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.
The German rating board deemed the game's gore and violence excessive and refused to rate the game at all. Since this had the potential to place the game on Germany's "List of Media Harmful to Young People", banning shops from either advertising or selling the game to customers of 18 years or older, Tecmo censored the PAL version to obtain a rating. A year later, Tecmo managed to obtain an 18+ rating for the uncensored release of Ninja Gaiden Black.
The game was originally a completely original IP during its early development stage. However, Itagaki was asked to title the game Ninja Gaiden so the game could be easily marketed to foreign markets.
According to a 2003 the Sega Meisaku series interview with the game's director/designer Noriyoshi Ohba, he was asked what kind of work directing the game specifically entailed. He responded that since he was the only planner/designer working on the game, he "basically had to be involved in everything" from the planning, to designing the gameplay system, to the art (including which backgrounds to use, among other things), etc.
According to a 2003 the Sega Meisaku series interview with the game's director/designer Noriyoshi Ohba, he was asked why the game wasn't a stealth game despite the name "Shinobi" implying the protagonist would be more stealthy. Ohba responded that this was probably due to the team wanting to show off "how cool and badass ninjas are" as they can jump higher than normal people and have stronger physiques.
The first stage of development was to create the game on the Sega NAOMI arcade system. They then planned to move the project to the Dreamcast console for further development and release, but this was abandoned when Sega ended the console's production in 2001. The game was then planned to be a launch title for the PlayStation 2. However, the game's producer, Tomonobu Itagaki, changed the development towards an Xbox exclusive after being impressed with the software development kits for the console.
Geese Howard's design is based on the character King, the main antagonist of SNK's arcade beat-em-up The Super Spy. His name comes from one of the bosses of the same game. Additional inspiration comes from Robert de Niro's role in The Godfather.
During the planning phase of development, the Mexico Team was originally going to be made up of Ryo Sakazaki, Robert Garcia, and Lee Pai Long. Over the course of development, Lee was drop in favor of Yuri, who would finally be replaced with Takuma in the final game.
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.
Geese Howard's design is based on the character King, the main antagonist of SNK's arcade beat-em-up The Super Spy. His name comes from one of the bosses of the same game. Additional inspiration comes from Robert de Niro's role in The Godfather.
