Misc. FFVII pre-release-related stuff

[VanishedOne]

A few things vaguely related to the game's development and pre-release demo phase. As far as I know this is new information, but please tell me gently if I'm wrong.

It turns out that the Deenglows' battle arena in

is from the PlayStation Underground demo, which has two (mostly disabled) debug rooms. I've no idea why the Deenglows were replaced along with the arena for the final game's version of Battle999. (EDIT: actually not demo-only; see Vehek's reply below.)

On some scans that were posted a while ago: GlitterBerri gave me a translation of the dialogue in the bottom-left:

クラウド「目標は北魔晄炉だ！ザコにはかまわず進め！」

Cloud: The North Mako Reactor is the target! These small fry won't make it tough to proceed!

She also translated the text in the image of a bar from the FFVII International bonus disc:

クラウド「勘違いするな。お前達アバランチにも興味はない。俺は今回の報酬をきっちりもらって次の職を探すさ。」

Cloud: Don't misunderstand. I have no interest in you Avalanche. As soon as I get my pay for this time, I'll look for my next mission.

Sounds familiar, huh? =)

I know Akari has looked at the field text encoding in both Japanese and English, but as far as I know the Japanese character mapping hasn't been worked out. I'm part-way through making a table file (with the aim of finding out what the unused field dialogue in the Japanese DAT files looks like, in the hope of uncovering clues about discarded ideas; the translators just blanked out some of it), and it's working so far; most of the kanji have yet to be added, though. Luckily, in the Japanese debug rooms Zangan provides a list of all the text characters, which is a veritable Rosetta Stone.

 

[Vehek]

Are you sure about the deenglows only being in a demo?
I first read about them in Kao Megura's Debug room FAQ.

When you use the 'Battle999' option, it's much neater than in the US version.  Instead of a black background, you're standing on a large Shinra logo with a gold backdrop, and you're fighting several monsters called Test 2: Deenglow (and they look like Deenglows) instead of the jibberish used to describe the enemies in the US version (which look like gold pyramids).  However, their stats. are still the same, and beating them still gives you lots of AP, EXP, and 5 Turbo Ethers, just like in the US version.

 

[VanishedOne]

Thanks for that; I have FFVII International, which has the pyramid version, so I assumed that version was common to all forms of the final game.

 

[jack-o-lantern]

Looking forward to seeing your results, VanishedOne! Is there any way people can help?

 

[VanishedOne]

This is the 'look through a list of 1000+ kanji and find their Unicode forms' stage, so see what you think about that.

In an image from yesterday the {K}s are unknown kanji, and the map was picked to see whether 魔晄炉 and 神羅 came out right, since Mako Reactors and Shinra get mentioned a lot; most maps will have a lower proportion of readable kanji.

So e.g. here's a place (CARGOIN map) where there's some unused text and some of it was blank when I checked the PC version using Loveless:

32 - [What Cloud says during the Cargo outtake]
33 - [blank]
34 - Shut-off the switch in this position.
35 - We can escape from the train event...
Did it!!
4th failure
3rd failure
2nd failure
1st failure
Escaped

Here's what I'm currently able to view:

クラウド{EOL}
「まだできてないんだ・・・{EOL}
 ã‚¦ã‚ªã‚ªãƒ»ãƒ»ãƒ»!!」{END}

「とりあえず、チェックしとく?」{EOL}
 åˆ—車{K}{K}へ!!{EOL}
 {K}魔晄炉{K}{K}{K}{K}へ{EOL}
 ã¬ã‘ちゃう!{END}

「このまま、スイッチをお{K}りください」{END}

「列車イベントをぬけるのだが・・・・・・」 {EOL}
 å¤§{K}{K}!!{EOL}
 {K}{K}4{K}ç›®{EOL}
 {K}{K}3{K}ç›®{EOL}
 {K}{K}2{K}ç›®{EOL}
 {K}{K}1{K}ç›®{EOL}
 ã¬ã‘ちゃう!{END}

(Indentation not quite right.) It looks like a three-choice dialogue, maybe debug text, but as you can see there are still kanji missing.