Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side

Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side is the semi-sequel to the Genesis fighting game Eternal Champions, and is notable for not only being one of the last Sega CD games released in 1995 but one of the few which took advantage of the Sega CD's features and storage space. It also featured FMVs which, while grainy, were full-color CGI (although CGI rendering was pretty simplistic at the time). The blood and gore were also ramped up, with a host of new finishers.

Unused Animation
While Sega CD games are difficult to look through for sprites, there are programs such as Artmoney which can do so. The following sprites were found in the ISO:



Unlike the Eternal Champion, who has a unique win animation for his second set of forms, Dark Eternal Champion uses the same win animation for both sets of forms. This could have been used for that, or a scrapped special move of some kind.

Debug Mode
While the first game had what appeared to be debug menu leftovers, this game has a fully-working debug mode. First, enter a fight and either win or lose. Once the blue results screen after a match comes up, press Y, A, B, B, A, Down, A, B, B, A, Down, Up, Up, Z, Z, Y ("YABBA DABBA DUUZZY") on Controller 2. A sound will play confirming it was entered correctly. Afterward, pause the game during a fight and enter one of these commands on Controller 1:

Character Unlock Codes
As opposed to unlocking the secret characters normally, there are cheat codes to unlock each of them. While they don't spell out funny messages, they do work and are entered in the same way as debug mode.

These cheats were probably used by the developers as a means of testing, but they could also just have been made because some of the character unlock methods are rather strange. Once again, use Controller 2 and enter the following codes on the blue results screen after a match:

The unlocked characters will be saved to the backup RAM.