After doing a few Google searches, I am slightly confused. In a Game Informer interview, Masuda says it took them 3 years to make SwSh. But in another interview, they say that Iwao only joined the project in September 2017, which is when actual production for SwSh started.

So was it 2 or 3 years of development time? The only logical conclusion is that they used LGPE's development to create the engine for SwSh, but it didn't become properly SwSh until September 2017.

What do you guys think? Is this a logical conclusion? And was this enough development time for SwSh overall? We should also take into account that this was the first game to include DLC, meaning that they had extra development time for Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra.