Natsuki Crisis Battle

Natsuki Crisis Battle
Developer: TOSE Publisher: Angel Platform: SNES Released in JP: April 21, 1995 This game has unused modes / minigames. This game has debugging material. This game has a hidden sound test. This game has anti-piracy features.

Anti-Piracy/Region Lockout

Like many of TOSE's developed SNES games, this game contains an anti-piracy check. The game normally does not contain SRAM, but still does two checks on bootup to ensure that it isn't a pirated copy. The first check identifies if the game is being run on a PAL console, while the second check writes a value to $B06000 and checks if the write was successful (which will fail on an original cartridge but will likely be successful if the game was run on a cartridge copier). If any of these two checks passes, the game disables all button input when the player reaches the title screen, making the player unable to start a game.

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Option II / Extra Characters

At the copyright screen, press X, Right, Down on controller 1 to unlock alternate versions of Natsuki, Rina, and Kandori for VS Battle and Hyaku modes, as well as an "Option II" menu accessible from the main menu.

A fourth extra character named "Kocho" also appears, but isn't usable; if you try to select him, his icon will contain a speech bubble that reads "Can't be used..." in Japanese.

(translation: GlitterBerri)

The second option menu allows you to hide the life and damage meters during play, and also lets you disable normal and hyper attacks. Note that disabling both makes the game completely unplayable, so try not to do that.

(Source: Original TCRF research)

Debug Mode

There is also an extensive debug mode accessible by starting the game with the Pro Action Replay code C0007F00 active. The message "DEBUGGING SYSTEM Ver1.0" will appear; press any button from here to get to the menu.

The debug mode contains options for testing graphics and sound, playing through a custom battle, and various other things. The fourth and fifth options don't do anything, and the eighth option (obviously) resets the game.

DATA Debug

The data debug menu contains various options for viewing character and background graphics, as well as a sound test.

The "CGX Checker" and "COL Checker" options are supposed to allow you to view tiles and palettes, although most or all of the selections available are invalid and will either crash the game or display garbage if selected. "BattleBG Checker" allows you to view stage background graphics, but with some on-screen garbage where the timer and life bars would normally be; this can be fixed by disabling layer 3 in an emulator.

AtariGetter ATAROW

This screen is a hitbox/viewer and editor. "Chr" selects a character, "ActNo" selects an animation frame, and "Type" selects a hitbox ("damage", "attack", "defense", and "body").

Selecting one of the asterisks next to the hitbox coordinates is meant to allow you to move or resize the selected hitbox. However, this doesn't actually do anything since the coordinates are always stored in ROM instead of RAM, meaning they are only writable on special development hardware and not an actual ROM-based cartridge.

"CenterShift" allows you to reposition the sprite on screen, with the grid lines and hitboxes moving along with it.

AtariChecker ATAROW

Related to the previous screen, this one allows you to view two player sprites at a time with the appropriate orientations and colors for both players. The options work the same as the ones on the previous screen. The "H" and "V" numbers on the right side represent the distance between both players.

SequenceChecker UGOKUZOW

This screen is for viewing entire animations associated with each character, instead of individual frames.

"SqncNo." represents one of up to 256 animations belonging to the second character. A table of animation data is shown underneath the menu, with each pair of numbers representing frame number and duration, respectively. Pressing "Play" will play back the animation in a loop until A is pressed again.

CenterShifter ZURASZOW

This screen is for adjusting the offsets of individual animation frames. It's also crippled for the same reason as the hitbox editor, so you can't really do anything with it. Oh well.

Sound Test

Not much is known about the sound test screen, but researchers speculate it was once used to test music and sound effects in the game.

"Note" selects which music bank is loaded; "music" selects a specific track within the bank, though most or all banks only play music on track 01; higher values simply stop playback. Pressing A/B will increment/decrement the selected value, and X plays back the selected song, sound, or voice clip.

The purpose of the "chr" option on this screen is unknown. It doesn't seem to have any effect on which sounds or voices are selectable.

Battle Debug

This screen allows you to set up and play a custom battle.

"GameMode" selects either "Story", "Hyaku", "Demo", or "VS"; depending on which one you select, only some of the options on this screen are actually applicable. "StoryName" selects where to begin when playing Story mode.

"SkipTime" allows you to control the speed of gameplay; values range from 0 (normal speed) and 1 (half speed) all the way to 15 (ridiculously slow). Setting the value to "PAUSE" requires you to press Start to manually advance frames, good for screenshot purposes and not much else.

DebugSystem MiTsuNoRi V1.0

This screen allows you to jump to any screen in the game, from the opening sequence all the way to the ending.

"clashDEMO" and "ENDING" lead to additional menus containing various story sequences. "100SELECT2" and "SELECT2" are the same as "100SELECT" and "SELECT", but with the alternate characters automatically unlocked.

Push Push Push Push Push

If you ever needed any evidence that TOSE's programmers still had time to get bored in between writing millions of games every year, well, here it is. When you enter this screen, you have ten seconds to press the A button as many times as possible. That's it. The screen also turns purple if you beat your high score (is there any greater reward?)

Yes, this is the entire reason for putting this article in the "unused game modes" category.

etc...

This menu is for the "miscellaneous" parts of the debug mode. Apparently having two dummy options on the main menu wasn't enough, because they put more of them here too.

Spot Window

This screen allows you to move a little circle around, shining through the Layer 1 foreground graphics to reveal the sweet, sweet Layer 2 background underneath. Like before, you'll have to temporarily turn off Layer 3 if you don't want garbage all over the screen.

Pressing A returns to the previous menu, but it doesn't actually initialize the screen correctly, so you'll have to reset the game in order to actually see what you're doing.

Zanzow Test

This screen lets you move a static sprite freely around the screen, with an afterimage/onion-skin effect trailing behind the sprite as it moves. For some reason, only one layer of stage graphics is shown, and the sprite priority is set so that the sprite is behind the stage.

There is no apparent way to exit this screen; just hit the Reset button again.

Prog Debug

The last submenu is for, well, messing with the screen. It's easily the least user-friendly part of the debug mode, but we present it anyway out of sheer dedication to our work.

CHR Checker

This screen allows you to view the contents of VRAM for a specific combination of screen mode settings. It's not too useful unless you actually know how the game initializes graphics, but here's more or less what the options do anyway:

• BG MODE (lower 3 bits only) selects screen mode 0 through 7
• SCR Add (upper 6 bits only) determines which "page" of VRAM to load
• CHR Add (lower 4 bits only) determines which tile set to use
• Palette (lower 4 bits only) is probably self-explanatory

Selecting "decide" will cause your selections to take effect. Once you're done looking at the beautiful pictures (or not), press A to return to this menu.

VRAM Checker

Even more obtuse than the previous screen, this screen allows you to write values directly to several SNES screen registers and observe the results.

Explaining what each register actually does is somewhat outside of the scope of this site, but this sacred tome is always available if you're really curious.

(Source: Original TCRF research)