In the NTT-PUB official guidebook, Koji Igarashi stated the team wanted to give players enough enjoyment with the game to match their money's worth by giving them more freedom to roam around to lengthen the playtime, unlike the previous Castlevania games which were shorter. To accomplish this, he inserted RPG elements like experience points and a level up system into the game so players would be more encouraged to challenge themselves against difficult enemies.
"We gave the player a lot of freedom because we wanted to lengthen the playtime for an action game, which is usually short. If people spend 5800 yen (approx $58) on a game, they should get 5800 yen worth of enjoyment from it. Even when a game is very difficult, defeating enemies isn’t very exciting, is it? I thought it would be fun for players to get experience from enemies and level up, so I added RPG elements."
In the NTT-PUB official guidebook, Koji Igarashi & Toru Hagihara stated that in their early planning stages they came up with an alignment system. If the player used a lot of sub-weapons, they would gain a holy alignment; if they used a lot of magic, they would gain a dark alignment. There would be different endings based on the alignments with various subtitles, with Igarashi citing one as being named "聖魔のトリル" (seima no toriru), something like "The Trill of Light and Darkness." A trill is a musical ornament where two adjacent notes (i.e. 聖 "holy" and 魔 "evil") alternate rapidly. The reason for this feature's removal is unknown.
According to a 1993 World of Phantasy Star book interview with Miki Morimoto, she stated that the meaning of the game's title was like “a planet/star of fantasy” and that Yuji Naka was the one who originally named the game Phantasy Star. He started with just the word "Fantasy", and played around with it until he figured out what to name the game. He was also influenced by a song called "Nagisa no Fantasy" (Beachside Fantasy) by his favorite singer, an idol named Noriko Sakai.
In a 1991 interview with BEEP Mega Drive Magazine, the game's composer Yuzo Koshiro stated that he started writing the music for the game at the end of 1990. He often went dancing at clubs, and at the time, the scene was moving on from Eurobeat to a new trend: house music. Because Streets of Rage was a beat 'em up game, he wanted the music to be energetic and exciting, and initially thought about writing a rock soundtrack for the game. However, when he first tried using house music in the game, "it all clicked, and [he] thought it sounded really cool."
The PlayStation 3's launch was delayed a year after the Xbox 360 was released, supposedly because of a short supply of blue laser diodes, a "$0.05 component" that were used on the system's Blu-ray drive to read Blu-ray discs. Former PlayStation executive Phil Harrison elaborated:
"In this particular case, the shift from red laser to blue laser was actually quite a sophisticated change in the way that the optical head on a drive worked, and it was a little bit of physics and a little bit of chemistry mixed together, because it's really a crystal that you're making. And they just couldn't make enough."
Though the game can run at 60 frames per second, the team had to lower the framerate to 30 frames per second when using Ninpo attacks due to hardware limitations. This change came to the disappointment of director Tomonobu Itagaki who strongly believed a ninja's magic should be "impressive and powerful" and who wanted the development team to use every resource they had to make the Ninpo attacks live up to his vision.
After footage of the game's final boss surfaced from pre-release copies, players expressed concern to the developers that some intense rapidly flashing lights and other visuals during the final boss may cause serious seizures to players that have Photosensitive epilepsy, and in general may be an eyesore to players that are not epileptic. The developers understood and significantly changed the battle effects in a day-one patch that was heavily recommended by Square Enix to be downloaded by future players.
The description for the Heshikiri Hasabe sword alludes to a real-life event where daimyo Oda Nobunaga used the sword to murder one of his servants in anger after he insulted him. The final enemy in the "Kanbei and the Overlord" side mission is a yōkai resembling a biwa that steals the weapon because of a grudge related to the sword. It is heavily implied that the demon is that slain servant.
If the player detonates explosive gel inside Penguin's vault, the stack of bombs turns into an unused destroyed Titan canister model that appears to have been carried over from Batman: Arkham City, although it is impossible to go back inside the vault to interact with it.
According to Masahiro Sakurai, the reason Min Min was chosen as the playable Arms representative out of the game's cast is because Arms producer Kosuke Yabuki personally requested Min Min; Ninjara was among his top choices to appear in the game as well. Yabuki at one point considered asking them to add the entire cast of Arms' lead protagonists as alternate costumes or playstyles instead of just one character.
Fortnite was stuck in development hell, with such development beginning as early as 2011 when it was first announced at the Spike Video Game Awards. The earliest idea for Fortnite was a horror-style third-person shooter similar to Gears of War, another series developed by Epic Games and later sold off to Microsoft.
Fortnite was originally made using Unreal Engine 3, but later shifted to its successor Unreal Engine 4 due to new high-tech functions that its preceding engine lacked. Because of this, the game was almost a PC-exclusive game and was set for a 2013 release, as Epic Games did not want to wait months for a game to get approved by console manufacturers, such as Nintendo and Sony, although they later acknowledged that a console release could not be ruled out. As Epic shifted to Unreal Engine 4 however, they immediately ran into development problems, which resulted in them hiring MMORPG developers to help finish the game.
According to a Japanese Seiken Densetsu guide book (specifically, the one with the blue bottom and "SQUARE BRAND" in the bottom right corner), one of the game's programmers claimed that it apparently began life as an experimental tennis game.
"This game actually started out as an experimental tennis game. At some point, the court turned into scrollable screens, the racket turned into the playable character, the ball turned into a weapon, the opponent’s racket turned into enemies, and the “court” became referred to as the “map”… And before I realized it, a story was added into it and then the game was released as “Seiken Densetsu.” It was a curious experience."
There are certain days coded into the game's files that alter Pokemon spawn rates.
On August 6th, August 9th and September 11th, Pokemon are 10% less likely to spawn in the wild. These dates coincide with the atomic bombings on Japan, and the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States.
On certain major holidays such as Christmas, New Years and Culture Day (November 3rd in Japan), Pokemon are 5% less likely to spawn in the wild possibly to discourage gameplay during holidays.
33 other holiday dates were found to have a 5% increase in wild Pokemon spawns, such as St. Patrick's Day (March 17th), Independence Day (July 4th in the United States), Bank Holiday (August 28th in the UK) and Christmas Eve (December 24th).
Bandai Namco heavily assisted Nintendo in the development of their games Mario Kart Tour, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Arms according to the Products page on Bandai Namco's website. However, they chose to be uncredited for their work in the games' final releases.
The game started development at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands as a way to predict how the railroad station in Utrecht, the location of where it was being developed, would look in 10 years as a result of the then-recent reconstruction of the town. THQ was impressed with their work and bought the rights to it, eventually making it a fully-fledged video game that would become de Blob.
In the PC version, a dash feature was introduced. The feature was in an early developer build of the game as a debug feature and was mistakenly left in the final build. When developer Cavia offered to remove the feature, publisher XSEED Games requested for the feature to stay in the game as it improved the gameplay's pace.
Kingdom Hearts' international release is the last game by Squaresoft released outside of Japan to have their logo and name adorned on its case before the company merged with Enix to become Square Enix in 2003. The Japanese version of Final Fantasy X-2 was last game ever to feature the Squaresoft logo in any region.
Kasumi was initially envisioned as a male character and was not going to be the protagonist. However, after changing the character's sex to female, series creator Tomonobu Itagaki became attached to her new design and decided to make her the heroine. Itagaki would go on to describe Kasumi as his “daughter”, and that she is “like a Venus” to him, as well as defending her sexualization among the rest of the series cast despite her canonical age of 17 years old being considered underage in countries with higher ages of consent like the United States. The now-defunct game journalism website QuickJump quoted him in 2007 as saying “in Japan, [the sexualization of a 17-year old] is okay. Maybe it’s 20 in America.”
Although Terry Bogard from Fatal Fury had made it into the game as a downloadable character, Masahiro Sakurai had initially planned to add Mai Shiranui alongside Terry. In the Japanese Nintendo Direct presentation of Terry Bogard, he explained further that he worried that CERO (Japan's video game rating board) would raise the rating from A (for all Ages) to a higher one which was why he reconsidered having her in the game, joking that Super Smash Bros. was only for "good boys and girls".
During the Plant chapter, several Mo'ai statues can be found in different locations on the Big Shell: • Strut D: Among the scaffolding above the pool. • Shell 1 Core, B2 Computer Room: Underneath the south-western computer desk. • Strut L: In the far corner of the small room behind the windows. • Shell 2 Core, 1F Air Purification Room: In the vents, using the Nikita. • Shell 2 Core, B1 Filtration Chamber No. 1: Underneath the wreckage, underwater. • Shell 2 Core, Locker Room (Where Emma Emmerich is hiding): It's hiding inside the locker (This locker can only be opened in Extreme mode. However, there's a Claymore mine that is set inside the locker, which will kill the player instantly if it's not destroyed or picked up). • Strut E: In the room with the Digital Camera, behind the northernmost boxes.
In the PC version, a dash feature was introduced. The feature was in an early developer build of the game as a debug feature and was mistakenly left in the final build. When developer Cavia offered to remove the feature, publisher XSEED Games requested for the feature to stay in the game as it improved the gameplay's pace.
