Pokémon Trading Card Game/Unused Graphics

This is a sub-page of Pokémon Trading Card Game.

Unused Font Characters

Oddly enough, the Japanese version contains a half-width font for the Latin alphabet, despite there not being any use for it. Compared to its international counterpart, the characters are all more vertically squished, and the gender symbols are instead a dollar sign and percent sign (in the Japanese version, full-width gender symbols are used for the Nidoran line). Meanwhile, the multiplication symbol is an asterisk, the "&" is completely different, and more of the comma is visible. As for "é", the lowercase one is missing, and the capital one is instead a slightly different "&".

The game's international font is based on ASCII encoding, which explains why some very specific tiles are present but never used. These tiles are found in both the US and EU fontsets.

Lowercase letters, alongside a couple extra ASCII characters. All but the "é" were blanked in the European versions.

Aside from the "é", the European versions contain two unused ordinal indicators. Neither ª nor º are used, be it in the Spanish or Italian versions. There also exists a lowercase "s", which oddly enough doesn't match the one from the US font.

Full-width lowercase letters, from the same fontset as the one primarily used by the player naming screen. Only the letters "g" and "m" are used, due to the Japanese and European versions using the metric system. The game's sequel makes use of these characters, as the ability to choose lowercase Latin characters was added to the naming screen.

Unused fullwidth characters. Some have used half-width counterparts, while others just don't really fit anywhere. Namely, money never comes into play in this game (unlike in mainline entries), and "Celcius" is always spelled out in full instead of being abbreviated. The game's sequel makes use of the at sign, asterisk, angular brackets, equal, semicolon, and underscore in its updated naming screen.

Unused Card Icon

Found among the graphics for the duel icons is this sprite of a card facing up. Cards are only ever seen facing down, so there's not really any need for this icon.

Unused Attack Animation Tile

Dive Bomb's animation is slightly broken, leaving out one of the fire blasts' tiles to go unused, the only unused tile out of all the attack animations for that matter.

In-Game	Fixed

Unused Overworld Sprites

Worth noting is that the clerk NPC's back sprite can be seen in-game, as in SGB mode one of the lounge clerks has their back to you, to show that the Gift Center can't be used. However, this sprite goes unused in the Virtual Console re-release, which can only be played in GBC mode.

Amy

Unused Frames	Animated Sprites

Amy spends most of her time lounging in her deckchair, only stepping out once to battle the player. Afterwards, she immediately snaps back to lying down, so the player never gets the chance to talk to her from the sides. Moreover, you wouldn’t even be able to talk to her from the back, as she stands in front of a wall.

The game's sequel makes use of most of these sprites, as Amy can appear as one of the Grand Master Cup challengers. Only her walking north frames remain unused, though her static back sprite can be seen if one happens to lose against her on the last round.

Steve

Unused Frames	Animated Sprites

Even after beating all Grand Masters, Steve can't ever be talked to from the back, as he stands in front of Courtney. The game's sequel makes use of these sprites, as there Steve can be talked to from more angles.

Fire

Unused Frames	Animated Sprites

A completely unused overworld sprite, which is an object version of the flames from the Fire Club's torches. Animated tiles are used instead, since as-is the Game Boy would struggle rendering so many objects on-screen at once between the player, the fire, and the NPCs.

Unused Tiles

Worth noting is that tileset 0D (Challenge Hall) also has unused tiles, though they won't be discussed in detail since they are merely leftovers from the Japanese version's Challenge Cup sign.

Tileset 03

The tileset shared by all club entrances has a handful of medal emblem tiles which never get used. It's fairly easy to know what goes where by cross-referencing the lobby medals with the ones from the status screen.

Tileset	Unused Tiles

Normal	Mockup

Tileset 07

The Water Club tileset contains some unused greenery tiles. These seem to have been designed with GBC mode in mind, whereas the final game simply reuses the corresponding SGB tiles. Moreover, one of the tiles uses the wrong palette, causing the grass to be the wrong shade of green.

Tileset	Unused Tiles

Tileset 08

The Lightning Club tileset has unused tiles for the main stage's spotlight effect. They look like they were intended to fill the spot occupied by the two small machines with flickering tights.

Tileset	Unused Tiles

Tileset 10

Besides an early stair tile, the Hall of Honor's tileset also has unused graphics for the Legendary Auto Deck Machine with its screen turned off.

Tileset	Unused Tiles

Normal	Mockup