Extending The Demo: Dark Savior

The ominous parallels

I started looking at Dark Savior in response to a reader question: Is there a sixth parallel?

In case you don’t know, Dark Savior is a Saturn RPG with an unusual structure. At the start of the game you have a task to complete: save your ship’s captain from a monster. The rest of the game depends on how well you do that task — you’ll see different story elements if you do it quickly versus slowly, whether you win versus the monster or lose. There are five branches of the story (parallels in the game’s parlance), and to complete the game with 100%, you have to finish them all.

I didn’t find any traces of another parallel in the final game, but I did find extra content on one of the Dark Savior demo discs. The disc is from April 1996, and the part of the game it normally lets you play is pretty close to what’s in the final version (from August 1996). But there’s more to it — including some cool scenes that didn’t make it into the final game. Maybe they are elements of an unused storyline?

I’ve made a patch that lets you explore beyond the demo limits — get it from SegaXtreme! This article will describe the unused sections of the demo, and provide technical details on how the patch works. As a bonus, I’ll also take a look at some other builds of this game.

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Playing more of the demo

In Dark Savior Taikenban, you play up to the battle with Bilan (Villain in this version). The demo ends with an advertisement for the game.

There’s more data on the disc, however. The value at address 060fdd66 determines which scene is about to execute. We skip over the ending sequence and to the start of parallel 1 by changing what gets loaded into that address:

0601bea8 0005  # Go to the start of parallel 1

Instead of the Coming Soon screen, we’ll get the introduction to Jailer’s Island. After that, we’ll have control of Garian (Ryu-ya in this version) again, and can keep playing!

You’ll notice some unfinished graphics from this point, but you can more or less play normally till the part where you climb to the castle entrance. The demo crashes after that, but we can fix that with the same trick as above:

0601bd4c 004d  # Go to the castle interior

After this, the prototype demo starts looking very unfinished. Some objects don’t work, e.g. you can pick up Drizzit, but can’t carry him between rooms:

As you make your way down to the sewers, you’ll notice that the enemies just stand there — you can’t fight them. Also, the camera starts behaving strangely and gets increasingly zoomed out:

It’s finally the end of the line when you reach the gate in the sewer. You’re supposed to be able to lift it by attacking a wheel, but it doesn’t work and you’re stuck.

…or are you?

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Accessing unused areas / debug features

If you want to keep exploring, you can boost your jump and skip over many obstacles. Here’s a memory patch that will let you clear the gate in the sewer:

0600f4d6 0200  # Increase jump height

There’s another way to see more of the demo content — this demo has an unused “scene skip” feature. It’s not hooked up, but we can restore it with this patch:

0601a050 e120      # Connect the Y button
0601a096 00000080  # Connect the Z button
0601a098 060fe158  # Point to controller 1 inputs

Now when you press Z, you’ll go to the next scene. Pressing Y will take you to the previous scene. This just adds/subtracts from the value at 060fdd66 mentioned above, so where you go may or may not have an obvious connection to where you’re coming from. It also resets your position, so where you land in the scene may not be right (or even playable).

Despite the limitations, you can see lots of unfinished scenes, and scenes that don’t have an equivalent in the final game! The most intriguing are these (around index 00A0) where you seem to be in some sort of giant’s lair — there are huge bottles of milk, cans of beer, and even cigarettes. The giant appears in the final game, but the household items don’t.

One interesting unused scene has Garian in “limbo,” the space between life and death. Another set of scenes has the giant’s lair covered in some sort of pink goo — maybe bubble gum?

Some other scenes involve rooms with platforms over a gate leading into a yellow door. Another involves a giant piano!

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The earlier demos

There are a few other builds of Dark Savior available to explore: Demos of it appear on another standalone disc, on Saturn Super Vol. 5, and Flash Sega Saturn Vol. 3. They’re all from February 1996 and have similar contents.

I dove into the Flash Sega Saturn Vol. 3 build. It’s pretty interesting! There are rooms on the ship that don’t appear in later versions of the game, like these in the ship:

The demo ends at the start of parallel 1 here, too (note that the fight with Bilan doesn’t trigger the combat mechanic).

You can hook up the scene skipping functionality with these memory patches:

060189ba e120      # Connect the Y button
060189f8 00000010  # Connect the Z button
060189fc 060fe148  # Point to controller 1 inputs

Here are some very incomplete locations that you can see by skipping scenes:

There’s not enough that actually works to make a patch that lets you play without hacking, alas!

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Outro

The scene skip function doesn’t exist in the final game, but we can skip scenes by changing these two addresses:

060fdd7a xxxx  # Replace with an index
060fdd44 0002  # Load the new scene

There are hundreds of scenes — I’m not actually sure how many exactly! Surely some are unused, but it’s hard to tell. If you find some, tell me about it!

For previous coverage of prototype content hidden away on demo discs, see my earlier articles on:

• Sonic Jam
• Street Fighter Zero 2
• Touge King the Spirits 2
• Swagman
• Rabbit
• Re-Loaded
• Fighting Force
• Panzer Dragoon
• Saturn Bomberman

*This article was originally published on https://32bits.substack.com