Takahashi said on famitsu interview regarding Future connected playtime
-Personally it took him around 10~12 hours to finish Future connected, it will be around 20 hours if you do all the side stuff.
It could have been bigger if it was made as paid DLC, but spending too much resources on this would have impacted the development of the new game.
Regarding game's development
-Currently the First Production Studio is divided into 3 teams: Team that makes Xenoblade DE, team that makes the new game, and team that is invovled in both games.
-In terms of character visuals, it was something that was regrettable in the original game so they improved it this time
-Since this game is a remaster, you can't re-arrange every songs in orchestra. So some songs just got rearrangement or improvement in quality
-The Data compression is better than Xenoblade 2, so the sound quality has increased.
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