According to the character designer, Tatsuhiko "Falcoon" Kanaoka, both Meira brothers were initially conceptualized to be the KOF counterparts to the Bogard brothers, given the game's setting, Southtown, is the same in Fatal Fury. Several of the brothers' prototype designs were assigned to other characters' alternate outfits; in this case, Alba's prototype design became Rock's alternate outfit, and Soiree's prototype design became Maxima's alternate outfit.
According to the game's artist, Yutaka Saito, Mila was created with the theme of "a girl who would appear in a sports anime or TV drama".
So we looked at lots of material of female athletes, and there was one that was very attractive/interesting to us. It was a blonde model who was profusely sweating while properly boxing, there were two pictures where afterward she took off her gloves, dangled them over her shoulder and smiled like "See you again tomorrow". When I saw them I thought "That's it!". Maybe you'd call it on/off? [referring to being on: training earnestly and off: smiling afterwards] When in the gym or the ring, it's all about winning, about becoming stronger. But once she leaves the ring, she returns to being a cute girl. This duality is what really enamored me. I think that Mira is a character who has that duality.
Critical Bursts were not originally going to be featured in the game. The staff did not see them as a priority at the time and did not add them to the demo. However, the game's director, Yohei Shinbori, thought they were an interesting idea and added the mechanic into the game's E3 playable build. After receiving positive feedback, an improved version of Critical Bursts became part of the final product.
According to a 1993 interview with the game's programmer Kan Naitou published in the 5/93 issue of Famicon Tsuushin, he stated that the game took a lot of inspiration from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s movies. He also stated that a single action in the game took 7 frames of animation, an idea which came from Disney's animated movies.
According to a 2003 interview with the game's director/writer Yoshio Sakamoto published in GSLA, he stated that after Super Metroid on the Super Famicom, they couldn't use the underpowered Game Boy Color for a new Metroid game. When the Game Boy Advance was released, a console whose specs surpassed the Super Famicom, the team from the mobile games division really wanted to work with it.
In a 1995 developer interview featured in the game's guidebook, the game's staff were asked what their concept for the development of this game was. They responded:
"A new Fatal Fury, one that both beginners and experienced players could enjoy, punched up with loads of snazzy visual effects. That was our image, but of course, the way newcomers and veteran players enjoy a FTG is dramatically different, right? Newcomers play relatively casually, and want to be able to perform lots of different special moves; meanwhile, veterans are more interested in precise timing and big combos. We tried to appeal to both, but above all, to make it the kind of game that jumps out at you visually."
"This may be too subtle to notice on first glance, but did you see how most of the stage backgrounds are done in darker colors? We did that so the flashy HIT marks and player graphics would stand out all the more. We asked ourselves, what do players really want to see in a FTG game today? And what you see in Real Bout Fatal Fury is the answer we came up with."
"I think you can say this about any game, but if it looks good, it will look fun to players. With that principle as our basis, we endeavored to make a game that truly anyone could enjoy."
According to a 1992 interview with the game's director/original story writer Makoto Ogino published in BEEP Megadrive magazine, he stated that while playing The Legend of Zelda, he held a strange fascination for it and loved the game, despite not caring for other games before then, and always wondered why there wasn't a game like it that came out since. He claimed that "it's good when games have a simple system like Zelda. It's got a lot of depth. I want King Colossus to be like that too."
According to a 2007 interview with the game's planner/graphic designer Yukio Takahashi published in the book Game Shokunin, the interviewer commented that the ending scene where the main character removes their helmet to find out that she’s actually a woman was the first game to make such a surprise twist. He responded:
"This was influenced by the anime Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Actually, a bunch of things were influenced by Nausicaa: the protagonist you just mentioned, the side-profile perspective of the paccets, and the Blue Worm boss… Also, as I mentioned, because people during the development were so enthusiastic about slaughtering all the paccets they could, as a contrast to all that cruelty I wanted at least in the final scene to have something cute and adorable, so I drew those ending images."
In an interview with the game's director and planner Kengo Morita, which was published in the All About Puyo Puyo Tsu guidebook in 1995, he was asked why the Mega Drive version didn't have the endless mode (“Tokoton Puyo”)? He stated that he was so busy focusing on the main game that he forgotten about it because from the developers' perspective, they always thought that endless mode was more of a side-dish. He also stated despite complaints about the lack of manzai demos in user surveys during development, they were left out due to time constraints.
The game's official art book, The Art of Super Mario Odyssey, includes concept sketches for a never-realized scenario where Bowser uses his own version of the Capture ability to possess Princess Peach, who would adopt Bowser's physical characteristics.
The concept art attracted attention online following the book's publication, as it coincidentally predated the creation of Bowsette, a viral fanmade design for Bowser wearing the Super Crown power-up from the Nintendo Switch port of New Super Mario Bros. U. Like the concept art, the Bowsette design mixes together attributes from both Peach and Bowser. The original comic depicting Bowsette was itself a parody of Super Mario Odyssey's ending, Spoiler:depicting Mario going out on a date with the Super Crown-wearing Bowser following Peach's rejection of the two.
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Four pieces of artwork in the Japanese release of the game were replaced in the international versions:
•The Fine Painting ("Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater" by Amedeo Modigliani) is replaced with the Basic Painting ("The Blue Boy" by Thomas Gainsborough). •The Healing Painting ("Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son" by Claude Monet, a.k.a. "The Stroll") is replaced with the Classic Painting ("Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Emanuel Leutze). •The Lovely Painting ("Portrait of Irène Cahen d'Anvers" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir) is replaced with the Quaint Painting ("The Milkmaid" by Johannes Vermeer). •The Pleasant Feeling Painting ("Olympia" by Édouard Manet) is replaced with the Scary Painting ("Ōtani Oniji III in the Role of the Servant Edobei" by Tōshūsai Sharaku).
Of these four, the only painting whose reason for replacement can be concretely inferred is the Pleasant Feeling Painting. Its real-world equivalent depicts a prostitute lying nude in bed, which Nintendo of America likely deemed too mature for a child audience.
The Fine Painting that was replaced in the Japanese release is a different item from the one named the Fine Painting in the English release of Animal Crossing, which is based on Paul Gauguin's "Arearea" and is included in all versions of the game.
With the exception of the Classic Painting, the replacement artwork would become standard for later entries in the series; the only replaced painting to return in a subsequent game is the Lovely Painting, present in all versions of Animal Crossing: Wild World.
Several clothing items were changed between the Japanese and international releases of the game:
•The Three Arc Shirt (a.k.a. the Familiar Shirt) is replaced with the Fortune Shirt, due to the former's resemblance to Charlie Brown's shirt in the American comic strip Peanuts (which had ended its print run in 2000, shortly before the game's release). •The Tomato Juice Shirt is replaced with the Fishbone Shirt, due to the former's design resembling bloodstains. •The W Shirt is replaced with the Houndstooth Tee, due to the former's resemblance to the logo of American fast food chain McDonald's. •The Puzzling Shirt is redesigned to use more pastel colors, also changing the bottom-center square from orange to purple, to reduce the design's similarity to the Rubik's Cube brand of toy puzzles. •The I Love GC Shirt (itself a redesign of the I Love 64 shirt from Dōbutsu no Mori) is replaced with the Cherry Shirt, due to the former being a parody of the I ❤ NY logo, which is trademarked by the New York Department of Economic Development.
These redesigns are also carried over to Dobutsu no Mori e+.
One of the early ideas for this game was an story driven game where the player would interview various people in a village to see if they were worthy to be sacrificed to the monster train. Gavin Eisenbeisz of Two Star Games scrapped the idea because it was considered too weird and because he decided to put bigger emphasis on gameplay rather than storytelling.
According to Gavin Eisenbeisz of Two Star Games, this game is a parody of Thomas the Tank Engine; the idea came because he noticed that there aren't enough games that parody children's TV shows.
In the Alpha build of the game and its E3 2015 demo, it would have originally revealed storyelements in the form of "Epitaphs", small gravestones spread throughout Lothric which upon offering a flame to it will display a text blurb with a lore-related message on each. In the English version of the Alpha build, some Epitaphs have no text due to the feature having been scrapped by that time, however in the Japanese version of the Alpha build, the data for all Epitaph texts and most of their physical placements on the game's map exist, albeit some are out of bounds or clustered together as their locations had not been finalized before being scrapped.
In the original game, the mural in Hyrule Castle Town was blurry and hard to make out. In Twilight Princess HD, the textures were updated with clearer, brand new designs. Notably, this updated mural features a Rito, a species which does not exist at the time the game takes place nor in the series' Child Timeline.
Separately, in the Temple of Time, a picture frame can be found with a backwards message written in Hylian along the lower border. Translating it reveals a hidden developer credit: "Jack Kirby Crosby Made This".
Crosby, a graphics designer working for Tantalus on the HD remaster of Twilight Princess, later confirmed that he was responsible for both that credit and the mural, the latter of which was the result of a higher-up at Nintendo asking for some reliefs in Hyrule Castle Town to be redone in the same style as a shop he had re-textured. The new mural design was inspired by Crosby's own idea of a story for a Zelda game and drew additional inspiration from a Zelda art book without any story direction from Nintendo, meaning the events depicted therein are non-canon.
In early pre-release screenshots and in the first playable demo of the game, Link could ride a canoe in Ordon Village's river, although this feature was removed from this area in the final game. These screenshots also suggest that the river was planned to be bigger and potentially a Fishing Hole before being sized down, although Hena's pond in the final game bears some resemblance to this area.
Interestingly, an unused yet fully implemented feature for canoes allows dogs to hop on and ride with Link on the bow, and then hop off when returning to land. However, dogs and canoes do not appear together in any location in the final game unless they are modded in. Seeing as Ordon Village has two dogs inside different houses and was originally meant to have canoes, it's possible this place would have done more with this feature before it was scrapped.
At Lakehill Seattle Hospital, while Ellie is looking for Nora, she holds a guard named Whitney at knifepoint, who is seen during the game playing a PlayStation Vita. The game she is playing is Hotline Miami, as indicated by the second floor of Chapter 7: Neighbors on the Vita's screen and the song "Hydrogen" playing in the background.
In a 2020 Eurogamer interview with the game's co-director Neil Druckmann, he revealed that they were originally going to use a previous Naughty Dog game in that scene, until they thought:
"Okay, is there an opportunity here to just make some meta-statement about the kind of narrative we're after? And we're also just huge fans of Hotline Miami - like, I love that game. I love the engine of that game. So we reached out to those guys, and they were nice enough to let us put it in there."
A Famitsu Column with game director Masahiro Sakurai revealed that Sora was able to get into the game because of a chance meeting that he had with a Disney executive at an unspecified awards ceremony where they expressed how cool it would be for the Kingdom Hearts protagonist to be a part of the Super Smash Bros. roster. This soon lead to negotiations between Nintendo, Square Enix, and Disney that eventually got the extremely highly requested character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Before then, Sakurai admitted he and Nintendo thought getting the Disney-owned character was a total impossibility.
According to the character designer, Tatsuhiko "Falcoon" Kanaoka, both Meira brothers were initially conceptualized to be the KOF counterparts to the Bogard brothers, given the game's setting, Southtown, is the same in Fatal Fury. Several of the brothers' prototype designs were assigned to other characters' alternate outfits; in this case, Alba's prototype design became Rock's alternate outfit, and Soiree's prototype design became Maxima's alternate outfit.
In the 1.04 update, Cammy's leotard costume removed her nipples from her 3D model.
The game's official art book, The Art of Super Mario Odyssey, includes concept sketches for a never-realized scenario where Bowser uses his own version of the Capture ability to possess Princess Peach, who would adopt Bowser's physical characteristics.
Several clothing items were changed between the Japanese and international releases of the game:
In the original game, the mural in Hyrule Castle Town was blurry and hard to make out. In Twilight Princess HD, the textures were updated with clearer, brand new designs. Notably, this updated mural features a Rito, a species which does not exist at the time the game takes place nor in the series' Child Timeline.
In early pre-release screenshots and in the first playable demo of the game, Link could ride a canoe in Ordon Village's river, although this feature was removed from this area in the final game. These screenshots also suggest that the river was planned to be bigger and potentially a Fishing Hole before being sized down, although Hena's pond in the final game bears some resemblance to this area.
At Lakehill Seattle Hospital, while Ellie is looking for Nora, she holds a guard named Whitney at knifepoint, who is seen during the game playing a PlayStation Vita. The game she is playing is Hotline Miami, as indicated by the second floor of Chapter 7: Neighbors on the Vita's screen and the song "Hydrogen" playing in the background.