New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Final Fantasy IV (4) [SNES – Beta & Unused Stuff]

As we can read in Wikipedia, Final Fantasy 4 was developed and published by Squaresoft in 1991 as a part of the Final Fantasy series. The game was originally released for the Super Famicom in Japan, but has been ported with minor changes to the Super Nintendo in USA, re-titled as “Final Fantasy II” due to it being the second of the series released there.

After completing Final Fantasy III for the Famicom (NES) in 1990, Square planned to develop two Final Fantasy games—one for the Nintendo Famicom and the other for the forthcoming Super Famicom (SNES), to be known as Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V respectively.

Due to financial and scheduling constraints, Square dropped plans for the Famicom game and continued development of the Super Famicom version, retitled Final Fantasy IV. A mock-up screenshot of the cancelled Final Fantasy 4 for the Famicom / NES was produced for a Japanese magazine.

In the released Final Fantasy 4, fans of the saga found some unused stuff still hidden in the game. One of the characters you get at the beginning of the game, Kain, has an unused spell casting animation. In the Slick Productions Forums you can read a theory about where his magic spell list is and see Kain in game using the spell.

Yang, another character that you get and lose and get again, during the battle against him, has an attack text-script, and that includes a script for a character in your party, but it seems that the developers “Dummied” it out. The same script has Yang attack Kain, but at this point, you don’t HAVE Kain in your party, hinting at a possible different story event. Another unseen event was hinted at in the code with a character named “Anna”, she has battle animations and everything but they were never used. More info can be found in here.

Also, there’s a picture of the back of FFIV’s japanese case, shows something that doesn’t happen in the game itself anymore. And another beta picture was found in Nintendo power. As Deathlike2 explained in the GameFAQS forum:

It looks like DK Cecil, Kain, and Yang with Young Rydia and Rosa. None of that is normally possible.

1) Fire2/Fira cannot be learned by Young Rydia until she comes back as Older Rydia.

2) Kain leaves right after the Mist event.

3) That enemy formation does exist, but not in a castle environment (the battle @ Fabul never has such a formation).

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Ascendant (Dungeons) [PS3/X360/PC – Beta]

As reported before, Big Huge Games was working on a new, THQ-published RPG for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. When THQ was hit by financial troubles, Big Huge Games was sold to 38 Studios where it seems that they still work on Ken Rolston’s new “masterpiece”. It’s currently unknown if this game will ever be released. Read more

RS Links: Phoenix Wright was removed from Tatsunoko vs. Capcom

phoenixwright

Robert Seddon has linked us to an article on GoNintendo, that reports an interview by NGamer with Ryota Niitsuma, producer on Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, in wich he revealed that the team had some plans to add the Phoenix Wright character in the game, but in the end he was canned because of his special move:

Because Phoenix Wright only has one move, ‘Objection!’, we struggled. We designed a move for him: when he says objection, the actual writing attacks the opponent. However, ‘objection’ in Japanese is ‘igiari’ – it’s four characters, whereas ‘objection’ becomes ten [sic. It’s nine, actually.] When we localize, the balance of the game gets destroyed because the move becomes bigger. There’d be no way of avoiding it! We had to remove him for these reason. In the future, it is one of our aims to get him in.

That sounds like a weird reason to remove a character. Why not to remove just his special move? We’ll never know.

Paradigm Entertainment FPS [X360/PS3/PC – Cancelled]

In 2008 Paradigm Entertainment were working on a prototype for a new First Person Shooter for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, that would have been published by THQ. They developed a playable demo, but the project was later cancelled for unknown reasons.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!

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Mario & Luigi RPG 3 [DS – Beta & Unused Stuff]

Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, released in Japan as Mario & Luigi RPG 3, is a RPG released for the Nintendo DS in 2009. Unreachable normally, thanks to Waluigiuseppe and whoever made the moonjump code, we see some of the normally bowser-only enemies have some leftover attack patterns for the bros. as well. Quite strange and shows that some of these might’ve been programmed without the memo that the bros wouldn’t fight them:

  • (Naplock) The blocks are breakable with jump counter
  • Dark Fawfulbot) A weird 2-3 minute beam attack, dark fawfulbot head uses a beam attack that needs to be jumped.
  • (Choomba) Telegraphs with M and L smoke clouds and only charges, freezes after first turn it seems.

Also, some more differences can be seen in a video (@ 2:13) posted by GigaBowserNS on YouTube:

  • Yoshi Story noises present in the rom (and working when there are no yoshis in M&L3)
  • M&L2 music (glitchy) in the final still
  • Bowser dialogue change during the start of the game
  • No icons for mushroom village inside bowser and the globin icon from the area right of it are missing
  • Some map cosmetic changes in mushroom kingdom

Neo told us about an unused “Life Shroom”: a Beta Texture of a shroom with a heart can be find hidden in the game’s code!

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