An insight into Final Fantasy XII’s development

Slashdot has a link to the story of the postmortem presentation of Final Fantasy XII. It covers how the developers avoid graphical obsolescence by putting a ton of money and resources (70%) into the art of the game. There is no video, unfortunately, but the 1up page for FFXII has this neat video of how to draw a chocobo.

While FFXII was without a doubt the most controversial game in the series yet (even moreso than FFVIII) it is an amazing game, graphically. My main wish is that the article would have covered more details, but it does raise an interesting point about futureproofing software that has a long development cycle. And this doesn't just apply to graphically-intense video games, but to the conventional monolithic method of making software as well.