Cut-scene Production: The hiring of a visual director from the movie industry was the good point of this production area. Nakazato credited him with, essentially, thinking outside the "box" that videogame visual directors think within. In addition, the hand-animated and English-matched facial expressions really paid off, and Nakazato emphasized that the quality there couldn't have been reached with automation. Lastly, he praised the decision to include the "text-based events," the 1000-Year Dreams. We agree.
He again pointed to prioritization as the primary error on cut-scene production. In contrast to the backgrounds, the game's 300 or so cut-scenes were broken down into FMVs, A events, B events, and scripted (in-game puppet show) events. In retrospect, he thinks that the FMVs were unnecessary, and that the B events were a mistake. A events got manual facial expression animation and custom motion capture, where B events used off-the-shelf mo-cap. Nakazato pointed out that by trying to use the cheaper B events for less key scenes, they generated an inconsistent level of quality for the player. Next time, they might just use A and scripted events.
Technology: Nakazato cleverly listed "Picked up Unreal 3 Engine" as both the good and bad headline for this section. The engine gave them a head start on new technology, the PC version was available before the 360 existed, and he stressed that it is a great tool set.
However, UE3 has a "different design philosophy from [a] typical JRPG; applying the JRPG philosophy to UE3 didn't work great." In addition, the engine was constantly evolving and changing during development, and live support staff didn't make up for all-English documentation. Overall, it made debugging and tuning difficult, with Nakazato explicitly calling at some problems it caused "...such as loading time issues."
Project Management: Developers fear the dreaded milestone, a set of dates and required levels of project completion required for a developer to get more money from a publisher. We were pleasantly surprised to hear Nakazato list milestones under the "good" column, crediting Microsoft for its atypical system. Each milestone meeting includes laying out the next milestone, so each milestone is concrete and realistic. In addition, Microsoft's acceptance process was "robust," ensuring that submitted milestone builds were approved as quickly as possible. He also credited Microsoft's program managers, two program managers and a globalization program manager who helped the team a lot.
