You never know what secrets continue to lurk in Sega Saturn games, even after nearly 30 years.
This week saw new secrets come to light, as one industrious Shining Force fan discovered cheats for Shining the Holy Ark that hadn't been known to the English-speaking world before now.
A member of fan site Shining Force Central's forums, S3M — perhaps better known as the person behind the Randomised Gaming Tumblr blog — was doing research for a video about Shining the Holy Ark when he dug up a Japanese fan site called Uepon's Game Land that had codes for the first-person dungeon crawler released in the West in the summer of 1997.
There are codes for enabling a sound test and starting the game with helpful items. Although they're not traditional codes, as in button inputs — they involve using a specific name when starting a new game. Most of the names are spelled in katakana, one of the Japanese syllabaries, so they can only be input using a Japanese copy of the game.
For example, inputting your name as シシオドシ — pronounced shishi-odoshi, which is a scarecrow-like device used to frighten animals — enables the sound test, accessible from the options menu by pressing the R trigger. It also allows for main character Arthur to be swapped out of the main party and placed in reserve.
Or inputting ダブルオー, which is pronounced "double oh," starts Arthur and Melody with one of each of the permanent stats upgrade items, such as Power Juice and Brave Apple, in their inventory as well as extra healing items and a pair of Squeak Sandals.
And one of codes uses English letters and numbers so it can be input on North American and PAL copies. That one is "ZX-9R," which is a model of Kawasaki motorbike, and it places 10 Quick Chickens in your inventory from the game's outset.
Thankfully, all versions of the game read the same save file, so players could input a cheat name with a Japanese copy of Holy Ark, then switch over to a North American or PAL copy to play.
But another method is to input the Game Shark/Action Replay codes that fellow SHIRO! staffer Knight0fDragon discovered today after S3M published his findings yesterday on Shining Force Central's forums.
Not only did Knight find codes for the cheat names that S3M found, he also discoverd new cheats that aren't even mentioned on the Uepon's Game Land site.
The new cheat names include ナナメミギ — pronounced naname migi, meaning "diagonal right" — which starts players with squeaky sandals, a loin cloth, power undies and a goblin helmet; ダーミズダ — pronounced dar mizu da — which gives a supply of brave applies; タgUチY — pronounced taguchiy, I guess? — which unlocks all pixies, but only when a particular byte is set to 1; and アーサー — pronounced Arthur — whose effect is still unknown.