This is a sub-page of Robopon Sun, Star, and Moon Versions.
Font Characters#
The game's US font contains a handful of unused characters. First are condensed 't and 's, which for some reason are never used, the game instead using a full apostrophe each time. There are two tiles, a capital J and a lowercase b, with a period in them, neither of which seems to be used anywhere.
Then come standard symbols like parentheses or brackets, a dollar/yen sign (the final game instead using the generic G common to RPGs), and some uncommon characters from ASCII encoding, which is nothing new to Hudson Soft. A copy of the overline and underscore also exist in the second half of the font (used for window borders, health bars and special characters), with those tiles also being present in the Japanese version, where they also seemingly went unused.
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An alternate set of tiles for the continue screen's GB Kiss option. Those were blanked in the North American release of Sun and Star.
Schedule Panels#
The tileset for the schedule panel interface contains a fairly large amount of unused tiles.
A tan card with a large question mark on it, likely a predecessor to the locked chests. There also exists a sprite of an open chest, which would have logically been used after picking a chest. In the final game, they remain locked no matter what.
An unused set of card icons, depicting a clock, a music note, a disk, and a magnifying glass. The last one might have had something to do with the odds of finding something, perhaps Robopon.
An early version of the Robopon encounter rate card, whose label started out as the text "Robo", rather than the final's small generic Sunny-shaped silhouette. There are also unused multipliers, with only "+20%" and "+50%" appearing in the final games.
An odd set of cards, with them depicting a generic female NPC, a trouble-maker, and Old Man Brownie himself. It also looks like those icons were meant to go with a set of unused letters. It's unknown what those cards would have been used for, with them maybe being tied to a cut special event. There is also a cut sideways card, whose purpose is even more unclear.
Unseen Region Map Details#
The Porombo Island map is always obscured by the various paths the player can take to go from one location to another. This always leaves some detailing unseen, unless one uses the debug menu's "WorldMap" option.
Unused Icon Palettes#
The North American version uses more varied palettes on both the overworld and the party screen. The latter however uses a different set of palettes when compared to the former. Of the eight unique menu icon colors, two of them go unused: a brown one and a golden one.
Overworld Sprites#
Grandpa Hogle#
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Grandpa Hogle walks around quite a bit at the start of the game, but never south, leaving those sprites unused.
Miscellaneous NPCs#
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All those characters do move, but don't utilize their entire directional spritesets. These include the pigtails girl, the middle-aged woman, the young woman, the female store clerk, the repairman, and the laboratory man.
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All those characters are completely static, but have full walking frames nonetheless. These include the elderly lady, the female trouble-maker, the Ghana Lake snorkelers, and the naked guy in the company building sauna.
Princess Darcy#
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Princess Darcy never walks to the side, either the left or the right.
Legends7#
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Neither Dr. Disc, Amron, or Kamat are ever seen walking north at any point in the game. As for Dr. Zero, he never walks south.
Old Man Brownie#
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Old Man Brownie has a lot of unique cutscene-exclusive sprites, and in general appears often throughout the game. However, despite this he is never actually seen walking around.
Wataru Tamori#
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Exclusive to the Comic BomBom version is a cameo by Wataru Tamori, the mangaka behind the infamous Robopon manga, here in the form of a barrel creature (a pun on his name). Despite being a static encounter, he nonetheless has a full set of "walking" sprites.
HeroHero-Kun#
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Another Comic BomBom-exclusive cameo consists of an appearance of HeroHero-Kun, the protagonist of a shonen manga then published in the eponymous Comic BomBom magazine. Despite being a static encounter, he also has a full set of walking sprites.
Cutscene Sprites#
Biscuit#
The biscuit that Old Man Brownie eats in one of the Meiji Forest events is drawn on the wrong layer, causing it to be completely unseen in normal gameplay.
Wild#
A part of the animation where Wild tries to start his motorcycle, which is completely obscured in normal gameplay.
Television Set#
An animation of a flickering television. The player can warp through TV screens, though there the player is the one animated, with the TV staying unchanged. Moreover, this set of sprites is found in a separate file to the "TV warp" graphics.
Grandpa Hogle#
An animation of an unusually wide-eyed Grandpa Hogle dropping his head, found alongside the (used) sprites of him performing the same action, but seen from the back.
Clerk#
An animation of the female store clerk bowing, stored in its own file. May have been intended to be shown after buying something.
Unused Tiles#
The following tiles were unused in Sun and Star, and were blanked/overwritten in Moon onward. These include an unidentified object, some sort of hole, a scrapped ground design, striped floor (both vertical and horizontal), and some building tiles for the Robopon Dome (the latter of which is only blanked in the SGB version of the Moon tileset).
A cut decorative object which vaguely resembles a crashed ship, a thin pole (used by neither the houses in Vanza nor the fabric overhangs in Carol Village), corner window tiles, and the upper half of a desk which is never seen since they always have a computer on them. Then comes a tile which would have allowed for wider bridge planks, then a bollard variation (in both SGB and GBC mode), and finally some unused tiles for Dr. Zero's flying machine.
An assortment of unused floor tiles. The second tile in this set is interesting in that its pattern appears in the corners of the elevated platforms that are seen in the Jumper minigame, as well as Meiji Cave. The tile before it also matches the texture of the rock wall.