..what? I don't even.

They had a director who was in charge of system menus?

Like...the menus..that pop up... when you press start 'n shit? That's an epic thing to be a director of...

Are you contending that the problems with FF XIII came about because it went multi-platform?

You mock, but a good interface can really help (or hinder!) a game. Not sure I'd devote a man exclusively to that, but I'm not going to knock it either.

Definitely an important part of a game, but I'm not entirely sure I'd dedicate an entire team AND a director to manage just that aspect of the product. I would have thought the director in charge of that aspect would also have been in charge of other areas, making his job more broad. Being just the director of system menus is very narrow.

But then again, I don't really know much about the structure of development teams. 

I'm assuming he probably has other duties too, if not on the same game then as the menu dude for other SE titles. But I'm likewise ignorant of the details.

*quotes your avatar*

Development time wise, yes a lot of the problems in that aspect were because they decided to skip a generation when the game was already running on the PS2. They wasted so many years building an engine that is already being replaced.

While I can agree that SE was incredibly inefficient with that game, amongst others, I should think that having so many more years to develop it than prior games in the series would largely negate the bad effects of the platform switchover. Essentially, the big issues I've heard about the game (note: I have not played it myself, and thus claim no personal opinion on the matter)  were things like the linearity and the combat system.

While lack of development time might explain these, it seems to me that the additional years of planning should have done more to help them refine the combat system at the least, and to plan around the problems of linearity. Basically, even if the engine wasn't ready for three years (which is what I understand), they could have used that time to lay the foundation for the game, and thus hit the ground running once the engine was prepared. In essence, the only FF game with more time between it and its predecessor was XII (I'm not counting XI, or XIV for that matter), and that was because its director had a breakdown.

I personally don't have an issue with Final Fantasy XIII. They tried something different and it clicked with some, and didn't with others. I don't really see how that's any different than the other games. The internet just wasn't as prominant during that time period so the moaning wasn't as loud then. They really do need to get their dev times under control though, and they proved with XIII-2 (and even XIV 2.0) that they can.

This. I wonder why...

We have seen gameplay, you know. I'm as pissed as anybody else who was looking forward to this game, but there has been a slow development in content in the trailers we've been shown.