In a 1997 interview with the game's director Yasumi Matsuno, found within the Famicon Tsuushin magazine, he was asked if terrain effects were in the game. He reponded:
"“Strategy games must have terrain effects” — we didn’t want to be bound by that way of thinking. As far as the player’s experience, though, I do think terrain effects are fine if they’re for easily recognizable and obvious situations, like the difference between playing volleyball in a gym and on a sandy beach. But yeah, the effects we did add were a product of that way of thinking—the user’s experience—rather than arising from strategy conventions."
Early designs for Chang had him wearing a traditional striped prison jumpsuit. This, however, proved difficult to animate, so his outfit was changed to plain white cloth with a skull and crossbones mark. This also turned out to be too difficult, so he was given an even simpler "tunic and chains" design.
The game was originally planned to be an official licensed adaptation of the second film in the Rambo series, titled "Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutsu" ("Rambo: The Furious Escape"). However, SNK was unable to acquire the rights to the film, resulting in the game's title being shortened to Ikari, referencing part of the film's Japanese title.
After the game was released in North America, SNK got in touch with the film's star Sylvester Stallone, who was personal friends with the president of the SNK sales office in America, about acquiring the rights to the film. However, by that point it was too late as the game had already become well known by its Japanese title "Ikari" among North American players after being debuted at an American arcade expo, leading to the deal falling through and the game being officially released as Ikari Warriors in North America.
The native children in the background of the Brazil stage were originally going to flash their buttocks. This idea was dropped after being deemed too distracting and distasteful.
Athena was originally planned to wear her schoolgirl uniform from her original appearance in Psycho Soldier. However, out of concern that overseas audiences wouldn't understand the reference, Athena received a redesign, prominently displayed in her entrance animation which starts her in the original schoolgirl outfit before throwing it off to reveal the new outfit. Athena's entrance animation is also the only one in the game to use 16 sprites, and her Shining Crystal Super Move was programmed in by the developers before proper work on the character had actually begun with the game's planners.
The design of the Anti-Funk, the final boss of the game, originally resembled the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member. This design made it into early review copies of the game before Sega discovered its existence and rejected it, forcing the developers to change it to a skull just before the game's release. In a 2003 Xbox Nation magazine interview with series creator Greg Johnson, he elaborated on the origin of the design:
"When I was doing it, it was actually an accident. We had done a bunch of designs for the Anti-Funk, and the artist had done this unintentionally. I looked at it and said, “Wow, that’s funny. That looks like a Ku Klux Klan hat.” And then I thought about it for a second and I said, “Well hey, what better villain for these black characters who are spreading the funk than the love and this kind of oblique reference?” Because it wasn’t [obvious]—it was open to interpretation."
In a 1989 interview with the game's director/scenario writer Yuji Horii in the 11/89 edition of Famicon Tsuushin, he was asked where the idea for the mini medals, a recurring hidden collectible in the series first introduced in Dragon Warrior IV, came from? He responded:
"DQIV is a multi-chapter story, and you ultimately end up gathering eight party members together, so we thought adding a bunch of story items you had to collect on top of that would be too much, and annoying. But collecting things like “orbs” and “crests” is undoubtedly one of the appeals of Dragon Quest, so we wanted to give players something to collect."
"“Ah hah! Coins!” — that was our first idea, and small medals were originally “gold coins”. But that name was too easily confused with the coins at the casino. Then we remembered the idea we had for “small medals” for Dragon Quest III, 2 and that’s how they got their name. (laughs)"
According to The History of Castlevania: Book of the Crescent Moon, the Belmont family was originally planned to be called the Dante family, with Simon Belmont originally being "Peter Dante, Vampire Killer and grandson of Christopher Dante".
According to a 1997 The PlayStation magazine interview with the game's director Makoto Ikehara & programmer Tatsuya Kitabayashi, they were asked how the game's development began. Ikehara stated that their developments "always sort of start the same way, with just a title." After which they just make whatever they want, and force it to all fit together after the fact. Ikehara also stated that when changing series to the PlayStation, the team considered calling the third game just "Breath of Fire" without the "III", but they ultimately decided not to as they wanted to bring about a conclusion to the work they had done up to then.
Kitabayashi added that after Breath of Fire II had finished, the team, now more confident, wanted to carry over that momentum from the previous game and begin working on Breath of Fire III straightaway.
Ikehara was also asked if there were things that they could not achieve in II that they wanted to do in III, to which he responded:
"Yeah. That’s true with every development, the whole “we’ll do it next time!” thing.
The second disc of the game has long been the subject of controversy due to its seemingly unfinished nature, where Fei and Elly sit in an empty area and narrate the remainder of the game's events as they are shown in a slideshow/montage format, with lengthy dialogue scrolls in front of them and little actual gameplay compared to the first disc. For almost two decades since the game's release, there was seemingly no official explanation about the production of the second disc, and fans believed that director Tetsuya Takahashi had more ambitious plans that the development team was forced to ditch because of budget and time constraints imposed by Square.
In a 2017 Kotaku interview with Takahashi, he revealed that while this speculation was correct, there was more to it than that:
"Honestly speaking, what had happened is Xenogears as a project was staffed pretty much entirely out of new staff members, young staff members... Back then, we had the direction of, ‘All projects take two years and that’s when we need to get it done.’ So on top of developing the game, we had to nurture and teach and grow these younger employees. Things like 3D were extremely new, which led to some delays in the schedule. It just wasn’t possible to get everything done."
The higher-ups at Square, when seeing that the team would not be able to reach the deadline in the state they were in, suggested that Takahashi end the game after the first disc when Spoiler:Fei and his team escape from Solaris. However, he did not feel the game's story should have ended there even with the lack of gameplay:
"It was a rough way to end it, and I felt like if we do that, then the players will not be satisfied... so we had a proposal—I proposed that if we do disc 2 in this way that it turned out to be, we can finish the game with the current number of staff and the current time allotted for the schedule and the remaining budget we have."
"I do think my decision was the right one to make, because if we had just ended at Disc 1 it would have been bad."
In a 2020 interview conducted by the YouTube channel Archipel with series creator Shinji Mikami, he stated that Dino Crisis was not a project he had first created. There was a team within Capcom that was working on original projects, when one day the team's leaders suddenly quit working at the company, leaving the rest behind. They came to Mikami with a pitch for a game with a 3-4 member party system (which Mikami likened to a Dragon Quest game) and asked him what they should do now. In response, he took them under his wing and told them to do their best.
Mikami's team initially brainstormed ideas together, but after struggling to find any good ideas, he asked each individual member to come up with their own ideas so they could decide on which one was the best to pick. At that point, someone from Capcom's graphics department had an idea for a game that took place in a locale similar to Skull Island from the 1933 film "King Kong". Mikami thought that idea was new; there were not that many creatures inhabiting the island, but the only kind was dinosaurs, so they stuck to dinosaurs and applied a gameplay and camera system similar to the first three Resident Evil games to make what would become Dino Crisis.
According to Tomonobu Itagaki, the Temple on the Mountain stage was originally going to be filled with human tourists. But, for an unknown reason, the team filled the stage with 108 white monkeys instead (the number 108 representing worldly desires in Buddhist teachings). The lead designer of the game became so inspired by their addiction that he suggested making an all-monkey fighting game.
In a 1997 interview with Koji Igarashi, found within the NTT-PUB official guidebook, he was asked how he came to hire Ayami Kojima as the game's illustrator? He responded:
"Wanting to do something different from previous Castlevanias, one of our first steps was to imagine an alluring new visual style for the characters. We decided then to search for an illustrator who hadn’t done much work with games, someone who was active in a whole different genre. As a team we went to bookstores and checked out book covers, buying the ones we liked and researching the artists. There were a number of candidates, but we felt that Ayami Kojima’s work had the rich, aesthetic direction we wanted for a new Castlevania."
According to a 2009 interview with the game's director Mitsuo Iwao & producer Yoshinori Yamagishi featured in the game's Official Complete Guide, Iwao stated that they did not immediately come up with the game's title "The Last Hope" right away. He questioned if mankind could really survive after the third World War, and wanted to express their thoughts that humanity's last hope may lie somewhere in the universe.
Yamagishi also stated about the game's title:
"As far as titles go, it was clear and easy to understand, which was big. It didn’t use any complicated terminology; it was straightforward, orthodox, using words any layperson could understand. It was a title that could be easily understood by people outside of Japan, too. I guess subtitles are sort of a tri-ace thing. The previous games didn’t use a numbering system either, and the subtitle makes it feel like its own single work."
According to a 2001 developer interview published in V-Jump magazine, the game's composer Nobuo Uematsu stated his team started including theme songs in the Final Fantasy games since Final Fantasy VIII, and that each time, Uematsu & Yoshinori Kitase would hold a meeting to decide who would sing the theme song. The developers brought in various music CDs of singers they liked to listen to and would share their opinions. At some point during the meeting for Final Fantasy X's theme song, they could not decide on who to pick. Around the same time, a member from their staff happened to buy one of Rikki’s independent releases at a CD shop, and showed it to Uematsu. He loved it after listening to it, and said in a excited mood "This is great!", leading the team to contact Rikki right away to perform the song, called "Suteki Da Ne", for the game. Uematsu considered it a memorable song for FFX, and that from the beginning the music would be a central part of the soundtrack.
According to a 1999 E.G.G. Complete Guide interview with the game's scenario writer/planner/supervisor Hiroaki Hara, he was asked what made him go for a fully illustrated 2D style for the maps. He responded:
"Hmmm… probably just our personal taste. Now that we’re firmly in the era of 3DCG, perhaps some of us may have wanted to go against that current. But in terms of what visual style would most fit the gameplay, for EGG we felt this was the best. This is a unique world that I don’t think can be rendered in polygons. Yet the Dreamcast is a polygon machine, isn’t it? We wanted to take advantage of that strength too, which is why the boss battles switch to 3D. The one thing we didn’t want, though, was for players to have to learn a whole new control scheme for the 3D fights, and we spent a lot of effort adjusting and revising it to feel right.
I would have personally loved to have more time to work on the game. But you know, we’d already spent 3 years… and if you consider the work we did before the initial pitch presentations, it’s even longer. I’ve never spent this much time on a game development before."
In a 1999 developer interview published in Gamest magazine, the concept art for Ibuki's "Yami Shigure" move was originally going to be a normal special attack, but was changed to Super Art after many people complained.
In a 1999 interview featured in the Giga Wing OST's liner notes, the game's planner Ikuo Satou stated that in his team's early planning documents, Giga Wing was a "surprisingly orthodox" shooter game, but the game's developers at Takumi Corporation had a habit of always wanting to do something different:
"Thus with [Capcom and the] development team at Takumi, every meeting became a search for new things to improve.
“We should focus on the 1P experience, right?!” “I know, let’s have the character profiles cut in every time you use a bomb!”
And so on and so forth. In the eruption of ideas and opinions from these meetings, the revisions piled up. By and by the gameplay system was transformed, until before we knew it, the score had 16 digits, the enemy bullets could be reflected, characters were created, and a whole story was added to boot."
According to a 1994 Gamest magazine interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno, he was asked what made him want to make a fighting game where every character was a monster? He responded:
"One reason, as you can probably guess, is that we wanted to create a new, different style of versus fighting game. In the midst of our brainstorming, someone proposed, well, why not make it all about monsters then? With monsters, we wouldn’t have to create brand new characters from wholecloth, and we could use famous monster characters that people would already be familiar with."
As Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors was a brand new fighting game, Ohno and his team also wanted to create brand new special moves for the monsters that were different from those from the Street Fighter II series.
In a 1994 interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno & Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu published in Gamest magazine, they stated that they considered putting monsters from all regions in the series. From the beginning, there were lots of yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters), but they cut the number of them down due to the team realizing that most international players would not recognize them.
Some "weird" characters from the beginning of Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors' development that were rejected include: •An old man who was dressed head-to-toe in a salaryman’s suit. •A nurikabe yōkai that could not move and was always in a guard state, which the game's planners mentioned would be easy to finish due to there being little about the character to animate. •An Invisible Man where the only thing about it the player would be able to see was his floating gloves, which was done so the development team could draw fewer graphics.
Athena was originally planned to wear her schoolgirl uniform from her original appearance in Psycho Soldier. However, out of concern that overseas audiences wouldn't understand the reference, Athena received a redesign, prominently displayed in her entrance animation which starts her in the original schoolgirl outfit before throwing it off to reveal the new outfit. Athena's entrance animation is also the only one in the game to use 16 sprites, and her Shining Crystal Super Move was programmed in by the developers before proper work on the character had actually begun with the game's planners.
The design of the Anti-Funk, the final boss of the game, originally resembled the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member. This design made it into early review copies of the game before Sega discovered its existence and rejected it, forcing the developers to change it to a skull just before the game's release. In a 2003 Xbox Nation magazine interview with series creator Greg Johnson, he elaborated on the origin of the design:
In a 1999 developer interview published in Gamest magazine, the concept art for Ibuki's "Yami Shigure" move was originally going to be a normal special attack, but was changed to Super Art after many people complained.
In a 1994 interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno & Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu published in Gamest magazine, they stated that they considered putting monsters from all regions in the series. From the beginning, there were lots of yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters), but they cut the number of them down due to the team realizing that most international players would not recognize them.