"Would I be right in assuming that Stranger in the Vicinity of Paradise got cut down a bit during development? I assume it was going to have a full-on overworld with towns you can explore full of NPCs that all drivel out one utterly banal sentence when you press on their heads. And all that got cut, because the final game is a linear sequence of combat dungeons and cutscenes that you pick from a fucking menu that they drew a map on so you can pretend it's an overworld. And I guess they'd already written the NPC dialogue, because rather than let it go to waste they stuck a submenu at the bottom of the map screen where you can click a name on a list to get subjected to one of the copy-pasted townsfolk making an insipid observation on the current state of the plot. Very useful feature if you happen to have breast cancer and will only survive by boring your own tits off. The budget cuts also hit the combat dungeons to an extent, because so much of them consist of copy pasted identical corridors I was constantly getting turned around and confused. If you want to know where all the money did go, I'd bet on the weapons and armour department. You are constantly being showered with new equipment, every piece of which is lovingly designed and attached to your character model even in cutscenes, ensuring that the light warriors constantly look like they're going to a costume party as the donation bin in front of a second hand kitchenware shop. I wonder if the people doing the face animation for cutscenes knew that the cast would be wearing full face masks most of the time. I further wonder if the armour department's coffee machine ever didn't contain piss."