Part 49: Debug Room

This place can only be accessed with a Gameshark. You can get there with any character, both in a new game and an already saved one (though I haven't managed to pull off the latter yet), and there's some neat things you could do with this as far as an actual quest goes. But, we're just here to look at stuff for now.

So here's the first room. It's really big, really blue, and has some japanese characters on the floor. As a person who failed Japanese 1 (I totally went back and passed with a C later, though), I can tell you the four characters read chi, n, pu, and ru, or chinpuru. Babelfish tells me this translates to "The ?it is the ? ?." Yeah. We head right to move on. EDIT: The chi is actually a sa (the characters are inverses of each other, so I got mixed up. I think I'm dyslexic). This makes it out to be the much more sensical "sample". Thanks go to CaptainRat. My previous assumption will remain in order to preserve my ignorance.

Oh geez, it's like the weapons room in the Matrix. Every playable character shows up in here.

The non-Riki monsters all show up as Slimes, though (they're still their actual selves).

Anyway, if you talk to one of the characters and select Hai/Yes...

Bam, recruited.

Two of these are particularly interesting. This first one is named Woman.

Hold your fire, she's a human. Her sprite shows up as a spinning T260G, though. This one was likely some sort of test character or something.

Next up is the equally generically named CommonMec.

He's a Type7 mec, which, as you may recall, is the only mec type that you cannot recruit a character of. This leads me to believe that he was an actual cut character.

Anyway, we can make some nifty little teams with this.

Heading to the right brings us to the next room (as it always will, this place is just room after room).

This here's the leader selection room. I talk to Blue, and...

Now I'm Blue. Also, note how in this room as well as the previous, Fuse is chilling in the main character row. If you ever wanted any actual in-game proof that he was supposed to have his own quest, here it is.

The extra Red and extra Riki allow you to walk around as Alkaiser and Human form Riki, respectively.

Note that Riki is called Coon here, which was his japanese name. I think Riki's a better name, but he's still retarded either way.

The remaining rooms are all just sprite showcases, so I'll just summarize them and mention any interesting things. Also, yes, you can use Fuse as your lead character. This room just has boring ol' townspeople.

This one is much more of the same, though a few story characters and a horse have been tossed in.

Some actual characters here.

More people and some monsters. I swear, there's some interesting ones later on.

This one's got that damn mouse, as well as the Riki Ass Wiggle sprite.

Octopus, half-naked boy dangling from a rope, the usual.

This one has the mec sprites, as well as the T260G version of that mec beside them. It also features a second set of the exact same sprites above it for some mysterious and whimsical reason.

Yup, even the iron pipe's sprite is here.

Now this one's interesting. I don't recall seeing the two people Fuse is standing between anywhere in the game. I may have forgotten, but it's not likely. Still, there's not much you can infer by just seeing them.

This room is also fun. All of Emelia's outfits, red-haired Asellus (her human form, of course) and no less than three sprites of Asellus constantly dying. Fun stuff.

Runes, tarots, and Power Axem Black X Rangers.

Some mystics, band members, etc. Things will get sexy again in a minute, I promise.

Monsters and treasure chests. Whoo.

Whee, some important storyline characters.

Of particular note is this sprite, which seems to be a normal sized version of Virgil. Why was this made? Was he originally not huge? Did they want him to be recruitable? Who knows. This sprite does get used in the game, though, but you'll have to wait until next update for that one.

The two silver mecs over there are what I assume CommonMec would have looked like.

Ooh, fun room! We've got Red turning into Alkaiser, Evil Mei-ling, and another unused sprite, Fuse in janitor clothes, which we would have seen when he did the Rune quest, much like the other sprites here of Red and Lute in the same outfit.

The right of this same room holds what may be the most interesting sprites of all...ah...I don't know if nude sprites would be considered NWS, but I'll link it anyway.

Click

Yeah. Naked Asellus and White Rose. Um.

White Rose is significantly more endowed, for what it's worth.

Back in the more clothed section, we see some evil guys, including Ciato with hot stabbing action!

More Alkaiser stuff, as well as Hawk to Alkarl transforming action.

Besides full mystic form Asellus here, we've got that top row which features another mysterious sprite, this one being more unique-looking than the other unused ones. Seems like it would have been another character.

And that's all of the rooms here. It's just a neverending void of empty rooms from here on. Hmm, how ever shall we get out?

Oh, how I wish I had had the foresight to shark a RegionMap into my inventory. Oh wait.

Oh, and all the spots are filled as well. Hmm, aren't there some spots that could never be filled normally? Let's check 'em out!

The first one's some sort of extra IRPO. The japanese character on the right there seems to be kanji, so y'all are on your own there.

We end up in some dark and ominous looking place.

The Warden's here, but you can't talk to him. Also, all the exits are unusable. This place looks more like an early or alternate form of Despair than anything IRPO related, but who knows.

The next one's unlabeled, but the icon should give you a clue as to where it goes.

Yup, it's Margmel.

Or, rather, it's the opening scene shot of Margmel from Riki's quest, so there aren't really floors or anything.

The next one's labeled as HQ.

However, it just puts us on a black screen, where all we can do is access the menu. It freezes up eventually, so we head out.

Another unlabeled but obvious one.

It's Junk!

The game acts as if you're T260G here, regardless of who you're using.

This one looks really cool, but it's just another black screen place.

As is this other IRPO.

No more unknown places left, but as we were discussing above, an interesting thing happens if you go to the Magic Kingdom.

Yup, you can only warp to the destroyed one.

The game doesn't let you go into Hell, though.

Here's Woman and CommonMec's battle sprites. Woman looks like Rabbit, while CommonMec is Type7 T260G, as you might expect. Both of them function just like any normal character of their type, so they should be fully playable.

Debug mode is fun. Note that you usually wouldn't be able to get two of a character like this. I'm still playing as Lute, but my character looks like Fuse (fights like Lute though) and all the reactions/dialouge is that of Fuse's (nonexistant) quest.

This obviously leads to some problems. None of these guys will respond to me since they didn't have unique dialouge for Fuse programmed in.

I can talk to and recruit Lute, though, for some reason.

Fuse can't get out of Omble, though. Even though his shadow is indeed there (each of the eight main characters are present, though Riki is represented by Mei-ling and T260G by Gen since they're not humans), the game doesn't register it as the correct choice when you touch it.

Anyway, the main usage for the Debug Room from a gameplay standpoint is, of course, making a bitching awesome party regardless of who you're playing as. Note that adding someone in the Denug Room just puts them in your party, it doesn't count as them "joining." You'd still have to recruit Gen normally to get to Wakatu, for example. Actually recruiting a character you've already added doesn't give you a second one, it just kind of overlaps with the current one and acts like a normal recruit.

Of course, this shouldn't be a problem since the only people you'd actually want to add would be people you couldn't recruit with that character normally. Also, when doing this, you should use a previously saved game that is in a non-storyline area (don't do this when Red is on the Cygnus, for example). You could mess up the storyline triggers otherwise, which is the same reason you don't want to do this through a new game. Also, make note of how many storyline characters you'd have to recruit, and leave that many spaces open (this is why Lute works so well for the Debug Room, he only has one required recruit).

But, do things right, and you could make Riki's quest bearable when he's backed up by Red, Blue, Rouge, and Asellus!