Quote Originally Posted by WarZidane View Post
I still say the only game you can really point at when you say "long dev times" is Versus XIII, which in the end was vaporware anyway. XV was available 3 years after announcement, World of Final Fantasy..I actually don't know but that can't have been more than 1-2 years either. XIV churns out a top-notch expansion every 2 years.

You could make an argument that the mainline entries are too far apart now, but who knows, maybe they'll get that back on track with XVI. If they bother making it.
They're talking about the time between entries based on the older games. The first six FFs were released a year apart from each other with the exceptions of III and VI. VII came out three years later, VIII two, IX -XI a year from each other and then XII came out four years later, then XIII another three, and then XV came out six years after XIV. To add to this wait, we knew XII was in development by the time IX was released so it actually took them six years to make it. We knew XIII was being worked on in 2004, so it took five years to develop it as well which is striking when you consider that VIII-X only took two years to develop a piece, and XI only took a little longer. Even if you discard Versus XIII's time frame (and people should cause it was nowhere near complete, after six years of development) and only take in account when Tabata took over, XV still took four years to develop and many fans still feel like the game needed another year or two to be really finished.

It's tough to go from expecting a new entry every other year to having to wait for a new entry every console cycle, SE's developing FFs like Nintendo does their main brand series except they don't get the same accolades by fans and critics like Nintendo does.