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".