Dragon View

Dragon View
Also known as: Drakkhen II (Copyright Screen), Super Drakkhen (JP) Developer: Kemco Publisher: Kemco Platform: SNES Released in JP: August 26, 1994 Released in US: November 1994 This game has unused areas. This game has unused code. This game has unused objects. This game has unused graphics. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has regional differences.

To do: Compare the original USA release ROM with the ROM used in the Piko Interactive rerelease on Steam. A patch to turn the original ROM into the rerelease ROM can be found here.

Dragon View, also known as Drakkhen II, is a frequently overlooked RPG for the SNES and the alleged prequel to the original Drakkhen.

Sound Test

To access the hidden sound test, press Start at the title screen then ABXY simultaneously on controller 2. Upon leaving the sound test, you can use the L and R buttons on controller 2 to decrease and increase the brightness of the background.

Unused Graphics

To do: These images may not have been ripped properly and thus may not be original size.

Found in ROM at 16D600 near some magic effects used in the Giza cutscenes.

Found in ROM at 1DE280 near the compass dot and the serpent scales animation.

Found in ROM at 03FD20 are pieces of some kind of person, not organized as shown.

Oddly, found in ROM at 053B60 is a large portion of Abu's sprites from Aladdin for the SNES! These sprites are at exactly the same address in both ROMs, but partially overwritten in Dragon View.

Found in ROM at 187980 is some Japanese text reading "Item Transfer".

Not yet located in ROM, these are loaded to VRAM in every town. The sign is a reference to the ANAKs from the original Drakkhen.

Not yet located in ROM, these bits of World Map scenery can be seen in-game by hacking unused scenery object numbers into a map tile in the Mt. Badsel region. The plant on the right is the only unused scenery object found that scales with distance.

Not yet located in ROM, what appears to be a glowing skull found in the Underworld region of the World Map in the same manner as above.

Not yet located in ROM, some greenish rocks found in the Snowfield region of the World Map in the same manner as above.

Unused Areas

Dragon View has a few normally-inaccessible rooms. Every room in the game is assigned a unique two-byte "Room Number" at address 7E3CFF (wide rooms take up two room numbers). The list of used rooms extends from 0000 to 03FF, with several gaps along the way. Notably Room Numbers between 037A and 03D7, as well as all rooms ending in FB or FC, produce glitched results and do not seem to exist. The remaining unused rooms are as follows:

• There are 54 identical, empty single-screen-wide rooms with background appearing like the Ice Fortress.

• 00FA is a unique wide room using the Sektra Temple background. The left half is empty, but the right half contains several obstacles around the edge of the room displaying garbage graphics, as well as an indent in the wall at the back. If this room is instead rendered in the Ice Fortress tileset, the left half appears broken but the right half actually turns out to be a normal single-screen-wide Ice Fortress room with doors on either side and an indented one in the back, identical to eg/ the room outside the one containing the Hauza Energy.

• Rooms 019A, 019C, 019D, 019E and 01A0 are connected together along with an exit. They are all empty rooms with the standard cave tileset. Rooms 01A1, 01A3 and 01A5 are a similarly connected set of caves with an exit. Though none of the doorways are visible, both caves appear to contain a staircase connecting two rooms.

• 02F6 and 02F8 are two completely blank rooms connected together, with an exit at the left side of 02F6.

In every room, the game stores the room number of the room to the left at 7E3D19. To access any room simply write the two-byte room number to that address, then exit the current screen to the left.

Certain values of the room number are also not actually rooms but rather special functions:

• Room numbers ending in 00 are "Not a Room" and cannot be entered.
• Room numbers ending in FD are "Exit and Re-Enter Town/Dungeon", and do not appear to ever be used in the game. There is some brief animation that goes with this, which temporarily puts garbage graphics on-screen.
• Room numbers ending in FE are "Exit to Last Town Screen", and are used when exiting houses back to the main Town screen.
• Room numbers ending in FF are "Exit Town/Dungeon" and will take you to the world map, outside the last Town/Dungeon you entered.

Programming Oversights

• Upon defeating Piercia, the first boss, a value of $7F is written to 7E9BAA. This value is only cleared back to zero when the game is saved and re-loaded. If the player reaches the end of Ortah Temple and initiates the cutscene with the Dragon Lords with the $7F still present, the program runs off track and will usually crash. The effect of this glitch can be very unpredictable and will frequently result in an infinite loop (often with a repeating sound effect used by the boss of the Fire Cave), but may also very rarely result in instantly beating the game.

• In ROM at 809F84 is the table of angles/orientations for the World Map and their corresponding amounts of movement along the East-West and North-South axes. There is an error on Angle $E6: $E0 is, as expected, 45 degrees between East ($C0) and South ($00), with X and Y movement values of 6 and 6. As your angle increases toward South the X component starts to decrease, but at angle E6 it's suddenly 6 and 6 again - back to 45 degrees. You face the correct direction in-game but you can see visually how you slide sideways along the perfect diagonal when you try to walk.

• In the Wet Cavern, behind the bombable door, you can walk inside the wall at the back of the room. To do so you must be standing in the second-leftmost patch of damaging spiked floor (said patches are below normal floor level), walk to the top of the screen and then to the left. Enemies will not attack you while you are inside this wall but you can still hit them through it.

Curiosities

• There's a well-hidden sound effect when you reveal the path to Ortah Temple that you can hear in the video to the right. The odds of you hearing it are extremely low, since it's normally covered up by the long Horn melody. To hear it you have to play the horn facing almost completely the opposite direction, so that you slowly turn around first and the horn song finishes before it starts. This may suggest that the "Score" was a late addition to the game, and that they originally intended for the regular (much shorter) horn noise to unlock the path.

• The path to Ortah is itself made of water (internally, object number $02). You can see water on the horizon as you're walking toward it, which will mysteriously disappear when you enter the same map tile that it occupies. When you get close, a conditional rule is engaged that shows water as either nothing before playing the song, or the path after.

• If the player returns to the Fire Cave sometime later in the game and reaches the Boss room again, the victory animation and fanfare will play again upon entering the room. After this point, the music stops and does not re-start until you exit the Fire Cave. If after doing this you immediately re-enter the cave and walk to the boss room one more time, the victory animation will not play again. Hacking the Fire Ring (the prize of the dungeon) back out of your inventory before entering the room does not affect the result. It is unknown what causes this and what other effects, if any, it may have.

• In the Snowfield region, immediately west of the Chest Game, there is a grey patch on the ground that appears empty in-game. In the game's ROM, there are actually four bits of scenery programmed onto that patch. These objects are the same internal type ($03) as the trees in the Hujia, Lake and Swamp region, but in the snowfield region they appear invisible. The map tile they are on is not re-used anywhere else in the world map, so it is unknown why these normally-invisible bits of scenery exist.

Regional Differences

Japanese	English

The Japanese and North American releases have completely different title screens. In addition, the Japanese version of the opening cinematic leads directly into the title screen with an animation of the words "Super Drakkhen" spinning into place, complete with sound effects.

The only other difference known at this time is that an extra sound effect will play after receiving an upgrade to your sword or armor in the Japanese version.