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One person who has been struggling to get excited about Sony and Microsoft's next-generation hardware is PlatinumGames' studio head, Atsushi Inaba. Here's what he had to say in a follow-up with VGC recently:

I don’t want to sound like, ‘hey, I know everything about the new consoles and they’re boring’. But with the information that I have now, I haven’t seen any extremely big surprises.

So, what's a surprise for him? Apparently it's the "ground-breaking" design of the Nintendo Switch. He goes on to explain how the hybrid system opened up "new" possibilities, much like the Game Boy and DS generations.

While Inaba thinks Microsoft and Sony could still have a game-changing quality in their next-gen systems, at the moment it seems to be all about improvements, such as visual enhancements:

when you’re simply seeing graphical improvements or just ‘faster, bigger’… obviously it’s nice, but it doesn’t have that same inventive quality that really surprised me with past consoles.

Back in his younger years, he recalls how graphics had more of an upgrade, and that people were "blown away" by each gen. One highlight for him was the leap from Super Nintendo to PlayStation.

While the head of Platinum is happy developers "have better technology to work" with, he feels it's a perceivable future:

There’s not the extreme surprise or the unexpected quality that I felt from the leap to previous consoles. Now I see the announcements and I think, ‘oh, that’s cool’ and then the next minute I think, ‘hmmm… what should I watch on Netflix tonight?’

[source videogameschronicle.com]