Unused Models Revisited

Remember those unused 3D models found in the first Star Force game that had nothing to do with the game? The Battle Network ones? It's one of my top posts.

Well anyways, thanks to a regular visitor of this blog named "Black Ace", I've taken the models and resources and tried opening them in the now abandoned Mario Kart DS Course Modifier. It's amazing what people can do when they want to modify their favorite game. Such tremendous progress!

So with that, it brings nearly flawless support for viewing NSBMD models, exporting them, and even viewing its animations! Take a peek below for the full scoop.

Here's a recap on the whole thing.
In every copy of MegaMan Star Force, the first game, the models.bin, motions.bin, and stages.bin all have content relating to this. Unpacking models and motions, here are the ones I used:
462.BMD0 = MegaMan
463.BMD0 = Lan
464.BMD0 = Generic Kid
465.BMD0 = Normal Navi
466.BMD0 = Buster
467.BMD0 = Foot
846.BCA0 = MegaMan animations
847.BCA0 = Lan Animations
848.BCA0 = Generic Kid animations
849.BCA0 = Normal Navi animations

At last, MegaMan can walk and run! As the video shows, everyone could walk. Aside from the model quality being very rudimentary, even for a DS game, the animations are fairly crude too.
Curiously, MegaMan's animation file is larger than the others to include animations named "bpl00". This might mean "battle player" and it makes sense seeing as how they are a battle pose, shooting, and getting hurt. Also unusual is that these don't actually fit MegaMan's model at all. They fit the other 3 characters though. However, the stray buster and foot models still don't seem to be for anything. The foot is not accurate but the buster might have gone over MegaMan's hand in-battle since the shooting animation seems to animate correctly.

Here are some of the animations in GIF form.

Yes, they're neat but crude. The blue tip on Lan's hair from the bad texture. Lan's giant hands. Excusable actual running and not skating as the games did. The stripe on both of them are overused. MegaMan doesn't have a backpack. The emblem is way out of proportion.

After seeing all this, it's become very obvious to me that this was probably never meant to be a game or even imply one was being made. I mean, sure, there were plans for a Battle Network game on the DS sometime in 2004-2005, but this was all most likely just a tech demo. Something to showcase the Nintendo DS, possibly internally, or as a demo like the Yoshi's Story GBA demo was to the GBA.

It seems all this would be possible: You can play as Lan in the real world. Walk around ACDC Town and talk to apparently only the generic kid who would just be walking in whatever direction. Run around and inspect buildings maybe. Lan can enter his room and jack in to the Net. You can also play as MegaMan. Walk and run and interact with a Normal Navi who just walks around. You may possibly be able to enter a battle where you can shoot and get hit by the enemy. The battlefield is fixed to the area and panel types you get. Also on the Net, you can follow warps to explore the various levels of the map.

And that's it.

Then for whatever reason, they accidentally ended up in the Star Force games for all regions when it wasn't supposed to. Even if gameplay-wise this wouldn't be very fun, I would still like to see it in action someday. A Battle Network game made today would likely feel close to this. With a MegaMan Legends-style overworld, it would be great and that's what I'm getting out of these. And if the 3D perspective is handled well in battle, that would also look fantastic.

We can always hope for a new game, right? Right?

Here are some more screenshots of the whole batch again since this viewer is so much better.