I dunno much about the actual cost of those games, but I do knoe that Japanese developers love RPGs because they are so cheap to program. They take a long time because the directors do a lot of scenario planning, scriptwork, etc. at the start and have to work with a lot of art teams to make concept drawings before they can even let their cgi artists at anything. But they only have a handful of people working on that, and they don't have nearly the costs at that time that they would in development. Granted, they can basically rotate these teams' projects and keep both active at the same time, as they certainly have, but for a single project they don't pay hundreds of people to be onboard from start to end.
I mean, really, if they paid cgi animators for three years of work and only got 45 minutes of quality footage out of them, someone made a mistake. Don't you think?
You do not have the right to never be offended.
