SaGa Frontier/Unused Text

The following text was translated by GlitterBerri, with commentary by Robert Seddon.

Lost Text of Saga Frontier I ended up pulling dialogue out of SaGa Frontier 's field files with, of all things, Firefox (for ease of SHIFT_JIS decoding), since although I understand a fair amount of its field script by now, there's a lot I still don't know about how it works with other parts of the game data. The result is basically context-free dialogue, but in concert with available information about The Essence of SaGa Frontier it provides some insights into what the game was once intended to be like. Below is GlitterBerri's translation of the unused Japanese text Square never bothered to translate (leaving out the テストです – 'it's a test' – that appears on several maps, and any debug room text), with my commentary added to try to make some sense of it all.

Most of the map descriptions were taken from here.

0x009 | Junk battle arena

0x011 | Koorong street

Doubtless these are additional lines planned for the chap who directs you to Annie or Dr. Nusakan if asked about Koorong's Rune Stone.

0x04F | Koorong, Dr. Nusakan's operating room

One of the lost scenes from Asellus's quest: not much new information (why would it bother Orlouge, not the most pleasant of souls, that he unintentionally killed a human?), but her being told to accept her fate like this would have added a little more depth to her predicament.

0x066 | Yorkland, scenic view; plus outside area with dancers

Some of this is clearly incidental text, like an alternative line for the woman with braided hair, but we also get to hear Lute talk about his father, presumably when leaving Yorkland in his opening scenes. Given how ridiculously quickly the avenge-your-father's-murder plot of Lute's quest is introduced and finished, it's annoying to see this morsel left out.

0x080 | Baccarat, scenic view from outside

Debug text, presumably from before the lifts were implemented. F_MOUSE→ probably has something to do with sprite movement; there are similar lines in the debug rooms, and an F_BORO→0C in the Junk crater (map 0x007).

0x091 | Rootville, fiery cave

Another scene cut from Asellus's quest, showing why Kurenai was included in the game; in the final version she's still present in Rootville, but after greeting Asellus she serves no function in the plot at all. This escape scene apparently follows the unused scene in Asellus's bedroom (0x1A9 below) and leads to arrival in Mosperiburg (0x1F3 below).

0x094 | Koorong, outside port

Goodness knows. Judging from it's position in the file, this line may have been intended for the merchant.

0x0D6 | Baccarat, hotel rooms

Debug text.

0x0E6 | Scrap, Caballero Factory large room beneath gunners

0x124 | Shrike, outside map

A little background information on Mu's Tomb, maybe also accounting for the EarthDragon boss in the Bio Research Lab.

0x135 | C.T.C Building, lobby

0x155 | TimeLord's Region, 5th room

Maybe's it's placeholder text.

0x16B | Shingrow Palace, room with strange glowing machinery

Another scene in which Red has just turned into Alkaiser out of sight; it sounds pretty similar to the one that takes place on entry to Red's final dungeon, so maybe it was removed to avoid repetition.

0x16D | Shingrow Palace, three circular cages

Another version of the same scene. It's BlackX troops who are apt to say 'Kee', but beyond that the first line is a mystery.

0x1A0 | Trinity Base, small room south of bunkbed room

This dialogue isn't fully formatted in the game files, so the divisions here are added for readability.

More Zozma, and another escape scene cut from Asellus's quest.

0x1A9 | Chateau Aiguille, Asellus's bedroom

Preceding the scene with Kurenai above (0x091).

0x1C6 | Chateau Aiguille, throne room

If you're thinking not all the dialogue here belongs on this map, you're probably right. A lot of it is incompletely formatted, too (line breaks are added in this transcript), so maybe someone just took the dialogue for a whole extended scene and dumped it into this file to work on later. (The FFVII team's habit of leaving duplicate scripts lying around their files makes it seem plausible that something like that happened.)

Perhaps 'Furdo1 has come' is another placeholder line for the developers.

So: Furdo would have had a larger role in the game, Nashiira and the Bio Research Lab would have had more of a purpose, and not only Zozma but also Ciato and Rastaban would have had more developed roles in Asellus's quest.

0x1E0 | Cygnus, pilot's room

I wonder whether this might also be from Asellus's quest, given that in Red's quest she and White Rose are travelling on the Cygnus during the pirate attack, and it's unclear from playing Asellus's own quest why they would be doing so. (If that's correct, it would mean that Asellus's reunion with Red might have been intended to occur during her own quest too.) On the other hand...

0x1E9 | Cygnus, engine room

(Repeated six times in this file; doubtless a placeholder from before the cutscenes were ready.)

So Riki's quest also had cuts: either events were moved to Tanzer or it was decided that the scenes inside Tanzer were sufficient on their own.

0x1F3 | Mosperiburg, large snowy field

Following the escape scene with Kurenai (0x091), and followed by the meeting with Virgil (0x25B below). This and the following scene are what the nude sprites seen in the debug rooms (in the lower section of the adjacent image) would have been for. As shown with a partial rip at the top of the image, the developers made a dedicated PEP file (used for playable characters' field sprites) of Asellus for this section, indicating that she'd have been controllable, but didn't bother doing the same for White Rose, presumably because she and Asellus acquire clothes again in the subsequent scene.

0x256 | GoldenGate, container with computer and crates that you hide in

More placeholder text for debugging, by the look of it.

0x25B | Virgil Palace, Virgil's room

Presumably musing once they've gone:

0x25F | Virgil Palace, maze over spiked floor

0x31A | MagicKingdom (destroyed), room south of room with Hell entrance

An unused moment of self-reflection for Blue/Rouge?

0x31D | MagicKingdom, room with 'MORI' angel statue, and slime that warps you, in a bubble

0x338 | Kyo, Mind Magic shop

Presumably this was to be used if the player took Zozma to Kyo and let him learn Mind Magic, requiring him to give up the opposing Evil Magic he knows, or there was to be a way for human characters to learn Evil Magic.

In conclusion: the major disappointment is that although his sprite was made for the title screen, we don't get to see any apparent remnants of Fuse's quest, the eighth story that might have tied up some loose ends. It's also a shade irksome that we see a little more character development for Lute, for whom it's so sorely lacking, though there's still no clear sign that his quest was ever intended to be much more involved than it ended up.

On the positive side, however, we get a pretty good picture of what Asellus's quest might have looked like, though it's still a fragmented one. Princess Kurenai's existence in the game turns out to have a point, and the actions of Zozma, Ciato and Rastaban become more explicable. Indeed, this perhaps stands out more than Asellus's own character development, except in the scene with Dr. Nusakan: the politics of the Chateau Aiguille ended up pretty sketchy in the final game, and it now turns out that this aspect of the storyline might have developed rather more smoothly.