Final Fantasy 6 only took over one year to complete

Development of Final Fantasy 6 took just over one year, immediately following the release of Final Fantasy 5, game director Yoshinori Kitane told Edge.

But even in that short development period, the game changed compared to what was initially planned. According to Kitane, Final Fantasy 6 was originally intended to let every character take on a leading role. Designers including series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and graphic designer Soraya Saga all had input on the large cast of characters.

The creation of multiple lead characters whose stories players would switch between proved difficult. According to Kitase: "Maintaining a careful equilibrium between all the characters was probably the greatest challenge I faced.

"However, I ended up so involved with each personality while scripting the scenarios that there were points where, looking back at the game today, it's clear that I somewhat lost this balance. For example, as the scenes featuring Celes and Kefka progress, these characters [while not actually playable] became far greater and more influential than originally intended when development began."

Final Fantasy 6 launched in 1994. While the title launched on time and within budget, Kitase describes a crunch period before release that arose around technical issues like memory management which had to be dealt with manually.

"It's maybe strange to say [this], but I miss the limitations of making games in those days," Kitase says. "The cartridge capacity was so much smaller, of course, and therefore the challenges were that much greater. But nowadays you can do almost anything in a game. It's a paradox, but this can be more creatively limiting than having hard technical limitations to work within. There is a certain freedom to be found in working within strict boundaries, one clearly evident in Final Fantasy 6."