So, the game is approximately a week out from release, and I've yet to feel any particular hype for it. I just can't see that my initial worries from the first non-teaser trailer have been assuaged.
My reaction back then was that the city looked awfully small - about the right size for a "hub world" in a game, but far too tiny to be the setting for the entire gameplay; that the concept "Like Legends Arceus, but confied to one city" was too bare-bones to be worth basing an entire game upon; and that there seemed to be no other "hook" to the gameplay than the new battling system. Surely, there had to be more, somewhere, somehow? But trailer upon trailer have all shown practically the same thing. Pokémon roam the tiny city by day, Trainers do so by night, and ... uhh, new Megas. Oh, and an overworld environment whose graphical fidelity would have been embarrassing for a game released twenty years ago.
The remaining hopes are basically that the battle system is super fun to play, or that the story is good. Exploration doesn't seem like it would be particularly engaging, with so little to see and so little to do. You're not going on some epic journey of discovery either, you're a tourist. And Lumiose doesn't appear to be a very interesting city at that; one street looks pretty much like the other. The battling league also doesn't strike me as anything but a grind either. What it most reminds me of, is the optional "battling mastery" quest at the end of LGPE. That worries me.
Then again, I greatly enjoyed Legends Arceus and S/V, so there's still hope that there's something I've missed in this game that will take me by storm. I just haven't seen that yet, nor seen anybody else present reasonable hope that there will be anything of the sort. Because while I'm open to the idea that I'm just an old fart who has stopped enjoying the things I enjoy, neither have I seen anyone else be very hyped for this game either. This final release thread has received 15 posts in six days, that's not a lot for what's basically a mainline console Pokémon game two weeks from release.