Dummied Out / Turn-Based Strategy

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• Sami's Double Time CO Power in the first Advance Wars, in addition to raising the movement and firepower of foot-soldiers, has the added effect of letting them cross all terrain with no movement cost. This effect still exists in the code of the sequel, Black Hole Rising, but neither of her powers use it anymore.
• Civilization: Call to Power:
  • The game has many leftovers from the early code, including special actions such as Terror Hack or Bomb Cabinet or the Cattle unit.
  • The sequel includes code for some features, such as space colonies, that were in the first game but ultimately removed from the second.
• Disgaea 2:
  • Hackers can find that the Hyperdrive item from La Pucelle and Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It lets you teleport anywhere on the screen; it functions perfectly, it's perfectly translated into English, and it was even moved onto the PSP remake. According to the Doublejump Strategy Guide; when asked; Nippon Ichi and NIS America "have nothing to say on the matter."
  • Downloading the DLC Hanako in the PSP version yields the data for the DLC weapon data for Gig, which is translated, but getting Gig is another problem...
• Empire: Total War modders discovered that files exist that could theoretically make the entire world playable, while the final game only has Europe, the Middle East, North America and India.
• Final Fantasy Tactics:
  • Every character that has a unique field sprite has a unique job class, down to the most insignificant cutscene-only NPC. And with each job class comes a job description and, sometimes, a list of skills. Most classes that aren't visible in-game are obviously incomplete.
  • Any character not intended to join the player character's party between battles uses a Ramza dummy sprite on the Formation screen when hacked in, but a few characters have valid sprites anyway, such as Orran and Valmafra (the latter of which never appears in battle sequences at all—her class doesn't even learn any skills!)
  • The oddest case is Tietra, who, if hacked into the party, uses a sprite not seen anywhere else in the game on the Formation screen that looks nothing like Tietra at all. Later on, Word of God would release concept art of the character Tietra looks like, with an admission that her purpose was forgotten.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2 was supposed to have a "Transmuter" job for the Nu Mou race, but it was cut out since the game was close to release time and they couldn't afford to delay the game and test the (very complicated) abilities from the job. The job was supposed to let a Nu Mou mix items together to get various effects. Its sprite still exists in the game; the character portrait/avatar is used for the luck stick sellers (showing both player and enemy colors) and the battle sprite can be seen when you start any tower in Brightmoon Tor and in some of the auctions. Word of God confirms this and they were visibly upset about being forced to cut the job.
• Fire Emblem always has a few dummy items/characters. A list can be found here — there are some minor spoilers.
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon:
    • The NES game featured an unused character named Saber (no apparent relation to the character from Fire Emblem Gaiden, and a differently spelled name), who is marked to be recruited by talking to him with Ogma. He's got a lot of traits of a playable unit, though most of them are borrowed from other characters: Elice's growth rates, Michalis's portrait, and Wendell's ending in the epilogue. There's also a large number of unused dragonstones, some Plot Coupons that'd go on to appear in Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, and an item (the Telescope) whose description seems to suggest that Fog of War was at one point planned. The most interesting thing is probably the Helearn staff, which makes an equipped item indestructible.
    • The DS remake seems to have been planned to use dismounting, as there are stats in the game for a dismounted cavalier. (Presumably, the game's reclass feature made this redundant.) There's also some evidence to suggest that the My Unit feature may have been planned for that game at first, though it only made its proper debut in New Mystery of the Emblem. An "Order Units" function, borrowed from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, is fairly complete and even has a tutorial for it. Three significant female characters (Mida, Minerva, and Caeda) have alternate portraits of them out of their armor.
  • Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem cut a number of characters from its predecessor, but a lot of them remain in the code, though they lack portraits (space reasons, most likely). Midia has a battle quote suggesting she was going to be an enemy, and there's an unused "Sea Dragon" class that can cross water. The most famous unused thing is probably the Aum Fragment, a held item that has no function but seems meant to instantly heal a character when they would hit 0 HP.
  • Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 had a rather long and idiosyncratic development, and so unsurprisingly, there's a lot left in the code.
    • There's a total of eight unused portraits (plus a ninth class portrait, designating civilians): three are just generic paletteswapped bosses, but five are new artwork, and all are pretty recognizable as Arthur, Femina, Asaello, Daisy, and Jeanne from Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. What makes this one strange is that four of those characters are subsitute units, meaning their existence contradicts that of the Genealogy characters in the final product, one of whom is a major character.
    • There's stats for a lot of characters that never appear in the final game—again, a good number of them appear to generic bosses, but others are characters who only appear in cutscenes (well-equipped enough that they could likely have been encounters in the final game), and one of them who never appears in the finished game, Gunna, has parameters that seemingly mark him as a playable character (he has growth rates, personal skills, and escape and death quotes) and suggest he may be Asbel's father.
    • Plenty of classes exist in the game's code that don't appear. Most are ported over from Genealogy, but Knight Lord and Master Knight are still there, and even have revised animations that suggest they were meant to be playable or at least possible to meet.
    • A large number of weapons — again, unsurprisingly, a lot were in Genealogy, but a lot aren't, or are unusually finished-looking. Mjolnir in particular is not only relatively complete, but it's coded to be exclusive to Ishtar, who, again, only appears in a cutscene. Particularly notable is the description of Gungnir, whose description simply reads "Hacking is bad."
    • An entire alternate version of the game's last map is lurking in the codes, with a pretty similar setup but completely redesigned (even the mapset is different). It's even mostly finished, with dialogue and everything, though it will start to bug out due to wonky unit placement if you take it for a spin.
    • Strangest of all, there's an entire missing skill in the game called Immortal—and it doesn't do what its description says it does, instead negating terrain penalties for the user. What makes this one particularly weird is that there actually is a skill in the finished game that makes the user effectively immortal, though it's invisible to the player (it serves as a form of Plot Armor for certain people).
  • Interestingly, some of the plot of the tenth game (Radiant Dawn) could be spoiled ahead of time by breaking open the ninth (Path of Radiance) — revealing that the Tellius duology had its plot planned from the get-go. The biggest example is that two characters — General Zelgius and the Black Knight — have the exact same stats (basically giving away that they're the same person), but you would only be able to see the stats of one of them in normal gameplay, as Zelgius is in cutscenes only.
  • It's also possible to use team modification hacks to recruit cutscene versions of characters such as Ike (understandable, because some cutscenes depict him as unarmed — using the real Ike internally wouldn't allow this without changing the player's equipment settings) and, in one silly case, a version of The Black Knight called "MPID_BLACKKNIGHT" — who has different stats. Also, since there are no female Bishops in the game, the female Bishop class is used as a dummy model for characters who only appear in cutscenes, like Elincia, Kurthnaga, and Gareth. There's also a cutscene model of an older Sanaki who, unlike the younger version, has a magic casting animation.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening has unused sprites for the Hero class for several characters who are otherwise unable to use that class. Since all of these characters have the Myrmidon set, it's thought that Hero was originally intended to be one of Myrmidon's promotion options. In the final product, Myrmidons promote into either Assassins or Swordmasters.
  • Another sprite shows a critical hit animation for an unmasked Gerome◊, which indicates that he was to remove his mask during combat at some point.
  • A critical/skill portrait was discovered for Phila was well; unfortunately, though, she's killed off before she has a chance to use it.
  • The game's files list the names Andrea, Leopold, Bella, and Tracie among the game's characters. There are no characters in the game by those names and no other indication who they were supposed to be.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates, some data shows that if Azura was the Female Kana's mother, she was supposed to have different support chats with her depending on the path taken. Similarly, some data states that in the Golden Path, Beruka was considered to be a potential wife for Kaden and mother for Selkie; in game, she can marry Saizo or Azama and be the mother of Asugi or Mitama, respectively.^note Whereas Kaden can marry either Peri or Charlotte.
  • Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia has several interesting cases of this.
    • In a slight variation, the various alcoholic beverages found scattered throughout the game were originally meant to be consumed by any character over 20. In the game proper, no character can drink them, though they're still in the game, and they can serve as potential offerings to Mila Idols.
    • Fernand and Berkut have nearly full sets of dialogue, including things like reactions to provisions, that are fully voiced, implying they were considered for playable characters at some point. While Fernand is playable in some of the DLC levels, there are still a handful of voice clips for him that are unable to trigger normally, such as a mourning clip for Clive.
    • Alm, Saber, Mycen, and Conrad all have unique voice clips that play if Celica is killed during a battle. Normally, this leads to a Game Over, even if you're playing in Casual Mode and after the parties merge in Acts 5 and 6.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses has some dummied dialogue implying Felix and Annette could have become enemies on the Blue Lions route at one point.
• Into the Breach: Pilot reactions for the pylons deploying on the final island are in the game files, despite the fact that, in the game proper, only CEO Kern can comment on them.
• After Strategy First released the source code to Jagged Alliance 2, many such removed features were revealed, including random airstrikes, weather effects, and a massive attack set to occur in the very early stages of the game. Most of these features were returned to the game in Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13.
• In Phantom Brave there is an "Infernal Sword" version of the Yoshitsuna that can only be gained via cheating. This is the version that the Disgaea protagonists can get. The Infinity+1 holy version of the sword is merely called The Divine Sword.
• Silent Storm has an unused multiplayer feature that can only be accessed by using the console, and is quite clearly unfinished, missing a few elements, if still playable.
• Even Super Robot Wars isn't immune to this:
  • In Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, GameShark codes can reveal a combo attack that was meant to be used with the Grungust Type-1 and the Huckebein 008L.
  • In Super Robot Wars Judgment, the debug mode revealed a removed attack for Justice Gundam, which would've had Athrun self-destructing it. In the end, it was removed and only Boss Borot and Million Alpha have suicide attacks.
  • Super Robot Wars Alpha 2 had sprites for pretty much all the story-relevant machines from Gundam Sentinel^note Including the S Gundam's Booster configuration, Ex-S Gundam, Zetaplus A1 and C1, FAZZ, Xeku Eins, Xeku Zwei, Gundam Mk-V, the Z'od-iacok, and even an "asteroid missile". The sprites were originally found in the data for Alpha 3, which lead fans to speculate that it was cut from the game in favor of Gundam SEED; however, when the sprites were later discovered in Alpha 2 as well, the rumor was put to rest.
  • Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 has plenty of them.
    • One of the songs removed was "Gattai! Getter Robo", which meant that, at one point, Getter Robo was meant to have either a brand new song or two songs.
    • Cut-in graphics and dialog show that Yzak Joule and Dearka Elthmann were originally intended to be able to pilot the Freedom and Justice Gundams; this was removed presumably due to Gameplay and Story Integration^note In SEED, Kira outright refuses to let anyone touch the Freedom because it has a nuclear reactor and he doesn't want the tech falling into the wrong hands. Not to mention MASS PRODUCED FREEDOMS.
    • At one point, Mazinkaiser was meant to have his Kaiser Blade attack like in Alpha and Alpha Gaiden, but was removed for unknown reasons.
  • Shin Super Robot Wars
    • Muge Empire and Robot Empire (Trider) enemy units/pilots (can be seen in karaoke mode)
    • Daikuumaryuu's alternate forms
    • A lot of cut stages
    • An alternate remix of Brave Raideen's OP.
• X-COM:
  • X-COM: UFO Defense features all sorts of stuff in the code of the game, such as an unused Gatling Laser, Alien UFO Components that were not used, a differently-shaped Small Scout UFO, and the ability to generate random UFOs based on the various major classes of enemy ships. Some of these features can either be hacked into gameplay by XComUtil.
  • Terror from the Deep has a lot of shared data from the first X-Com, allowing canny modders to bring back some of the stuff they had from Enemy Unknown.
  • Apocalypse has an unused Research option called One Way to Win, along with several other things like Tracker Guns and Prison Cells for human criminals and organization leaders, and weapons like the Dimension Destablizer. These hint at a far more ambitious game that eventually got smacked with time and budget problems. See this page for a list of dummied out items.
  • X-Com: Enemy Unknown:
    • The reboot has the "Second Wave" menu, a set of optional modifiers intended to customise the difficulty by adding various hardships and penalties. It was removed from the game before release, but was reimplemented with a free DLC patch in January 2013.
    • There is a list of unused abilities, some of which are old names for the current class abilities, and others that were removed for various reasons.
• Xenonauts: A lot of things in between versions of the Alpha/Beta build (ex. certain types of researchable equipment). Putting said things back in is one of the current hot topics of the Game Mod community.

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