Xenogears

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>“Honestly speaking, what had happened is Xenogears as a project was staffed pretty much entirely out of new staff members, young staff members,” said Takahashi, speaking through a translator. “Back then, we had the direction of, ‘All projects take two years and that’s when we need to get it done.’ So on top of developing the game, we had to nurture and teach and grow these younger employees. Things like 3D were extremely new, which led to some delays in the schedule. It just wasn’t possible to get everything done.”

>As it became clear that Takahashi and team weren’t going to hit their deadlines, Square’s higher-ups suggested that they just end the game after the first disc, when Fei and his team escape from Solaris.

>“It was a rough way to end it, and I felt like if we do that, then the players will not be satisfied,” Takahashi told me. “So we had a proposal—I proposed that if we do disc 2 in this way that it turned out to be, we can finish the game with the current number of staff and the current time allotted for the schedule and the remaining budget we have.”

>So they turned disc 2 of Xenogears into the montage that shipped with today’s game. Instead of playing through events like the world’s mutation and the search for Fei, you just have to watch them. And it was Takahashi’s decision—so he could finish the story he wanted to tell rather than cutting it off after the first half.

>“I do think my decision was the right one to make,” said Takahashi. “Because if we had just ended at Disc 1 it would have been bad.”