This is a missconception. Budgets scale with workforce and development time. The graphics themselves are not that relevant

There are over 1100 names on credits of TOTK and the game took around 5 years to develop. I'm pretty sure it was more expensive to develop than Baldurs Gate (450 employees, 6 years development), and Baldurs Gate have much higher quality assets and animations than any Nintendo game

FF16 has towns, and VA for even minor NPCs.

TOTK also reuses a lot from BOTW, and neither has much variety of unique assets or much at all in the way of VA/cutscenes/etc.

More complex assets generally take more time and manpower to produce though. They're just not the only factor as stuff like scope and content matters too.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth likely had a notably smaller budget then FFXVI

People mistake how shiny they find a game with with it's budget, but that is not how it works. Rebirth development was less than 4 years, XVI's was 6.

Rebirths gameplay systems was already ironed out, many character models and animations, already existed. Little to no engine work involved. In many ways Rebirth is less technically ambitious than XVI even if people find the former more visually impressive at a glance.

Rebirths budget is still going to be higher than TOTK because of VO & cutscenes, but they're probably closer than people think. The ambition of TOTK gameplay systems requires immense man hours to iterate, implement and then eventually QC. It's why it took so long, because the games actual content (puzzles and fetch quests) is not what took them 6 years.

It has two if you're being generous, way less than Zelda or Rebirth, or the other open-world AAAs. Besides most of the sidequest dialogue is not voiced.

Regardless of TOTK assets, it took 6 years to develop vs. 4 for Rebirth, which is the point here. Neither game is the ceiling of ambition but they're probably very close budget-wise.

So basicly a regular Switch is roughly half the price of a PS5 and an OLED is the same as a Series S (based on amazon prices). Guess that's just another reason Switch is dominating in Japan.

I don't know about TotK, but about BotW, Miyamoto once said, they needed 2 million sales to break even. 100 People working on it with 300 in the credits.

Source:https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/06/29/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-needs-to-pass-2-million-in-sales

I did notice TotK creditroll was noticeably longer than BotW's, so I do believe the second game have cost more to make. It's important to note that being in the credits means a contribution of some kind, but does not necessarily mean working on the game.

Pretty sure when I played through it sidequest dialogue was mostly voiced in FF16, whereas BOTW/TOTK had comparatively very little VA. There's more than two towns/settlements as well, can't remember their names but there was plenty of times we'd get to one and have a bunch of NPCs with side content to do.

TOTK was also basically complete by March 2022, they spent the last 14 months in QA/polish, so most of the team was finished: https://www.gamesradar.com/zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-was-basically-finished-before-its-year-long-delay/

I would argue that TotK development did not really start until early 2018. They still needed to ship BotW DLC till end of 2017. Take that into account plus as you said the year of tidying up, most of it was done in 4 years.

That being said, as I commented before, I did notice that TotK credit roll was considerably longer than BotW. I also noticed a section called "Motion Capture" in TotK's credit, that I did not notice with BotW or any other Nintendo game before.

FF16 did the same thing, development was done by the first half of 2022.

To clarify, it depends on what you consider a town. If you're generous you can count a handful more, but by the same standard that still falls way short of TOTK.

Of course, it's not that important since the main point was, regardless of what devs are doing and what is included in the final product, FF games cost way less than the likes of GoW or Spiderman and have more in common with other Japanese games like Zelda, MH, or Resident Evil. No one is going crazy over budget here, their problems lie elsewhere.