Final Fantasy VI entered development in late 1992 after the release of Final Fantasy V and took only about a year to finish, with a team of roughly 30 people. Series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi became producer, splitting directing duties between Yoshinori Kitase for story and events and Hiroyuki Ito for battles. Every character was the protagonist of an episode, with different staff members conceiving different characters. The team split the story into two halves, the World of Balance and the World of Ruin, because they were tired of the usual plot where the hero narrowly saves the world. The game also made extensive use of the Super NES's Mode 7 for its world map. When released in North America it was called Final Fantasy III, because only two earlier games had been localised, and the dialogue was softened and censored in several places. The soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu uses leitmotifs for characters and places.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.