The scenario was designed to combine the freedom of choice of earlier titles with the overarching narrative, with all the protagonists being part of a shared world and crossing paths during the adventure. The original story began with the concept that humans worldwide have superstitions regarding eclipses, and built on that the premise that there is actually something to fear, and that eclipses meant death to many people, so if you survived you must somehow be special. When writing the story, Kawazu decided that the heroic Matriarch should be a woman as traditionally the demonic antagonists of games at the time were male. This naturally led into the plot twist of there being two Children of Destiny, one a man and one a woman. Kawazu did not communicate this clearly at the time, so when graphic designer Hiroshi Takai created the opening cinematic, he wrote the Matriarch as a male "Hero King". A feature he had to drop was the characters realistically changing clothes during their adventure, which would have been prohibitively complicated.