Developers were quite fearful at first in developing a fifth installment of the Star Ocean series and to just leave the fourth game to be last out of respect for the series' former producer, Yoshinori Yamagishi, who had departed from the company after the release of the previous game. The game's producer, Shuichi Kobayashi, forced himself to produce it and if had the proposal for the game been rejected by the company's CEO, it would've been the end of the franchise.