In the game's Trial Version demo bundled with Brave Fencer Musashi, a song called "Raid on Dollet" plays during the opening to the first gameplay segment on the beaches of Dollet. However, in the final game, it is replaced by a completely different song called "The Landing", and "Raid on Dollet" could now only be heard in the game's debug room. It's been widely speculated that this song was removed from the scene for legal reasons due to similarities with the song "Hummel Gets the Rockets", composed by Hans Zimmer for the score of the 1996 movie "The Rock".

According to a 1998 Famitsu interview with the game's director Yoshinori Kitase, he stated that when the game's development started, character designer Tetsuya Nomura suggested for Squall & Laguna's stories to end in a way that would have tied them together. This idea was scrapped for unknown reasons and forgotten about completely.

According to a 1998 Famitsu magazine interview with the game's character designer Tetsuya Nomura, preliminary meetings to plan out Final Fantasy VIII with the game's team, including director Yoshinori Kitase, began immediately after the completion of Final Fantasy VII's development.

During one of the conversations, Kitase said that he wanted to use a character that Nomura drew 3 years ago, before Final Fantasy VII, which was the sorceress Edea Kramer.

He added that although the Final Fantasy series has the word "Fantasy" in its name, it had become routine for them to feature technological civilizations and machines, and he felt the fantasy aspect had steadily weakened its presence. Therefore, Edea was added to the game to genuinely counteract those growing technological aesthetics: "a full-on, high-fantasy sorceress".