In regards to the game's visuals, director Ryan Vandendyck opted to avoid using a style that was considered common among indie games, stating:
"Basically we felt that the retro pixilated look and the anime-look in RPGs were way over-done, especially in the realm of indie RPGs. Plus, we felt neither of those two really fit a modern setting that well. So we went with a more cartoony style that we think fits the modern, Westernized setting, as well as being something quite unique. As you may guess by the fact that I made Waveform, I like making things not seen in other games! And as soon as we saw Robin’s character designs and the characters brought to life through animation, everyone on the team was sold."
In a 2008 interview with the game's director Katsura Hashino published in the Persona Club P4 book, he credited the game's Japanese voice cast for having "saved us". They only started conducting the casting for the Japanese version after a rough draft of the script was finished. The game's scenario writer Yuichiro Tanaka came up with a list of potential candidates and samples of their work; Hashino, character designer Shigenori Soejima, and sound designer Shoji Meguro selected the cast together from that list. Hashino noted that none of them had much knowledge about voice actors and only relied on the given samples to choose who they felt was best for the role.
At one point when talking to D in The Crooked Man, David reveals that he is color blind, which ultimately lead to him failing to become a pilot. The Boogie Man elaborates on this, revealing that while he can see red, he has difficulty with white and pink. This would suggest that he specifically has Deutan Color Blindness, where it is common to confuse pink and white colors (particularly in cases where the pink is akin to a light purple).
Behind-the-scenes pictures from the game's development show that former wrestler Jeff Jarrett did green screen capture work for appearing in the game as a playable character. However, due to his departure from the WWF (now known as the WWE) in 1995 regarding a contractual dispute before the game's release, he was subsequently removed from the roster.
In The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, when Sonic is found presumed dead on the ground, the pose he is laying in is a reference to a meme within animation circles known as the "Family Guy Death Pose". This pose is frequently used throughout the animated series of the same name created by Seth MacFarlane, which became criticized in later years for utilizing cheaper animation. This is not the first time this pose was referenced in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise; the first time being in Issue #3 of the IDW comic book miniseries "Sonic the Hedgehog: Imposter Syndrome", where the character Surge collapses into the pose at one point.
Dance Dance Revolution II is the only DDR game released on the Wii to feature a 1-20 difficulty scale (introduced in Dance Dance Revolution X), Doubles Charts, and Challenge Charts. However, due to the game lacking Shock Arrows, any Challenge Charts containing them are omitted.
In 2013, Valve and the tabletop game company WizKids collaborated to produce an exclusive chess set themed around Team Fortress 2 that was sold on Valve's website and on ThinkGeek. Each copy of the set came with a digital code for a hat called the Grandmaster, where the head piece would change as your killstreak increases. Aside from "Grandmaster" being one of the highest titles awarded to chess players by the International Chess Federation, the hat's item description references a pair of highly publicized chess matches in 1996 and 1997 between former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, and IBM's chess-playing computer Deep Blue.
In an attempt to make the game more accessible and add more depth to the series, Sega opted to focus more on the game's plot compared to previous titles, which primarily focused on the gameplay, to try and take the series' characters "into the next sort of iconic level".
According to animator PhantomArcade, Nene's redesign for the game went through numerous changes that ultimately did not go through. Additionally, he was the only person on the team involved with Nene's redesign.
According to Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled art director Jason Godbout, when the Crash Nitro Kart bosses were being redesigned, extra care was given to Nash the Shark so he would be "so awesome" that he becomes "the character that everyone's gonna want to play [as]". Godbout believed that Nash went from being "okay, but unappealing" in his Nitro Kart iteration to being his personal favorite character in Nitro-Fueled due to the redesign efforts.
This is the first game in the Dragon Ball: Budokai Tenkaichi series to be released under its original Japanese name (Dragon Ball: Sparking!) in the overseas version of the game.
In a pre-release gameplay video from 2018, at the end of a tour of the Home Base, a lit sign featuring the logo for the pizza restaurant chain Domino's can be seen hanging on a wall near the refrigerator. This sign would be removed in the final game, but within the game's files are several voice lines spoken by the game's main cast (Coco, Davis, Eva, Io, Jack, Louis, Mia, Rin and Yakumo) talking about eating freshly delivered pizza in an unusually glorifying manner without mentioning the company by name. It's unclear how these voice clips would have been used in the game, but when taken with the unused Domino's sign, it's believed that this was all part of a planned promotional tie-in that fell through when the game was delayed to 2019, where Domino's would have somehow survived the apocalypse in the game's story and adapted to the Revenants and the Lost.
Just before Sonic transforms into Super Sonic near the end of the game, the surviving crowd in Station Square can be heard in the background chanting Sonic's name to encourage him. This crowd recording is actually comprised of over one thousand attendants in the audience for the official reveal of the game at the Tokyo International Forum on August 22, 1998. The chant was led by special guest Hiroshi Fujioka portraying Segata Sanshiro, the Japanese advertising mascot for the Sega Dreamcast's predecessor the Sega Saturn, and recorded by Sega to use in the game.
When Fox frees Krystal from her crystal prison at the top of Krazoa Palace in Star Fox Adventures, she immediately grabs her staff back from him and begins firing at the newly resurrected Andross as Fox runs off to his Arwing to confront the latter in Dinosaur Planet's orbit. Strangely enough, in the ending cutscene after Andross' defeat, Fox once again has Krystal's staff in his backpack. When asked about this in a January 10th, 2003 issue of Rare's scribes, the development team responded with:
"It was late. We were tired. Just leave it. Okay? Could you honestly not think of a better question than this?"
Despite incorporating several elements common in a live-service game (i.e. an in-game store, a battle pass, seasonal events, and premium currency), Skull and Bones was given a price tag of $70. Yves Guillemot, the CEO of Ubisoft, justified this during an investors call before the game's release, stating:
"It's a very big game and we feel that people will really see how vast and complete that game is. So it's a really full triple-A, quadruple-A game that will deliver in the long run."
It's worth noting, however, that the game cost $200 million due to its decade-long development, with Ubisoft admitting that they did not think they would be able to break even due to its poor launch. Knowing this, it can be inferred that Ubisoft insisted on referring to Skull and Bones as a "quadruple-A" title not because of the scope of the project, but for how abnormally long it took to produce and raised the price to recoup costs, because this was not the first or only game they called a AAAA title in the past. It was discovered as far back as 2020 on the LinkedIn pages of several Ubisoft employees that they referred to Skull and Bones, the also long-delayed Beyond Good & Evil 2, and later Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, all games with development times lasting at least six years, as AAAA titles in their work experience.
According to the game's official Twitter account, the developers claimed that the only characters they would not add to the game if they became, or were discovered to secretly be, public domain were Calvin and Hobbes from the comic strip of the same name. While the characters are still copyrighted thereby ruling them out, the reasoning for refusing to consider them was out of respect for creator Bill Watterson and his refusal to license the comics for merchandise despite their popularity, feeling that it would go against the strip's ideals and ruin its authenticity.
In June 2012, game director Shun Nakamura expressed interest in making a port of Rhythm Thief & the Emperor's Treasure for the Wii U and a sequel for the Nintendo 3DS, revealing that he wanted "to create a virtual play version of the "Looting the Louvre" part because moving the body really fits into rhythm games." However, the plans for these games never materialized.
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Stellar Blade became rather controversial with critics in large part due to the sexualization of its protagonist Eve. They argued that the game's marketing leaned heavily into Eve's sexual appeal by focusing on elements such as revealing costumes and suggestive character designs for its promotional strategy. This got to the point where the South Korean version of the game received an "Adults-Only" rating due to suggestive images, nudity, and violence. Hyung-Tae Kim, the game's director, defended these design choices, stating:
"When it comes to the design, we put special attention on the back of the character because the player is always facing the back of the character when they're playing. That's what they see the most of, so we thought this was pretty important."
This controversy culminated when the game released with a Day 1 patch that patched out unintentionally offensive graffiti, and censored two revealing outfits Eve can wear in the game, the Holiday Rabbit and the Cybernetic Bondage, but these are not the only censored outfits left in the game. When the player finds their first unlockable Nano Suit blueprint on the overworld, a tutorial pop-up appears featuring a video that scrolls through a montage of the other Nano Suits you can unlock in the game, and among them is an uncensored version of the Moutan Peony, an outfit that features dark pantyhose covering Eve's skin up to her waist in both the base game and the Day 1 patch. It appears that the developers forgot to remove this video when changing the costumes during development, and it's currently not known if other outfits in this video were changed in the final game.
These changes are in contrast to a claim from the game's official Twitter account stating that all versions of the game worldwide would be released uncensored, leading to the changes being widely criticized by players on social media and speculation that the game's publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment mandated the changes after addressing the offensive graffiti. However, Kim addressed the matter during a Q&A at a launch event for the game, stating:
"Understandably we also recognize about[sic] the issue. However, the final costume that we wanted to show you is indeed the costume in version 1.0.0.2. I want to clarify that is our final product. However, I know this answer is not enough to convince our users. There is an internal discussion ongoing regarding this. So I think we'll have a chance to answer it soon."
The speculated tensions between Shift Up and Sony during development were actually highlighted by Drakengard and Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro, a developer with a history of tensions with Sony, during a joint interview with him and Kim for IGN published a little over a week before the game's release:
Yoko Taro: "[...] Mr. Kim, I wanted to ask you if there were any fights with Sony Interactive Enteratainment (SIE), since they are publishing Stellar Blade."
Hyung-Tae Kim: "(Glances at SIE staff members in the room and laughs.) The people at SIE are... very, very nice!"
Taro: "SIE's staff members are pulling faces I've never seen before. I wish the readers of this article could see it!"
Compilation of outfits in base game before Day 1 patch (uncensored versions of Cybernetic Bondage at 2:30, and Holiday Rabbit at 4:52): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMT6z9xejeA
Compilation of outfits after Day 1 patch (censored versions of Cybernetic Bondage at 1:03, Holiday Rabbit at 2:19, and Moutan Peony at 3:02): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcvYBGPoGk
Nano Suit tutorial pop-up montage with uncensored Moutan Peony costume (this is the only footage I could find of anyone sitting through this video start to finish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHJhViruQKM?t=3761
Kid Icarus: Uprising's final campaign features 25 stages in total. It could be said that this is a reference to how long it had been between the release of the original Kid Icarus and Kid Icarus: Uprising in Western territories. However, director Masahiro Sakurai revealed in a post-release interview that he had intended to do three more story missions when first putting together the storyline, but ultimately had to drop them early on, presumably because of time constraints.