PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid's Curse

PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid's Curse is a follow-up to The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, a horror-mystery visual novel game about a clambor for the immortality-granting powers of the mythical mermaid.

Unused Graphics#

Unused Backgrounds#

Filename	Unused Image	Final Image	Notes
bg_13_n			A night variation of the background for Toba City. It has the kanji 仮 overlaid, meaning "temporary", and the image seems to be an unedited panorama photo instead of a finalized game asset. You can see shadows on the ground and seams in the fence. Naturally, this location is never visited at night in the final game.
bg_title_temp			A duplicate of bg_22. A version of the title screen composed from separate layers is also present in the files, so it's unclear if either of these backgrounds are used.

Unused Characters#

Filename	Name	Notes
a009/syg	Shogo Okiie	A playable character from the previous game. He's alluded to in this one, but doesn't appear in person.
a051/xxx	Kikuko Tsutsui	An unfinished sketch version of Kikuko's sprite. The used version of Kikuko is in a014, with character code kkk.
chara_yta	Yoshiatsu Yamashina	A near-duplicate of Yamashina's character portrait, properly titled "chara_yat", with thinner outlines around his facial hair.

Unused Story Chart thumbnails#

Many Story Chart thumbnails are visibly screenshots of the Unity Editor, relying on the in-game border around Story Chart nodes to crop out the UI. There are too many to upload them all, but here's an example:

Other than that, several thumbnails are fully unused placeholders, with the chapter ID over the same background. Besides the below example, other IDs with such thumbnails are a120, b010, and c060.

Additionally, a thumbnail from the first game is present in the files. Notably, it's part of a larger UI texture atlas, whereas other thumbnails are their own texture.

Unused Map Images#

The map of the Sumida ward from the previous game is still present.

Map icons for every location in the game are present, several of which are never visited from map screens. In addition, there are two true placeholders.

Filename	Image	Notes
photo_bg20		A blank photo with the kanji 洞窟, meaning cave. Presumably a placeholder for the Ryugu Sanctuary.
photo_bg23		A photo with its own filename loudly overlaid. The beach image in the background is the same as bg01.

Similarly, the icons for present characters include every character in the game, including those who are never present during a map sequence. Yes, even that one. Additionally, three characters from the first game are in the files, using numbers instead of the usual three-letter character code.

Filename	Image	Character
spot_chara_01		Shogo Okiie
spot_chara_02		Yoko Fukunaga
spot_chara_3		Richter Kai

Miscellaneous#

Filename	Image	Notes
itm_magatama		A magatama that would have been an inventory item. What purpose it would have played is unknown.
pic_phonebox		A picture of the phone booth from Kinshibori Park in the previous game, used for that game's "Telephone Booth" entry in the Files.

Unused Text#

Test Scripts#

To do:
Document what each test script says and does? This would require loading them in-game somehow or learning to understand the scripting language, as well as translating the text within.

In addition to the scripts for each in-game chapter, there are several scripts which seem to be used for testing - one for each character, e.g. CHR_AVI_ST, and a series of miscellaneous scripts titled DOCXX_ST, from 00 to 54.

Unused Audio#

Just like in the previous game, the audio files include a synthetic pulse labelled "SampleVoice". Unlike the previous game, this game has no voice volume slider or associated puzzle, and the rest of the audio files are stored in Square Enix's proprietary SEAD format, while SampleVoice remains as a plain .ogg file. This makes its continued inclusion even more anomalous. Notably, the SampleSE sound effect from the previous game is not present in this one.