In a 1994 interview with the game's director Takashi Tokita published in Famicom Tsuushin magazine, he was asked what made him want to make the game? He responded that the idea for the World Select featuring the game's several smaller worlds was the biggest motivator for him, as Square had made many different games with grand stories, like the Final Fantasy and Hanjuku Hero series, that take dozens of hours to complete. Tokita figured that in that sense, they were all the same, so he thought that if he could change that formula, it could breathe some fresh air into the team's development process and possibly enlarge the scope of the gameplay.