Final Fantasy 15 released recently, and against all odds, ended up being actually good. But most people didn’t actually expect that, and their cynicism was well founded- this was a game that had spent ten years in development, with one title change, one change of directors, and at least one change of platforms- not to talk about how the entire work done on the game was scrapped and thrown out on at least one occasion and probably twice.
All of this is to say, the game’s development was a chaotic mess, and it’s a wonder that it managed to turn out as well as it did. This is evident even more so when you consider what Character Designer Roberto Ferrari had to say about the game’s development on his Facebook page.
“They’re highly disorganized,”he said. “Our staff (200 suffering souls) had to work on FFXV while the story still had to be finalized. In 2013, the damn story changed every three months or so and the game’s release date had been scheduled for December 2014.
“In the world of animation, which is where I come from, the main story is nailed down before hiring the staff in order to avoid this kind of a waste.”
This honestly sounds about right- and is probably also one of the reasons that Tetsuya Nomura was removed from the project, with Hajime Tabata put in charge instead. Nomura simply takes far too long to deliver meaningful content- just consider the fact that Kingdom Hearts 3 still does not have a release date yet. That Tabata salvaged this mess and turned out a game as great as Final Fantasy 15 ultimately was will never cease to amaze me.
