Level Oddities

This is a sub-page of Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution.

Shantae Advance runs on Wayforward's proprietary GBAEngine, which has its own dedicated tool, GBATool.

GBATool packs its maps in .SCN files, with tilesets in .TS4 files tied to them. The maps it generates are much larger than they need to be, and the dead space holds some interesting secrets.

Most levels contain lone tile sets, developer notes, and otherwise unused goodies outside of camera boundaries. Some of these can be seen via invalid doors in the debug menu.

Introbay has developer text written in tiles, specifying the 2 versions of the map.

Scuttle Town's buildings are packed into one scene, and they are accompanied by yet more labels and a tileset.

Same thing, labels and tile sets. This time though, there are boxes around each screen.

Risky Chasm and Mining Town are in the same scene! There's text showing what various little chunks here are intended for, along with another random tileset.

Mining Town's exterior has some goodies as well, same as usual.

Orc Orchard's Bramble Maze has developer text and art showing how to get through the labyrinth. Too bad you can never see it.

There are also unused chunks in the bottom right corner, and are only present on the monkey vision layer. These are also present in the demo's version of the map.

Frozen Lava Town is easily one of the worst offenders in the game.
It's more unused junk than town, with mountains in the sky and random tiles sitting unsorted below, all with developer text pointing out the obvious.

Strangely, hot Lava Town is one of the cleanest scenes in the game, with no unused junk whatsoever.

The inside of the museum has the usual tile and developer text junk, and it looks like the rooms might have been longer at some point.

Naga Cliffs has leftover tilesets above and below. Also, the map extends higher than is possible to view.

Naga Cliffs' labyrinth is already massive, but looking at the full scene shows it would have been even longer. Two corridors were cut, both fully functional. One room from the original demo can also be seen at the lower-left.
The upper hall would have been a tongue bug course, the lower a rotating platform course. They can be accessed via Door 036/037 and Door 014/015 in the debug menu respectively.
Besides that, there's another developer guide that doesn't help.

The scene used when Risky Boots raids Bog Town is actually an earlier version of the one you can explore. There's placeholder tile art of a snail, stray tile sets at the top, and is more boxed in.

Regular Bog Town retains most of the earlier version's Developer text, but the snail is gone. There's even more tiles to enjoy as well.

Sequin Land's Palace has unseen boxing around both versions of the map, along with more tiles at the top. Even royalty can't escape from laziness.
Also, the sewers don't exist in the clean version of the map.

Other than the usual tileset in the corner, this scene is pretty clean. However, underneath the Sultana's room is an early throne room! Perhaps at one time, she wasn't as huge.

Haunted Grove has the usual tiles, but then it also has a grass tile located so far out of bounds that there's no way to see it without crashing the game.
However, it does a great job at making the scene ridiculously tall, so there's that.
This is technically a leftover from where they edited Orc Orchard, but there's nothing of worth note for that level; It's squeaky clean.

While the main scene of Abandoned Prison doesn't have anything of note, Its (unusually separated) boss room does. There are placeholder cakes under the floor, and the usual tilesets in the upper-left corner.

The caves are all bundled in one scene, and are labeled by number! These numbers correspond with their debug menu listing. Other than that, usual tileset.

All 3 crypts are held in one scene. There's developer text specifying the entrances, but the best thing here is a tiny little test room tucked behind Orc Orchard's crypt.