphill battle to make that title popular and even after all that work, it may only sell to those who already liked Xenosaga at the end of the PS2. Which wasn't much (Xenosaga Episode III only sold around 180,000 units total). So while the 'name' of Xenoblade is big, its sales may not be. The only way they may get people to buy the game is a big media push and trying to market it as a totally different game.