In a 2020 interview conducted by the YouTube channel Archipel with series creator Shinji Mikami, he stated that Dino Crisis was not a project he had first created. There was a team within Capcom that was working on original projects, when one day the team's leaders suddenly quit working at the company, leaving the rest behind. They came to Mikami with a pitch for a game with a 3-4 member party system (which Mikami likened to a Dragon Quest game) and asked him what they should do now. In response, he took them under his wing and told them to do their best.
Mikami's team initially brainstormed ideas together, but after struggling to find any good ideas, he asked each individual member to come up with their own ideas so they could decide on which one was the best to pick. At that point, someone from Capcom's graphics department had an idea for a game that took place in a locale similar to Skull Island from the 1933 film "King Kong". Mikami thought that idea was new; there were not that many creatures inhabiting the island, but the only kind was dinosaurs, so they stuck to dinosaurs and applied a gameplay and camera system similar to the first three Resident Evil games to make what would become Dino Crisis.
According to Tomonobu Itagaki, the Temple on the Mountain stage was originally going to be filled with human tourists. But, for an unknown reason, the team filled the stage with 108 white monkeys instead (the number 108 representing worldly desires in Buddhist teachings). The lead designer of the game became so inspired by their addiction that he suggested making an all-monkey fighting game.
The game is a remaster of the original arcade game that was ported to the Sega Saturn, instead of the Playstation port which was vastly different from the original. This was because the developers felt that the Saturn version had the best quality out of the different versions of the game, with Tomonobu Itagaki citing it as his personal favorite version of the game on top of having great personal significance to him as it was the first game he fully produced.
In a 1997 interview with Koji Igarashi, found within the NTT-PUB official guidebook, he was asked how he came to hire Ayami Kojima as the game's illustrator? He responded:
"Wanting to do something different from previous Castlevanias, one of our first steps was to imagine an alluring new visual style for the characters. We decided then to search for an illustrator who hadn’t done much work with games, someone who was active in a whole different genre. As a team we went to bookstores and checked out book covers, buying the ones we liked and researching the artists. There were a number of candidates, but we felt that Ayami Kojima’s work had the rich, aesthetic direction we wanted for a new Castlevania."
According to a 2009 interview with the game's director Mitsuo Iwao & producer Yoshinori Yamagishi featured in the game's Official Complete Guide, Iwao stated that they did not immediately come up with the game's title "The Last Hope" right away. He questioned if mankind could really survive after the third World War, and wanted to express their thoughts that humanity's last hope may lie somewhere in the universe.
Yamagishi also stated about the game's title:
"As far as titles go, it was clear and easy to understand, which was big. It didn’t use any complicated terminology; it was straightforward, orthodox, using words any layperson could understand. It was a title that could be easily understood by people outside of Japan, too. I guess subtitles are sort of a tri-ace thing. The previous games didn’t use a numbering system either, and the subtitle makes it feel like its own single work."
In a 1997 interview with the game's producer Hironobu Sakaguchi, found within the Famicon Tsuushin magazine, he was asked how the development of the game started. He responded:
"The title “Final Fantasy Tactics” was actually something I thought up four years ago. We even took out a trademark on the name. I’m a strategy game fan myself, and I had been thinking about what Final Fantasy would look like as a strategy game. I’m the type of person who comes up with a name first, so nothing much else had been concretely set down, but there was a “Final Fantasy Tactics” design document that I had made then. Unfortunately I was caught up in the development of the main FF series—which were coming out at a quick pace, one every 12-18 months—so my plans for FFT remained unrealized. But it is true that the kernel of the development goes back 4 years, to 1993."
According to a 2001 developer interview published in V-Jump magazine, the game's composer Nobuo Uematsu stated his team started including theme songs in the Final Fantasy games since Final Fantasy VIII, and that each time, Uematsu & Yoshinori Kitase would hold a meeting to decide who would sing the theme song. The developers brought in various music CDs of singers they liked to listen to and would share their opinions. At some point during the meeting for Final Fantasy X's theme song, they could not decide on who to pick. Around the same time, a member from their staff happened to buy one of Rikki’s independent releases at a CD shop, and showed it to Uematsu. He loved it after listening to it, and said in a excited mood "This is great!", leading the team to contact Rikki right away to perform the song, called "Suteki Da Ne", for the game. Uematsu considered it a memorable song for FFX, and that from the beginning the music would be a central part of the soundtrack.
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The enemy Laments had their nipples removed in the Japanese release for the PlayStation 4 & Xbox One versions of the game.
According to a 1999 E.G.G. Complete Guide interview with the game's scenario writer/planner/supervisor Hiroaki Hara, he was asked what made him go for a fully illustrated 2D style for the maps. He responded:
"Hmmm… probably just our personal taste. Now that we’re firmly in the era of 3DCG, perhaps some of us may have wanted to go against that current. But in terms of what visual style would most fit the gameplay, for EGG we felt this was the best. This is a unique world that I don’t think can be rendered in polygons. Yet the Dreamcast is a polygon machine, isn’t it? We wanted to take advantage of that strength too, which is why the boss battles switch to 3D. The one thing we didn’t want, though, was for players to have to learn a whole new control scheme for the 3D fights, and we spent a lot of effort adjusting and revising it to feel right.
I would have personally loved to have more time to work on the game. But you know, we’d already spent 3 years… and if you consider the work we did before the initial pitch presentations, it’s even longer. I’ve never spent this much time on a game development before."
In a 1999 developer interview published in Gamest magazine, the concept art for Ibuki's "Yami Shigure" move was originally going to be a normal special attack, but was changed to Super Art after many people complained.
In a 1999 interview featured in the Giga Wing OST's liner notes, the game's planner Ikuo Satou stated that in his team's early planning documents, Giga Wing was a "surprisingly orthodox" shooter game, but the game's developers at Takumi Corporation had a habit of always wanting to do something different:
"Thus with [Capcom and the] development team at Takumi, every meeting became a search for new things to improve.
“We should focus on the 1P experience, right?!” “I know, let’s have the character profiles cut in every time you use a bomb!”
And so on and so forth. In the eruption of ideas and opinions from these meetings, the revisions piled up. By and by the gameplay system was transformed, until before we knew it, the score had 16 digits, the enemy bullets could be reflected, characters were created, and a whole story was added to boot."
According to a 1994 Gamest magazine interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno, he was asked what made him want to make a fighting game where every character was a monster? He responded:
"One reason, as you can probably guess, is that we wanted to create a new, different style of versus fighting game. In the midst of our brainstorming, someone proposed, well, why not make it all about monsters then? With monsters, we wouldn’t have to create brand new characters from wholecloth, and we could use famous monster characters that people would already be familiar with."
As Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors was a brand new fighting game, Ohno and his team also wanted to create brand new special moves for the monsters that were different from those from the Street Fighter II series.
In a 1994 interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno & Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu published in Gamest magazine, they stated that they considered putting monsters from all regions in the series. From the beginning, there were lots of yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters), but they cut the number of them down due to the team realizing that most international players would not recognize them.
Some "weird" characters from the beginning of Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors' development that were rejected include: •An old man who was dressed head-to-toe in a salaryman’s suit. •A nurikabe yōkai that could not move and was always in a guard state, which the game's planners mentioned would be easy to finish due to there being little about the character to animate. •An Invisible Man where the only thing about it the player would be able to see was his floating gloves, which was done so the development team could draw fewer graphics.
In an interview with the game's producer/scenario writer Hiroyuki Takahashi and director Shugo Takahashi published in the 1993 Megadrive Fan Attack Special book, they stated that the enemy "Paste" (called "Bubbling Ooze" in the English localization) was originally going to be named "Slime". Its name was not included due to copyright issues, so they tried other options to name it like "Ooze" or "Gel", neither of which got picked. They later came up with the name Paste, while the English release gave the enemies the unused name "Ooze". It's possible that 'Slime' couldn't be used due to a copyright for the iconic Dragon Quest enemy of the same name.
According to a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's designer Fumi Nakashima, she stated that her inspiration for the Al Bhed’s clothing came from bondage fashion. She recalled having various bondage books and magazines on her desks at work and her co-workers giving her "weird looks" in response to seeing them.
In a 1991 interview with the game's composer Yoko Shimomura published in vol. 62 of Gamest magazine, she stated that her idea for Dhalsim’s theme was inspired by a CD she owned of Indian and Pakistani music, and that she "may have gone a little too far" in selling the idea to the development team. She also thought using tsuzumi drums in the music would make it sound more Japanese, and more akin to "that fusion sound, the king of music that's great to listen to when you're driving around."
In a 1991 interview with the game's composer Yoko Shimomura published in vol. 62 of Gamest magazine interview, she was asked about the in-game music speeding up when the fighter's health gets low, and if the tempo of the songs themselves was actually speeding up. She responded:
"Ah, yeah, actually I wrote them all as separate compositions for that purpose. At first they only asked me to write one song for each stage, but later I said “it would be cool if the tempo got faster during the fight” and they liked the idea. Unfortunately it meant writing twice as many songs for me."
In a 1991 interview with Yoshiki Okamoto published in vol. 62 of Gamest magazine, he was asked how development on the game started. He responded:
"We started out wanting to make a fighting game. The game we finished then, however, was not Steet Fighter II. It was Final Fight. We originally titled it Street Fighter 89, but then all of the players complained that this wasn’t Street Fighter. So ultimately SF89 became Final Fight, and we started working on a separate sequel to Street Fighter. In that sense, Street Fighter II is a game that was made by the players."
Akira Nishitani was then asked if he played the first Street Fighter, and stated:
"It would be impossible to make a sequel if you didn’t understand the appeal of the original, so yeah, I played it quite a bit."
In a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's art director Yusuke Naora, he was asked where the idea for an "asian" themed world came from? He responded:
"Let’s see… after the cyberpunk and “near-future” settings of VII and VIII, we returned to our roots with FFIX. So the question became, what should we do next…? And to be honest, that question vexed us. Around that time, I happened to be looking through some books and travel pamphlets and randomly thought to myself, “you know, Asia is really nice too…” There haven’t been many fantasy games in that kind of setting. There have been games set in China, or with a Chinese atmosphere, but nothing with a Southeast Asian or similar setting. So I thought I’d try drawing some pictures to flesh out this vision I had, when lo and behold, I read Kazushige Nojima’s script and by chance it turned out to have the same feeling. Then it was like, OK, now we’ve got to do this. We all brainstorm ideas on our own, but when we meet up and share them, the ideas that happen to be similar to each other are always good ones."
In a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's character designer Tetsuya Nomura, he said that when designing Tidus' emblem, he thought of various things related to the ocean, like fishing hooks, fishbones, whale fins, and based his designs about them. He mentioned that Tidus' necklace is the emblem for his blitzball team, the Zanarkand Abes. And also stated that he came up with the idea before the Al Bhed language was written, but the shape design of the necklace is actually the combined letters of "T" + "J" from the start of Tidus & Jecht's names.
In a 1999 developer interview published in Gamest magazine, the concept art for Ibuki's "Yami Shigure" move was originally going to be a normal special attack, but was changed to Super Art after many people complained.
In a 1994 interview with the game's planner Junichi Ohno & Capcom producer Noritaka Funamizu published in Gamest magazine, they stated that they considered putting monsters from all regions in the series. From the beginning, there were lots of yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters), but they cut the number of them down due to the team realizing that most international players would not recognize them.
According to a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's designer Fumi Nakashima, she stated that her inspiration for the Al Bhed’s clothing came from bondage fashion. She recalled having various bondage books and magazines on her desks at work and her co-workers giving her "weird looks" in response to seeing them.
In a 2001 V-Jump magazine interview with the game's character designer Tetsuya Nomura, he said that when designing Tidus' emblem, he thought of various things related to the ocean, like fishing hooks, fishbones, whale fins, and based his designs about them. He mentioned that Tidus' necklace is the emblem for his blitzball team, the Zanarkand Abes. And also stated that he came up with the idea before the Al Bhed language was written, but the shape design of the necklace is actually the combined letters of "T" + "J" from the start of Tidus & Jecht's names.