Advance Guardian Heroes

Advance Guardian Heroes
Developer: Treasure Publishers: Ubisoft (US/EU), Treasure (JP) Platform: Game Boy Advance Released in JP: October 22, 2004 Released in US: September 18, 2004 Released in EU: February 5, 2005 This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has a hidden level select.

To do: Possibly make a code that activates the debug mode without needing the combination. Also, go into the regional differences.

A sequel to the cult classic Guardian Heroes. Unfortunately, this game is plagued with odd and overly literal English translation, most notably its intro.

Debug Mode

By inputting Right, Left, L, R, Up, Select, Select quickly while the Treasure logo is showing, you'll unlock quite an extensive debug mode. The code is actually well known, since it unlocks absolutely everything, which would usually need you to complete the game multiple times.

However, as well as that, you also unlock various debug options in various places.

Options Screen

As you could guess, the most noticeable debug options can be found on the options screen. This consists of a language select, a sound test, an animation test, and a message test (despite the name, it doesn't actually check events).

The sound test is easy to use, merely press Left and Right to go through all the sounds in the game. There are 419 entries; the first 33 play music, 34 to 40 are empty and stop the music, and the rest are sound clips.

Language Select

Quite strangely, the language select which lets you choose between English and Japanese is actually disabled unless in Debug mode, despite the fact both language options seem to be fully working. The event checker (although really a message test) even changes depending on your choice.

Animation Checker

The animation checker contains all the sprites used in the game. Holding B and using the D-Pad lets you move the sprite around the screen, while using L & R lets you decrease/increase the speed of each animation (which also lets you stop it entirely). The main options in the list are:

• CharNo (aka Character Number) contains 22 values with 0-19 being the Characters, 100 being the effects, and 200-201 being used for background objects, which includes text like what you see when you start the game.
• AnimeNo (aka Animation Number) has 255 entries for every 'Character' despite quite a lot of them not actually being used. In fact, some seem to hold multiple if you press A on them instead of letting them auto-play.
• Oddly enough, there are BGM (Background Music) and SE (Sound Effects) options, but they seem to be badly implemented. Unlike the one on the options screen, you can press Start at any time to turn the music off.
• Palet (Palette) lets you choose the colors to use. Characters and effects are limited to 9 (0-8), but BG_OBJ and BG_OBJ2 can go up to 127, which may be an oversight.
• CenterMark is a small star like marker shown on sprites which can be switched between 5 colors (White, Black, Red, Green and Blue) or turned off. The characters have extra markers that surround the character, though that aren't affected by the color selection.
• BackColor (aka Background Color) lets you pick between five colors (Black, White, Red, Green and Blue again). The White option is actually Grey, since it would otherwise hide the text.

There are also quite a few values with the left section being seen on all Sprites and a bottom section which contains player only stats. The Left Stats are:

• [LOOP] indicates when something is played continuously. If it is not, then the text won't be there and END will appear underneath once the animation is over (instead of constantly flickering on and off).
• PAT indicates the current frame being used. The amount each animation use varies, but only a few things use more than 10.
• SPEED is the indication of how fast the animations are being played. L decreases the value by 1 while R increase it by 1. Oddly enough this seems to be one of the only options that uses hex with a max value of 7F and a default of 10.
• TIME seems to be the timing of animations as well as presses, it isn't really noticeable at first glance but some animations like jumping has Time show "HOLD".
• ATIME seems to stand for Attack Time, since it stays at 0 whenever anything that isn't a player character is chosen. Oddly enough, the value for animations actually stops at 1.

As for the Player Character only values:

• Damage seems to indicate damage to the player, although it's hard to tell when it's set to 01 most of the time, with a few 00's and 02's.
• Body is a mystery, you'd perhaps think it meant to tell if the sprite could be hit or something but it's rarely ever not 01 even on empty animation slots.
• Guard is luckily easy to tell and is toggled between 0 and 1 depending on whether you are blocking or not. It's most noticeably used at the start of special moves so the player doesn't get hit out of them.
• Attack seems to indicate when the sprite in question is used in an attack which switches between 00 and 01 like the others.
• HPD (Hit Points Damage?) seems to show values during attacks with higher values for noticeably stronger attacks.
• MPD (Magic Points Damage?) would be the magic equivalent of the above, which only shows values in animations where the player is using a magic attack (as you'd guess).
• Z refers to the direction and seems to indicate when an attack affects enemies behind or in front of the player. An example of such a move is Dylan's Spin Kick at AnimeNo 152.

Event Checker

The Event Checker is actually a message test that lets you load all the messages in the game, including two obviously unused ones. The first one is aptly called #DUMMY which is empty, while Message 1 (aka #000) contains both a numbers test and button prompts (which the Japanese version doesn't have). The messages shown depend on what language the game is set to.

Stage Select

With Debug Mode enabled, going to the Story Mode screen will show a stage select underneath the 1/2 Player Select, which can be changed using Left and Right. Not only does this include seemingly every part of every stage, but it also includes the openings, endings, and even the Game Over screen, among a few other things.

In-Game Debug Menu

If you have Debug Mode on, you can press Right while paused in game to access yet another debug menu. This is mostly developer cheats, with a few other things like some mysterious hex in the bottom left corner. As for the stuff in the menu:

• TASKDISP (aka Task Display) shows lines on the screen, which indicate how much processing is needed to render a scene.
• HP MAX refills your health.
• MP MAX refills your magic.
• AP MAX refills the bar on the right, but I can't remember what the bar is for.
• EXP MAX doesn't actually level you up. Instead, gives you 999,999 of the gem things you can use to power yourself up.
• BGM lets you toggle the music on or off.
• ClearLevel seems to let you choose what difficulty the game has been cleared at.
• Get/Clear seems to let you unlock characters and also set if they've cleared the game. The former is useless considering you unlock all the characters anyway by having the debug mode on. What's interesting is that there are clear flags for both Gob Tank and Heavy Gear, who are normally unselectable in Story Mode.