This may be a cop out , but a lot of the designs for the games were rehashed and used in other games . Like , Sorceress Edea was a design concept for FF 6 I think but didn ' t appear until 8 . The company was pretty prolific in this regard in the mid 90 ' s , and some of Chrono Trigger ' s concepts were pulled from this pool of ideas and character concepts . The games from 410 were all developed in an over lapping fashion . Once this stopped , development increased a lot . XIII was also in development forever . What I was referring to was 10 , that was in development for a long time I forget what it says now , but when you boot up the game it says This is a game that we took forever to make and we love it and we hope you will too . I may be wrong on the took a decade part , but I remember this screen appearing and me being really surprised when I played it upon release . Generally SE acknowledged this issue and shifted into producing rather than developing hence the acquisitions of Eidos and Enix , the distribution of Tomb Raider , Hitman etc as a way of sustaining the company while they iron out their development process . That process remains . wrinkled .