In interview with game's lead writer Matthew Ritter at Gamescom 2018, he stated that he was influenced by adventure games like Beneath a Steel Sky and the Space Quest series while growing up and always looked to those when writing.
According to Akira Ushizawa in a 1998 interview published in volume 122 of Gamest magazine, he was asked where the idea of all of the game's fighters being summoned through a time machine to fight each other came from, and he responded:
"It was when we were first working on the planning, and thinking of stages for each character. We wanted those stages to have a lot of individual personality, and someone suggested the idea of setting the stages in different eras."
In a 1993 Dengeki Megadrive interview with the game's producer and writer Hiroyuki Takahashi, he was asked what was the basic difference between Shining Force I and Shining Force II? He responded:
"The first Shining Force was a game of armies battling armies. In Shining Force II, it doesn’t have that rigid “troops” feel so much—it’s more of a swashbuckling adventure. For example, say your team is traveling by wagon. In the first game you’d basically proceed straight to your “true enemy”, but in this one, you might get waylaid by random monsters along the way. In that sense, Shining Force II doesn’t feel like a game where you’re simply trying to defeat the big bad guy at the end."
Hiroyuki also stated that he intentionally changed the way the game's story progressed, noting that in the first Shining Force game, as soon as the player leaves town, they're drawn into a fight. He felt that players saw this immediacy as too linear and forced, and decided not repeat it with the second game.
According to game's planner and director Kenji Sawatari in a 1998 Gamest magazine interview, he was asked why he added a female character to World Heroes. He responded:
"We haven’t had many female characters in our games up to now, so we wanted to add a proper one. Kagerou, the white ninja you can use after stage 3 in Ninja Combat, was ADK’s only other female character to date."
According to the game's director Tomoyoshi Miyazaki during a 1995 interview featured in Dengeki SFC and Famicon Tsuushin magazines, he was asked how the game's development began? He responded:
"We started the planning for Terranigma very shortly after completing Illusion of Gaia, so we’re about a year and a half into the development now. Of all our Super Famicom titles, I think Soul Blazer would be the most iconic Quintet game. However, the world of Soul Blazer didn’t feel like a big, epic—it felt more like you were playing a series of miniature set pieces. That was something I was left a bit unsatisfied with.
Soul Blazer had a unique worldview, though: in that game we tried to depict humans as viewed from a non-human perspective. So the inspiration for Terranigma came from the desire to combine that concept with an “epic”, larger world a la Illusion of Gaia."
According to the game's producer and graphics/visual artist Daisuke Ishiwatari in two 1998 The PlayStation (JP) and Dengeki PlayStation magazine interviews, Ishiwatari stated that he originally wanted to ask Koichi Yamadera to voice Sol Badguy, but didn't give him the role. The high cost of hiring Yamadera meant there would not be enough payment for the rest of the game's voice actors who had already been set for their roles, meaning the team couldn't make any further adjustments, so Ishiwatari took on the voice roles of Sol Badguy and Potemkin himself. When asked why they could not have just hired a different voice actor, Ishiwatari responded:
"Well, that was an option too, but I felt like if we couldn’t have Yamadera, I might as well just do it myself. Now I kind of regret that choice, it was a bit impudent of me."
According to the game's producer and graphics/visual artist Daisuke Ishiwatari in a 1998 The PlayStation (JP) magazine interview, he was asked how the game's development started? He responded:
"Well, at the time we wrote the initial planning documents, the decline of 2D versus fighting games had not yet begun. And I personally felt like there was not a single fighting game out then that had truly “cool” characters in it, though I had been a fan of the original 2D fighting game, Street Fighter II. Anyway, feeling dissatisfied, I started drafting the plans that would become Guilty Gear. Arc System Works then publicly announced it, along with the characters, but there followed a very long period where nothing happened… eventually we reached at point at the company where we had a software development environment capable of handling it, and that’s when the real development finally started."
According to game's producer and graphics/VA Daisuke Ishiwatari in The PlayStation (JP) magazine interview, he was asked how long did it take to make the game? He responded:
"Once we got down to the actual development work, it took about a year and a half to complete. It was a very long interval, though, from the time we finished the planning docs to the time we started development."
He also revealed that the game was originally in development for the Nintendo 64, the Sega Saturn, and for arcades as well as the PlayStation, and that as a result, Ishiwatari put a lot of thought into designing the Instant Kill system, and that it only ended up the way it was in the final game when the team decided to make Guilty Gear exclusive to home consoles.
In a 1997 The PlayStation (JP) Magazine interview, the game's producer Sherry McKenna was asked if the team used motion capture for the character animation in the game. She responded:
"No, it’s standard, original animation. The most important thing for us was making it feel like the characters lived in and inhabited that world. It wasn’t about showing off the latest in fancy technologies or anything."
During the fight with Psycho Mantis, the player is intended to swap their controller to the second port to prevent Psycho Mantis from reading their mind. However, if you call Campbell after losing to Psycho Mantis enough times, Campbell and Naomi will reveal that the statues in the room are based on Mantis himself, and attacking the statues will distract him long enough to be attacked. This alternate strategy was implemented in case the second controller port of the PlayStation is damaged, although this strategy was not included in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on the GameCube.
There are several zips/screen wraps and out of bounds travel spots in the game that can be performed with Shovel Knight, Plague Knight, and Specter Knight. Each Knight has the ability to perform them in different areas in different ways, with some not being intended by the developers and patched out to prevent them from happening during casual play, while others that they saw as being hard to pull off by first-time players were left in and are still used by the game's speedrunning community (as of September 2021).
Shovel Knight can perform the "Bubble Wrap" zip in the Plains of Passage by bouncing off of one of the Bubble Dragon's bubbles, causing the game's camera to try and follow Shovel Knight by pushing him through an off-screen transition into the room directly above the Bubble Dragon.
Plague Knight can perform similar harmless "Room Zips" in one area in the Iron Whale by bursting, jumping, bursting again, followed by two uses of the Staff of Surging to access a secret room with a Music Sheet, and when boarding the Flying Machine by using a combination of the Vat and Burst Jumping to skip two vertical screens and the challenges within them. In previous versions of the game, Plague Knight could preserve their momentum before entering a boss room, allowing speedrunners to set themselves up by triggering the opening dialogue to a boss fight in more advantageous spots than normal. This would be patched out later to prevent unexpected results, but still allowed a brief window for players to perform any action, including bursting forwards to bosses anyways. All characters may do any action frame perfectly after the transition, including pausing.
Specter Knight used to be able to perform a transition in the second stage of the Tower of Fate ("????" in New Game + only). Normally, Specter Knight can perform an easter egg by jumping off of a ledge in the Tower of Fate, but will not lose money and trigger a cutscene with either Dark Acolyte or Reize. However, the plane that triggers this death used to be low enough that Specter Knight could float underneath a nearby ledge precisely and use that as a screen transition to enter areas the player is not supposed to go to yet. In a later update, this plane was raised to prevent this glitch from happening, but Specter Knight does have a glitch that was intentionally left in by the developers. In the Lost City, a trick called "Lost Spaghetti can be performed in one area by having Specter Knight turn the lava into bouncy goo while he is falling in. If done right, Specter Knight should fall just below the plane where he would bounce on the goo and harmlessly phase through it into the room below, missing the death plane normally assigned to the lava.
In earlier releases of the game, Specter Knight can double jump with some complicated inputs, two walls very close together, and the use of a curio that doesn't halt his momentum. This glitch would later be patched out.
Plague Knight can achieve super speed by combining a fleet flask with a bomb burst, but only while the cheat code that enables God Mode is activated ("STQQTXVX"). This glitch can cause various softlocks due to it providing far more speed than the game expects the player to have, and can break cutscenes and lure bosses outside of their arenas.
According to the game's executive producer Takeshi Miyaji in a 2000 Dreamcast Magazine interview, the interviewer asked him if the game's target demographic would be a little older now given that Grandia II was the second game in the series, and he responded:
"Yeah. To begin with, obviously the people who played Grandia are also now 3-4 years older. So that was one reason we raised our target age.
The other reason is that, with the Grandia series, we don’t want to make the same game every time. The last game was a young boy’s tale of adventure, but in Grandia we wanted to show other things. By raising the target age, we could make the world a little more edgy and mature."
According to English voice actor Sean Chiplock during a 2020 Reddit AMA, he was asked how did he get to voice Noob Saibot. He responded:
"Pretty much the same as I potentially get any other role; my agency sent me audition sides for the character, I submitted my audition takes, and the client decided they liked one of them enough to cast me! The character/project was codenamed at the time so I didn't know what it was for, but the specs asked for something "wraith-life and not of this world". So for the first take, I did something higher pitched and ghostly, with a little bit of teeth; for the second, I impersonated Black Doom from Shadow the Hedgehog's game on GameCube, and aimed for a baritone demonic rumble."
In a 1995 interview with the game's director Hiromichi Tanaka and designer Koichi Ishii, found within the Family Computer Magazine and Famitsu, they were asked when did they began planning out the game. They commented:
Tanaka: "We started drafting the plans for SD3 two years ago. We then went through a period of trial-and-error, where we programmed a lot of different systems, erased them, programmed them anew, erased them… and so forth, until finally we came up with something we now like."
Ishii: "We more or less wanted SD3 to be a continuation of Secret of Mana, but we ended up scrapping all the code from Secret of Mana. It was like, “All these parts that weren’t interesting, let’s try starting from a blank slate and finding another way.” So we essentially reconstructed all the programming for SD3 anew."
In a 1995 interview with the game's designer Koichi Ishii, found within the Family Computer Magazine and Famitsu, he was asked how the game's team created the "three-dimensional" quality in the game's map, characters and monsters. He responded:
"For example, take a boss battle like the fight with Mispolm. That battle is presented to the player from a certain visual angle. If you completely ignore the background when you’re creating the sprites, then the sense of orientation of the scene gets completely messed up. That’s why we had the sprite artists and the background artists work in tandem for SD3, communicating closely with each other as they went.
We’re aiming for something better than Disney. Also, for shadows and the like, we’re using deep blues and purples instead of shades of black, to impart a sense of softness. If you use black for that there’s a tendency for things to look cold and sterile. As I mentioned, visually we wanted to go for a more storybook, fantasy vibe rather than something realistic. It’s the same direction we went with in Secret of Mana, but in that game we didn’t have enough memory to fully express what we wanted."
In a 2001 interview with the game's illustrator Tonko (Aki Senno), found within the Arcadia magazine, she was asked if both Garou: Mark of the Wolves (MOW) and The Last Blade had the same staff working on them. She responded:
"No, it wasn’t. MOW was originally being developed by a very select group; later, a few of the Last Blade staff joined in. The waterfall stage, and several others, were done by The Last Blade staff. Visually I think you can see a bit of The Last Blade’s style in those stages."
According to a 1998 interview with Sega R&D head Hideki Sato published in The History of SEGA Console Hardware, the Mega Drive's design from Japan was based on the audio player's appearance, and presented the "16-bit" label embossed with a golden metallic veneer to give it an impact of power:
"We had a feeling that before long, consumers would be appreciating video games with the same sense with which they enjoyed music; moreover, since the Megadrive was a machine that you put in front of your TV, our concept was to make it look like an audio player. So we painted the body black and put the “16BIT” lettering in a gold print. That gold printing, by the way, was very expensive. (laughs) But we really wanted to play up the fact that this was the very first 16-bit home console."
In a 2004 interview with D (a pseudonym for one of four members of DECO [Data East Corporation] interviewed), found within the Arcade Gamer vol.1 mook (magazine/book portmanteau), he was asked how development on Outlaws of the Lost Dynasty began. He responded:
"One day our boss came in and declared, “You know what would be a big hit in China? A game based on Suikoden!” And we were off. Most of the staff was a bit perplexed, “Huh? Suikoden… why not Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) instead?” In any event, the development schedule was very short so it was a tough one."
According to the game's producer and graphics/visual artist Daisuke Ishiwatari in two 1998 The PlayStation (JP) and Dengeki PlayStation magazine interviews, Ishiwatari stated that he originally wanted to ask Koichi Yamadera to voice Sol Badguy, but didn't give him the role. The high cost of hiring Yamadera meant there would not be enough payment for the rest of the game's voice actors who had already been set for their roles, meaning the team couldn't make any further adjustments, so Ishiwatari took on the voice roles of Sol Badguy and Potemkin himself. When asked why they could not have just hired a different voice actor, Ishiwatari responded:
There are several zips/screen wraps and out of bounds travel spots in the game that can be performed with Shovel Knight, Plague Knight, and Specter Knight. Each Knight has the ability to perform them in different areas in different ways, with some not being intended by the developers and patched out to prevent them from happening during casual play, while others that they saw as being hard to pull off by first-time players were left in and are still used by the game's speedrunning community (as of September 2021).
In earlier releases of the game, Specter Knight can double jump with some complicated inputs, two walls very close together, and the use of a curio that doesn't halt his momentum. This glitch would later be patched out.
Plague Knight can achieve super speed by combining a fleet flask with a bomb burst, but only while the cheat code that enables God Mode is activated ("STQQTXVX"). This glitch can cause various softlocks due to it providing far more speed than the game expects the player to have, and can break cutscenes and lure bosses outside of their arenas.
