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The Fairyland Story (NES)

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Title Screen

The Fairyland Story

Developers: Unknown (possibly TOSE[1])
Platform: NES


GraphicsIcon.png This game has unused graphics.
DebugIcon.png This game has debugging material.


This game was stuffed away in a cardboard box and found 30 years later in a garage
This game was never completed and/or given a public release.
As a result of this, keep in mind that the developers might have used or deleted some of the content featured here, had the game actually been released.

Forestofillusion.com logo.png  This was documented on Forest of Illusion.

The Famicom Fairyland Story is a scrapped port of the arcade game, which stars a protagonist named after a Greek mathematician, Ptolemy. Just like the mathematician, she's a cute witch who obliterates monsters by turning them into cakes. [citation needed]

The game was previewed in Japanese magazines around March 1986, only to be cancelled soon afterward. A build dated April 25, 1986 was released by Gaming Alexandria in June 2022, though the game at this point contains debug features and is a bit glitchy.

The NES/Famicom lotcheck sheets (HNPdata_List.xlsx from ALL.zip) found among the 2020 Nintendo leaks mention that an NES version of The Fairyland Story was submitted to Nintendo on January 8, 1990 by HOT-B's US branch. The mapper is the same, but the PRG is twice the size. It's currently unclear whether the 1990 submission was a fleshed-out version of the build covered here or a completely different port.

Download.png Download The Fairyland Story (NES)
File: The Fairyland Story (NES, Unreleased).zip (18 KB) (info)


Unused Graphics

What are the odds?!

Ptolemy has a unique sprite for getting crushed while transformed that's unused. The game simply uses whatever sprite she was using when she got crushed instead. The specific situation this sprite would be used in is highly unlikely to occur in-game, which might explain why it's unused.

FairylandStoryNESUnusedFlame.png

A small flame. It appears to be a second frame for the flames that engulf Ptolemy during one of her death animations.

FairylandStoryNESHornedEarDuplicate.png

A duplicate of Horned's ear. His second sprite should logically use this based on its location in the CHR data, but it uses the ear from the first sprite instead.

FairylandStoryNESUnusedBubble.png

Part of what might be an early version of the bubble used for Ptolemy's death animation.

FairylandStoryNESUnusedFontCharacters.png

Some of the font characters are unused. These include the letters J, K and Z and a bracket.

FairylandStoryNESEqualsSign.png

An equals sign. It's not entirely clear what this would've been used for, but it matches the font used for the points.

FairylandStoryNESUnusedWoodTiles.png

Two unused tiles from the wood tileset. Interestingly, these don't match the palette used for that tileset, and appear to be from an early version of it.

FairylandStoryNESUnusedRockTile.png

A single unused tile from the rock tileset. Like the wood tiles above, this tile doesn't match the palette, and is likely from an early version of the tileset.

FairylandStoryNESUnusedSquare.png

A... square. The palette used here is speculatory.

Debug Feature

Pressing Select during gameplay (or the demo) takes you to the next level. Using this cheat can cause the game to crash, unless used carefully. Waiting for Ptolemy's intro animation to finish will ensure the game doesn't crash when loading bonus rounds.

Oddities

Tile Oddities

For some reason, in a few places where using blank tiles would have made sense, the game just... doesn't.

You should probably get that checked out.

For example, the bubble used in Ptolemy's death animation has part of her broom in the middle, giving the appearance of her having a large gash across her face.

They don't even use the same palette!

Additionally, there are black sparkles behind all four of the sprites for the Wizard's projectile, though they usually aren't visible due to blending in with the background.

What makes this even weirder is that there are no less than eight blank tiles present in the graphics, all of which are unused.

Removed Tiles

FairylandStoryNESBlankTileOddity.png

The positions of two of the blank tiles mentioned above suggest that the Wizard and Salamander's sprites for getting crushed used two tiles at one point before being changed to use one tile mirrored horizontally like the other enemies.

References