the hunt for unused content in the game itself is not doing so hot, so i went to look for some old magazines and was immediately rewarded. Again, eternal thanks to Sega Retro for archiving this stuff.
There’s a magazine with some interesting stuff from three months before the game’s release:
“…the king of Guardiana said, ‘you are our last light’…“
First of all, pink haired Simone! Just like in the GBA games. Her face has a few details different as well, there’s an actual line for her nose, lighting in her eyes, which she only gets when looking at you in the final version, and a weird line on her forehead i can’t understand. The whole scene also looks lighter but i don’t how much of that is printer effects.
Anyway, while I like the auburn hair more, I have no clue why they would change it, and bringing it back for the GBA makes me think that at least the designer preferred the pink version. Interestingly her artwork in the manual already implies that, her hair is not pink there, it would probably be too obviously contrasting with the game’s version, but it is far lighter than in game.
Her text is also different here. I have translated part of the JP intro before, she talks of Max and Cain’s bloodline instead, no mention of Guardiana and its king. Makes me wonder if these lines survived in the JP rom, the US rom has unused lines for her but all of this intro was altered in localization, so they tell little of what the JP might have.
Moving on, Ken has completely different sprites, and mind you, they kick ass, I’m wondering big time why they were changed. I guess the perspective might be a little off, but, you should not talk to me about perspective lol. The lower body is also not moving much, but that wouldn’t be reason to change the whole shading. Notably, the spear seems to be part of the character instead of a different sprite, and is accurate to the knights’ artwork.
I didn’t even notice at first, but you can see an axe on the loose behind the sprite, meaning weapon sprites and animations were already in, but unfinished.
For further evidence here’s Max’s sword learning how to levitate as well. This sword sprite is also cooler than anything in the actual game.
It also took me a ridiculously long time to notice Max has no MP here. Perhaps there was no egress at this point, or you’d have to gain the MP to use it first? sounds bad. But Max’s magic suffering late changes would explain the oversight in the final version where his MP continues to grow despite learning nothing but Egress. Would also explain Egress requires exactly 8 MP, which is kind of a random number for a basic and unique. It would come to make a little more sense in future games where the heroes have Bolt and you have to actually manage their MP if you want to be able to retreat later on, but Max has no other spells here.
Of course, the other possibility is that Max was meant to learn more spells. With the trend of GBA version things being planned for the classic all along, it wouldn’t surprise me. This is probably the moment I should bring up that the final game has exactly one dummied out spell, which just so happens to cost 20 MP, a weirdly high cost for a test/placeholder feature, and very in line with the costs of Supernova in the GBA version.
For minor details that don’t excite me as much, Guardiana castle had a gate at some point, and plenty of chickens as well. Even I can’t make a theory out of that, they are probably placeholders.
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