/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9299039
IIRC
>Part of the team at Square wanted to make FFIV a big ass FDS game under their DOG label
>The higher ups nixed the idea, as they wanted FFIV to be one of the first games released on the Super Fami
>They did let the team make the game as its own thing, though
>That game was going to be called Seiken Densetsu Excalibur
>The FDS was too dead in the water for them to want to keep working on it, so they ported as much as they could to the GameBoy and released the original Seiken Densetsu
>Meanwhile, Square wanted to release another big game when they found out about the SNES CD, so they wanted to revive the original idea for SD Excalibur
>Halfway through development, Nintendo and Sony had their spat and there would be no CD add-on
>Square, not wanting to waste that devtime, took the basic skeleton of the game, spruced it up, and released it as Secret of Mana, while letting some of the wilder ideas get cobbled together for a future release, which would become Chrono Trigger

As pieced together in a previous thread:
>FF4 was first pitched as a FDS game
>Upper management nixed the idea, wanting FF4 to be on the SuFami
>The team that was working on the FDS game pitch was allowed to continue working on a title to be released under Square's DOG sub-line of games
>That game would become Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden, and was nearly completed
>The FDS flopped and, not wanting to lose their hard work, the team reworked SD into a GameBoy title, which we in the West know as Final Fantasy Adventure
>Meanwhile, Square wanted to make an action adventure RPG for the upcoming SNES-CD.
>When that fell through, they used the bulk of the work to create Secret of Mana and the rest of the work (time travel and multiple endings) became the basis of Chrono Trigger