Fire Emblem: Monshou no Nazo

Debug MenuWelcome to the Build-A-Battle Workshop.

Development Stamp#

Located in the game are leftover strings from an internal development tool, such as S-CG-CAD. Such strings can found in other SNES titles, such as Super Mario All-Stars and Rokkun! Monster!!. More information on this software and the leftover strings can be found here.

Leftover Characters#

A total of five chapters and six playable characters from the first game were cut from its Monshou remake, but some data remains for both the missing playable characters and the bosses and enemies of the cut chapters, mostly in the form of unit IDs and matching name strings.

• 08: Wrys (リフ), a playable curate.
• 0E: Darros (ダロス), a playable pirate.
• 27: Beck (ベック), a playable ballistician.
• 2D: Roger (ロジャー), a playable knight.
• 2E: Jake (ジェイク), a playable ballistician.
• 33: Gotoh (ガトー), a playable bishop. Gotoh is still a major character in both parts of Monshou, but he never appears in gameplay so this character ID is never used.
• 35: Wyler (ワイラー), an unused boss name from the original game.
• 3D: Bentheon (ベンソン), a cavalier boss from the original game's Chapter 4.
• 3F: Mannu (マヌー), a manakete boss from the original game's Chapter 9.
• 42: Heimler (ヒムラー), a paladin sub-boss from the original game's Chapter 12. Although the chapter is still in Monshou (now Chapter 10), Heimler is absent.
• 43: Grigas (ギガッシュ), a ballistician boss from the original game's Chapter 13.
• 47: Sternlin (スターロン), a paladin boss from the original game's Chapter 18.
• 4A: Orridyon (オーダイン), a paladin boss from the original game's Chapter 21. Curiously he has a unique palette associated with his ID.
• 5C: Raman Soldier (ラーマンへい), a label for generic enemies at the Fane of Raman, used in the original game's Chapter 19. The generics in the Monshou version of the chapter (now Chapter 15) are instead predominately Dolhr soldiers with a handful of "Raman Thieves" (74).

None of these characters (with the obvious exception of Gotoh) have portraits. All of these characters were restored to their original state in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, the second remake of the original game.

Unused Classes#

Dark Knight#

The dark knight (ダークナイト; ID 21) is a variant of the cavalier class. It has a unique set of map sprites and it shares its battle sprites with the cavalier. It still wields lances, but unlike the cavalier it is unable to dismount.

Both Tear Ring Saga and Fire Emblem Awakening revisited the dark knight class idea. The Tear Ring Saga class has a very similar look and function to the Monshou class, while the Awakening one is a mounted magic/sword class.

Guardian#

The guardian (ID 25) is a variant of the general class. It has a unique set of map sprites, and shares its battle sprites with the general aside from its unique silver palette. It isn't programmed to use any weapons at all in regular gameplay, but the debug mode treats it as able to wield lances.

Unusually, the guardian has two completely different names depending on where one looks. The game has a separate list of class names used on the battle screen, which is usually used to abbreviate the longer classes to make them fit, but it spells "guardian" completely differently. Menus refer to it as "ガーディアン", a.k.a. the English word "guardian" spelled in katakana, but battle screens call it "しゅごしん", or "guardian god".

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia later introduced a similar guardian class, which is also a lance-wielding variant of a pre-existing armored class, except that the Shadows of Valentia guardian is a monster class with a slightly different Japanese name.

Ocean Dragon#

The ocean dragon (かいりゅう; ID 27) is a water-based dragon species, a concept which had originally been planned for Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light. It is able to move freely on water in the same way as the pirate class. It has a set of unique sprites for moving and attacking on the map, including a very distinctive dodging animation where it ducks underwater; although its stationary map animation no longer seems to exist, one frame of it still appears in unit list menus. In battle scenes, it just reuses the fire dragon's sprites.

It doesn't have a matching breath weapon of its own, but has no problems using the other four breaths if they are hacked into its inventory. Like the other dragon classes, when battle scenes are in map animation mode, it always uses a specific set of breath attack frames exclusive to itself that depict a waterspout, regardless of what breath weapon it is actually using. Appropriately, the Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light concept also describes ocean dragons as attacking with waterspouts.

The debug menu indicates that a matching dragonstone item was also intended for it at one point, but its slot was eventually repurposed into the Part 2 version of the Aum staff.

Shadows of Valentia later introduced the dagons, a similar class of water-based dragons which also happen to reuse some assets from that game's fire dragons.

Unused Items#

ID	Icon	Weapon Name	Translation	Durability	Worth	Help Text
54		あんこく竜石	Shadow Dragonstone	18	N/A	マムクートがつかうと あんこくりゅうに へんしんする	When used by a manakete, they transform into a shadow dragon.
59		ぎんのかぎ	Silver Key	1	5000	ぎんのとびらをあげる	Unlocks silver doors.
7A		オームのかけら	Aum Shard	N/A	N/A	せんじょうより　りだつ する これをもっていると １どだけ　しなない 戦場より　離脱する	Retreats from the battlefield. When held, it prevents you from dying just once, and you retreat from the battlefield.

Unused Text#

Enemy Midia#

The dialogue is at address $89B91-$89BF2 and reads as follows:

There is what appears to be a battle quote for Midia in Part 2. It is possible that she was initially intended to remain loyal to Hardin despite his corruption, but in the finished game, she is captured by Hardin for trying to lead a rebellion.

(Gotoh)#

Between 2 dialogues, at address $92001, there are 5 unused bytes C2 7E 64 B9 C3 which convert to （ガトー）.

Unused Music#

There are 8 unused music tracks in the game, which can be heard on the file select screen by using the Pro Action Replay code 8491C6 XX, where XX is one of the following values:

Unused Maps#

Test Map#

Chapter ID 00 contains a leftover test map titled "第９９章 デバッグがんばれ！のまき" (Ch.99 Good luck debugging! Nomaki). The map itself is a near-exact duplicate of the Part 2 Final-1 map. According to the status screen, the chapter's objective is to "Find all of the bugs" (バグをかんぜんにとる).

Set the byte at 7E07DF to 00 to access this map. Note that any attempt to save the game in battle preparations will fail and just delete the save file entirely.

The player is allowed to deploy a maximum of 7 units, including Marth. Unlike the actual chapter, the player's army starts right in the middle of the map (pictured). There are 13 enemy units, all of whom are named "Galder Soldier" and all of whom have Marth's Part 1 portrait. None of them have particularly remarkable stats or items, aside from a female mage who has a Nosferatu tome.

The map has a handful of noticeable differences from the actual Part 2 Final-1:

• The chapter's seize point is missing, so there's no way to end it through normal play.
• The map plays the Part 1 map and battle themes, instead of the tracks used by the actual chapter.
• The village and shops along the top are all missing. Instead, a random assortment of village fence tiles is sitting in their place.
• A few of these fence tiles are also strewn around the bottom-left, where the player starts in the actual chapter.
• Unsurprisingly, the map has no cutscenes or events at all. This also means that the cursor is not placed on Marth at the map's beginning, and instead sits in the top-right corner of the map.
• If loaded from the chapter select screen, the game zooms in along the top of the world map, opens a text box to begin the customary opening narration, then crashes.

Orphaned Maps#

To do: Polinym's findings discuss how other maps exist in some fashion from 31 onward, as some combination of junk data and duplicates/variants of other maps. What is the nature of the duplicates/variants - do they exist in their own right, or are the attempts to load their data merely piggybacking off the originals of those maps in some way? Do any of them have anything of interest worth reporting on?

There are at least two unused maps which, unlike the test map and used chapters, exist only as maps and have no associated chapter data - no name or objective of their own, no enemies, no ally spawn points. Additionally, any space that one would expect to have some sort of interactive terrain effect (e.g. doors to open, thrones to seize, healing effects) is non-functional, although some other terrain effects (e.g. requiring mounted units to dismount to enter) are functional.

These maps can be accessed by setting the byte at 7E07CE to the appropriate value for a given map at the main menu, then doing one of two things:

1. Load save data. When started fresh this way, no enemies are present, and no units other than Marth can be deployed in the battle preparations menu (the header claims you can still choose 55 more units, but will act like you're at maximum capacity). Marth starts the map invisible (possibly out of bounds) due to the lack of ally spawn point data, and attempting to automatically move the cursor onto him (e.g. by selecting him in the Unit menu) will hang the game as it tries and fails to find him in the map's bounds.
2. Load a suspend point for a chapter already in progress. This forces the suspend point data to load on the new map: all allies and enemies within an area the size of the unused map are put on it in the same relative positions they were at the time of the suspend point's creation.

ID	Map	Dimensions	Notes
17		30 x 30	Set in a castle or fortress, featuring a distinctive brown-gold tile set. Its basic structure - a branching path leading to two (in this case, non-functional) doors, both of which appear to lead to a large, converging area in the back of the map - is reminiscent of Olbern Keep from Part 2 Chapter 6.
22		30 x 30	A dark tower that uses the same tileset as the Tower of Thabes from Part 1 Chapter 18, sans the glowing desert exterior. The torch animations work properly in the same way as that map. A non-functional throne is present.

Unused Terrain#

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Currently only observed on map entry 3B (see "Orphaned Maps"), where it: a) has what looks like a unique tile that does resemble the design used in Gaiden but could be some sort of product of glitchiness in the same manner as a lot of those maps in that range, and b) is non-functional, just like all of the other terrain types that are meant to have functionality that's present on that map. Is it possible that these two traits are purely the result of being on one of those unstable maps? Is there some way of editing it onto a proper map to confirm whether the terrain type does indeed have that tile design/lack function in general? Also, can we get some sort of internal ID number for the terrain type?

• Heal Tile: Ostensibly, a piece of miscellaneous healing terrain other than forts, gates or thrones, like in Fire Emblem Gaiden. Seems to be non-functional, but has a complete set of terrain window help text:

Anti-Piracy#

Like many post-1993 first-party SNES games, Monshou no Nazo tries to protect itself against being run on cartridge copiers by checking SRAM at startup. The game calls a subroutine at $93EA4E that compares the memory range $700000-$702000 with the range $702000-$704000. If the cartridge has the correct amount of SRAM, the ranges will be identical due to address mirroring and the game will pass the check subroutine, but an incorrect amount of RAM (as copiers commonly have by their very nature) will result in mismatched ranges that fail this check, prompting the game to throw up a stern warning message (featuring a fun typo) and freeze.

Game Genie code 99DD-FADD will boot the game to the anti-piracy screen.

References#