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Formation Special Event Flag Findings

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In FF3usME Monster Formation Editor there are 'Special event' flags that are of course tied to the battle events, more specifically the 'Characters acting as monster' a.k.a. "CAAM" data that was brought to light by the Pandora's Box team years ago, which loads various things like character data, AI, positioning, and other flags in order to have battle events. Anyways, while seeing how many I had left to possibly do something with, I thought I'd take a closer look into these and wound up taking some notes... notes which I will now share, because there's a chance that 1% of the people who see this may find it interesting or even better useful.

1) There are two consecutive 'Cyan fights alone' flags. While they are exactly the same in terms of CAAM data, formation 59 (the third encounter with the Cadet) uses the second 'Cyan fights alone' flag... It seems that originally the developers were going to do something a bit different for that third battle, but then just duplicated the CAAM info for the first 'Cyan fights alone' one instead of having just the one flag for it. I suspect that maybe these Special event flags came before a lot of the actual development, which would explain why a bunch went unused and left to become artifacts. Anyway you can put the first flag onto formation 59 and free up the second one there for something else.

2) The one labeled 'Piranhas fight' is seemingly used for the Piranha/Rizopas battle (formation 79), however, it does absolutely nothing, like a Magikarp. It can be used for something else. My guess is the developers were going to have that battle be even more unique somehow, but then went with the "Piranha command" in the AI. That, or originally Gau was to show up for the battle ala Sabin does with Vargas, or who knows what.

3) The next Special event is labeled as '? (Kefka vs Sabin)', and it is not used on any formation at all, meaning it is unquestionably unused. It is for all intents the same as the one that is used for formation 504, except it has Kefka positioned just a tad more to the upper right. This leads me to think that maybe they had a third battle with Kefka in the Imperial Camp, possibly when trying to escape because the CAAM data is loading M.Tek armors to be on the characters, but this is of course purely hypothetical.

4) After this we have one labeled as '? (Kefka vs Terra)', which appears to be at least somewhat similar to the actual Kefka vs Terra Flashback one that is used - it appears to be another Kefka and Terra scene where Kefka would come up from the bottom of the screen, minus the Magitek Armor... but there are enough differences that lead me to think it may have been a different scene all together. This one however unlike the previous one is seemingly used, on formation 506 that has a L. 60 Magic monster inside Mould 9 (weird). Thing is formation 506 is never used anywhere. More about that at the end of the post.

5) '458 ? gau. return from veldt' looks to be just that, Gau, probably returning from the Veldt. But it is not used, or rather it is put on an unused formation (458) with a oddly placed Dirt Dragon. Perhaps a dinosaur was meant to show up to take the Dried Meat instead and...okay I'm stretching now. This formation is in the range of other weird non-used ones, so who knows.

6) '<0x0B> not used', is just that, not used anywhere. The CAAM data though from what I can discern shows what is loading Terra, Locke, and Celes... huh!

7) The following Special events are all nice and used, up until the one labeled as 'Espers & airship'... This one is actually unused and has nothing to do with that. Instead, the data shows Kefka being loaded, as well as three Imperial Soldiers ($0E)! The positioning of this Special event is right after 'Bridge p. 4', which is when the Espers come to save their friends, right after Kefka does away with Leo, and 'Kefka vs Esper', which is of course right after that. SO, I'm led to believe that at one point there was maybe a battle event with Kefka and three soldiers, in between those two. Or, perhaps it was an earlier design where Leo or the party would battle that instead of the static Kefka image. Like other battle events they would have been loaded to appear from under the dialog box and walk up to the middle of the screen to do who knows what. So anyways, the 'Espers & airship' one couldn't be more wrongly labeled and is unused. The actual Espers & Airship one btw is the one labeled as 'Bridge p 3'.

8) The next one, Kefka vs Esper, is indeed used of course, for when an Ifrit clone shows up to challenge Kefka (bad idea), this is done on formation 392...so why the heck does formation 391 have the flag also?! Because this one (formation 391) is not used. Again, more on the in just a bit.

8) The one labeled as 'Bridge p. 6' is actually the notorious Kefka vs Gestahl battle event on the Floating Continent. Not sure how that got labeled as such.

9) The ones labeled as '?' are 100% unused and have no data attached to them worth mentioning. You can use the 'not used' ones as well, but in reality they only go up to <0x1F> because that's where the actual data ends in the ROM.

Now some of these unused Special event flags are used in formations, formations that are actually unused! I thought I'd mention this as well because these unused formations are not taken into account in assassin's list of unused pack & formation document, and they are:

390, 391, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510

More free/unused formations woo-hoo!


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(01-07-2021, 02:32 PM)Gi Nattak Wrote: 5) '458 ? gau. return from veldt' looks to be just that, Gau, probably returning from the Veldt. But it is not used, or rather it is put on an unused formation (458) with a oddly placed Dirt Dragon. Perhaps a dinosaur was meant to show up to take the Dried Meat instead and...okay I'm stretching now. This formation is in the range of other weird non-used ones, so who knows.

[Speculation] Perhaps World of Ruin Gau was meant to be locked behind a boss battle, like many of the other World of Ruin characters?  The thieves in the Cave on the Veldt talk about the dinosaurs and the boy in the wild, so perhaps when Gau appeared and you used the Dried Meat again it would trigger a boss fight.
Could have been scrapped because of fear of the 'on the veldt' flags, as much of the Gau protective coding revolves around that.[/Speculation]

Very nice list.  Character Acting as Monster events kinda melt my brain, but I'm sure somebody will find this quite useful.
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