When Square Enix started work on Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2, it was determined to have a short-term turnaround for the project, according to Taku Murata, Square Enix's head of research and development.
He told a packed room at GDC during a session titled "Final Fantasy XII Postmortem" that the company had employees working on a variety of specialist subtasks. He said, "We wanted to avoid a long-term development period, [and] to solve that problem we just hired so many employees that you can't imagine." In the end, the game was five years in development.
