Final Fantasy VI turned 25 this month, and is still considered a real gem for the ages — a quarter of a century later and highly regarded as one of the finest JRPGs to ever exist. In celebration of the milestone achievement for the beloved classic, many members of the original development staff — including producer Hironobu Sakaguchi and Director Yoshinori Kitase — sat down with Famitsu to reflect on the game and its production. Here are some highlights:
- FFVI was released on April 2nd, 1994 in Japan, and went gold just a couple months earlier. Apparently the sound team (located in a separate location from the main dev team) wasn’t notified when that happened, and ended up staying a while longer at the office.
- The development cycle for Final Fantasy VI took less than a year to complete. The team started working on it right after finishing on Final Fantasy V. During that year, of course, the devs worked themselves to the bone, often staying the night at the office — they even have separate anecdotes as to what they brought in to sleep with.
- A big drive to work so hard on the game was competition from Dragon Quest, which was seen as the Final Fantasy series’ biggest rival back in the day. There was even a small event cut from the game that served as a DQ reference to how your party lines up in the overworld. Sakaguchi was reported to say at the the time: “We’ll at least beat ‘em in the amount of main-numbered titles!”
- Now that the team has played FFVI again recently, Sakaguchi notes that the game is still very fun to play today. And also that “the bird on the beach only got in the way” (referencing the first Celes sequence in the World of Ruin, presumably).
You can check out the full interview translation over at Siliconera.
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Written by Amelia Fruzzetti
A writer and Nintendo fan based in Seattle, Washington. When not working for NinWire, she can be found eating pasta, writing stories, and wondering about when Mother 3 is finally going to get an official localization.
