Final Fantasy VI devs say the Dragon Quest rivalry helped them reach new heights

Final Fantasy VI recently celebrated its 25th annniversary. In honor of the occasion, Famitsu gathered up some of the dev team to look back on the title's creation. In the blurb below, read up on how the team was influenced by the Dragon Quest series when creating this installment.

Hironobu Sakaguchi: “A lot of it was influenced by Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest just had this unique vibe about it, along with a spectacular scenario from Yuji Horii-san. We were mostly fired up with a rival mentality, thinking ‘We must surpass them!’ rather than thinking ‘We’ll make something top-class!’”

Yoshinori Kitase: “Back in the days of Final Fantasy V, Sakaguchi-san, I remember you saying ‘We’ll at least beat ‘em (Dragon Quest) in the amount of main-numbered titles!’”

Hironobu Sakaguchi: “I figured we couldn’t beat them head on when it came to the games themselves, so yeah [laughs]. However, ever since the very first Final Fantasy, I always felt that we wouldn’t lose when it came down to graphics. Of course we did put in effort into systems and scenarios, but that was one part I used to be confident we could beat Dragon Quest in. Oh, speaking of Dragon Quest, wasn’t there some event that Kitase rejected?”

Yoshinori Kitase: “Huh? What was that again?”

Hironobu Sakaguchi: “No matter how many party members you have in Final Fantasy, you can only move one lead character on the map, right? So when you get members, they kind of fuse into the one representative party member. So the event that was rejected involved a part where four party members attempt to “fuse” into one lead, but then it was like ‘Huh!? We can’t fuse!?’ and had four of them line up instead, kind of a reference to Dragon Quest [laughs].”

Yoshinori Kitase: “Ahh, as expected, I remember saying ‘Okay, now you’re messing around too much!’ and rejected it [laughs].”