For Dead or Alive 3, Team Ninja considered replacing the entire roster of the past two games with a new set of characters, with Hitomi as the new heroine to replace Kasumi. This idea was scrapped, with the exception of Hitomi's inclusion as a fighter.
During the fight with Psycho Mantis, the player is intended to swap their controller to the second port to prevent Psycho Mantis from reading their mind. However, if you call Campbell after losing to Psycho Mantis enough times, Campbell and Naomi will reveal that the statues in the room are based on Mantis himself, and attacking the statues will distract him long enough to be attacked. This alternate strategy was implemented in case the second controller port of the PlayStation is damaged, although this strategy was not included in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on the GameCube.
There are several zips/screen wraps and out of bounds travel spots in the game that can be performed with Shovel Knight, Plague Knight, and Specter Knight. Each Knight has the ability to perform them in different areas in different ways, with some not being intended by the developers and patched out to prevent them from happening during casual play, while others that they saw as being hard to pull off by first-time players were left in and are still used by the game's speedrunning community (as of September 2021).
Shovel Knight can perform the "Bubble Wrap" zip in the Plains of Passage by bouncing off of one of the Bubble Dragon's bubbles, causing the game's camera to try and follow Shovel Knight by pushing him through an off-screen transition into the room directly above the Bubble Dragon.
Plague Knight can perform similar harmless "Room Zips" in one area in the Iron Whale by bursting, jumping, bursting again, followed by two uses of the Staff of Surging to access a secret room with a Music Sheet, and when boarding the Flying Machine by using a combination of the Vat and Burst Jumping to skip two vertical screens and the challenges within them. In previous versions of the game, Plague Knight could preserve their momentum before entering a boss room, allowing speedrunners to set themselves up by triggering the opening dialogue to a boss fight in more advantageous spots than normal. This would be patched out later to prevent unexpected results, but still allowed a brief window for players to perform any action, including bursting forwards to bosses anyways. All characters may do any action frame perfectly after the transition, including pausing.
Specter Knight used to be able to perform a transition in the second stage of the Tower of Fate ("????" in New Game + only). Normally, Specter Knight can perform an easter egg by jumping off of a ledge in the Tower of Fate, but will not lose money and trigger a cutscene with either Dark Acolyte or Reize. However, the plane that triggers this death used to be low enough that Specter Knight could float underneath a nearby ledge precisely and use that as a screen transition to enter areas the player is not supposed to go to yet. In a later update, this plane was raised to prevent this glitch from happening, but Specter Knight does have a glitch that was intentionally left in by the developers. In the Lost City, a trick called "Lost Spaghetti can be performed in one area by having Specter Knight turn the lava into bouncy goo while he is falling in. If done right, Specter Knight should fall just below the plane where he would bounce on the goo and harmlessly phase through it into the room below, missing the death plane normally assigned to the lava.
In earlier releases of the game, Specter Knight can double jump with some complicated inputs, two walls very close together, and the use of a curio that doesn't halt his momentum. This glitch would later be patched out.
Plague Knight can achieve super speed by combining a fleet flask with a bomb burst, but only while the cheat code that enables God Mode is activated ("STQQTXVX"). This glitch can cause various softlocks due to it providing far more speed than the game expects the player to have, and can break cutscenes and lure bosses outside of their arenas.
It's possible to have Scarlet's Skull in the same room as Red, the NPC who is searching for her. Under most circumstances, Scarlet will be the 80th Skull to collect, but the game's developers took some careful measures to try and prevent her Skull from being the one in the same room as him. However, if you collect the other Skulls in the Tower of Fate, such that Scarlet's Skull is the 80th or 81st, the remaining Skull in the same room as Red is forced to be Scarlet's Skull.
According to the game's executive producer Takeshi Miyaji in a 2000 Dreamcast Magazine interview, the interviewer asked him if the game's target demographic would be a little older now given that Grandia II was the second game in the series, and he responded:
"Yeah. To begin with, obviously the people who played Grandia are also now 3-4 years older. So that was one reason we raised our target age.
The other reason is that, with the Grandia series, we don’t want to make the same game every time. The last game was a young boy’s tale of adventure, but in Grandia we wanted to show other things. By raising the target age, we could make the world a little more edgy and mature."
In the German release of the game, the color of the red blood in the international releases of the game was changed to green to tone down the game's violence.
According to English voice actor Sean Chiplock during a 2020 Reddit AMA, he was asked how did he get to voice Noob Saibot. He responded:
"Pretty much the same as I potentially get any other role; my agency sent me audition sides for the character, I submitted my audition takes, and the client decided they liked one of them enough to cast me! The character/project was codenamed at the time so I didn't know what it was for, but the specs asked for something "wraith-life and not of this world". So for the first take, I did something higher pitched and ghostly, with a little bit of teeth; for the second, I impersonated Black Doom from Shadow the Hedgehog's game on GameCube, and aimed for a baritone demonic rumble."
In a 1995 interview with the game's director Hiromichi Tanaka and designer Koichi Ishii, found within the Family Computer Magazine and Famitsu, they were asked when did they began planning out the game. They commented:
Tanaka: "We started drafting the plans for SD3 two years ago. We then went through a period of trial-and-error, where we programmed a lot of different systems, erased them, programmed them anew, erased them… and so forth, until finally we came up with something we now like."
Ishii: "We more or less wanted SD3 to be a continuation of Secret of Mana, but we ended up scrapping all the code from Secret of Mana. It was like, “All these parts that weren’t interesting, let’s try starting from a blank slate and finding another way.” So we essentially reconstructed all the programming for SD3 anew."
In a 1995 interview with the game's designer Koichi Ishii, found within the Family Computer Magazine and Famitsu, he was asked how the game's team created the "three-dimensional" quality in the game's map, characters and monsters. He responded:
"For example, take a boss battle like the fight with Mispolm. That battle is presented to the player from a certain visual angle. If you completely ignore the background when you’re creating the sprites, then the sense of orientation of the scene gets completely messed up. That’s why we had the sprite artists and the background artists work in tandem for SD3, communicating closely with each other as they went.
We’re aiming for something better than Disney. Also, for shadows and the like, we’re using deep blues and purples instead of shades of black, to impart a sense of softness. If you use black for that there’s a tendency for things to look cold and sterile. As I mentioned, visually we wanted to go for a more storybook, fantasy vibe rather than something realistic. It’s the same direction we went with in Secret of Mana, but in that game we didn’t have enough memory to fully express what we wanted."
In a 2001 interview with the game's illustrator Tonko (Aki Senno), found within the Arcadia magazine, she was asked if both Garou: Mark of the Wolves (MOW) and The Last Blade had the same staff working on them. She responded:
"No, it wasn’t. MOW was originally being developed by a very select group; later, a few of the Last Blade staff joined in. The waterfall stage, and several others, were done by The Last Blade staff. Visually I think you can see a bit of The Last Blade’s style in those stages."
According to a 1998 interview with Sega R&D head Hideki Sato published in The History of SEGA Console Hardware, the Mega Drive's design from Japan was based on the audio player's appearance, and presented the "16-bit" label embossed with a golden metallic veneer to give it an impact of power:
"We had a feeling that before long, consumers would be appreciating video games with the same sense with which they enjoyed music; moreover, since the Megadrive was a machine that you put in front of your TV, our concept was to make it look like an audio player. So we painted the body black and put the “16BIT” lettering in a gold print. That gold printing, by the way, was very expensive. (laughs) But we really wanted to play up the fact that this was the very first 16-bit home console."
In a 2004 interview with D (a pseudonym for one of four members of DECO [Data East Corporation] interviewed), found within the Arcade Gamer vol.1 mook (magazine/book portmanteau), he was asked how development on Outlaws of the Lost Dynasty began. He responded:
"One day our boss came in and declared, “You know what would be a big hit in China? A game based on Suikoden!” And we were off. Most of the staff was a bit perplexed, “Huh? Suikoden… why not Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) instead?” In any event, the development schedule was very short so it was a tough one."
In a 2016 interview with Lufia & the Fortress of Doom's director Masahide Miyata, he was asked where the Japanese name 'Estpolis Denki' (Japanese for Biography of Estpolis) comes from. He responded:
"Estopolis Denki was originally developed under the title “Esuteeru”, but someone had already taken out the copyright for that name, so we had to change it. We chose Estopolis since the root of the word resembled Esuteeru. Estopolis means “City of the East”, and we imagined this world having four continents, in the east, west, north, and south."
In a 2016 interview with the director of the first game in the series Masahide Miyata, he was asked how development on Lufia & the Fortress of Doom began. He responded:
"Four or five of us got together and started talking about making our own RPG. We developed a prototype version of “Esuto” for the PC-98, and shopped it around to different companies for distribution. This was before the era of things like powerpoint presentations, so we lugged a PC-98 and CRT monitor around with us to give our pitch. Taito was one of those companies we presented to. Then once the development was officially underway, the idea came up that, since we were gonna do this after all, we might as well make it for the Super Famicom."
Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition, an expanded 2017 re-release of the game for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch and PC, uses the full uncompressed video footage recorded for the original game. Additional bonus content includes deleted scenes like an introduction scene for the game's story and a death scene featuring Danny (which was most likely cut due to Danny's young age), as well as a behind-the-scenes developer commentary, a "theater mode" to watch all of the game's story, a "survivor mode" that will randomly place Augers in the house, and a playable version of "Scene of the Crime", the first prototype of Night Trap created in 1986 to pitch an unreleased console called the Control-Vision to Hasbro.
In a 2010 interview with the game's director Hiroyuki Maruyama, he stated that he originally wanted to release the game on the Xbox. Despite the console's poor sales around the time it was being made, he was very interested in the network capabilities of Xbox Live, so he tried to get in touch with Microsoft to release the game on that platform. Instead, Microsoft asked the developers to release the game on their next console, the Xbox 360.
In a 1995 interview with the game's director Yasumi Matsuno, found within the Dengeki SFC magazine, he clarified that the game was a part of the Ogre Battle series, but it was not a direct sequel to Ogre Battle: The March of The Black Queen. The games' world and environments are shared, but the gameplay systems are completely dissimilar. When asked why the gameplay system was changed, he responded:
"First off, after we finished the Ogre Battle development, we determined that doing another 3D real-time simulation game for the Super Famicom was going to be difficult. There is a special chip now for the SFC that offers more possibilities, but it’s also very expensive to use [this could be referring to the Super FX chip]. Therefore, we abandoned the idea of doing another, powered-up version of Ogre Battle, and instead decided to develop a brand new system."
"Another reason was that we actually started the planning for Tactics Ogre three months before the release of Ogre Battle. To decide on a direct sequel then would have been pointless if Ogre Battle didn’t sell well, and we didn’t have any confidence that it would. Ultimately it was very popular, so we carried over just the world and setting."
"Also, in Ogre Battle the units moved in real-time, which meant you couldn’t take your time and plan out a strategy. For us, this was a big point we wanted to improve on. From the beginning of the Tactics Ogre development, therefore, we never saw real-time as an option."
For Dead or Alive 3, Team Ninja considered replacing the entire roster of the past two games with a new set of characters, with Hitomi as the new heroine to replace Kasumi. This idea was scrapped, with the exception of Hitomi's inclusion as a fighter.
There are several zips/screen wraps and out of bounds travel spots in the game that can be performed with Shovel Knight, Plague Knight, and Specter Knight. Each Knight has the ability to perform them in different areas in different ways, with some not being intended by the developers and patched out to prevent them from happening during casual play, while others that they saw as being hard to pull off by first-time players were left in and are still used by the game's speedrunning community (as of September 2021).
In earlier releases of the game, Specter Knight can double jump with some complicated inputs, two walls very close together, and the use of a curio that doesn't halt his momentum. This glitch would later be patched out.
Plague Knight can achieve super speed by combining a fleet flask with a bomb burst, but only while the cheat code that enables God Mode is activated ("STQQTXVX"). This glitch can cause various softlocks due to it providing far more speed than the game expects the player to have, and can break cutscenes and lure bosses outside of their arenas.
It's possible to have Scarlet's Skull in the same room as Red, the NPC who is searching for her. Under most circumstances, Scarlet will be the 80th Skull to collect, but the game's developers took some careful measures to try and prevent her Skull from being the one in the same room as him. However, if you collect the other Skulls in the Tower of Fate, such that Scarlet's Skull is the 80th or 81st, the remaining Skull in the same room as Red is forced to be Scarlet's Skull.
In the German release of the game, the color of the red blood in the international releases of the game was changed to green to tone down the game's violence.
The "Japan Street" stage is based on a viaduct next to Esaka Train Station and SNK's headquarters, in Osaka.
