Great Greed

Great Greed

Also known as: Vitamina Oukoku Monogatari (JP)
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco
Platform: Game Boy
Released in JP: September 17, 1992
Released in US: April 1993

This game has unused enemies.
This game has unused items.
This game has unused text.
This game has regional differences.

This game has a notes page

This game has a Data Crystal page

Great Greed is another one of those Japanese things where everything's named after food for some reason, except instead of heavily-muscled men twitching their eyebrows at each other for hours on end, it's a Game Boy RPG with very loose environmentalist themes. It's surprisingly decent despite that, and even has some nice features like autosaving that its contemporaries might have done well to emulate.

It's also notable for being one of, if not the first video game to feature same-sex marriage, predating Fallout 2 by more than 6 years.

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Notes

Unused Items

Two of the game's key items aren't used. In the English version, both are named "NOT USE" and have blank descriptions, but they're intact in the Japanese version.

Item ID	Name	Description
0x15	ピップどりのす	こしによいくすりになる
0x15	Pip's Nest	Becomes medicine that's good for your back.
0x16	カヌー	きゅうりゅうをくだれるてづくりのカヌー
0x16	Canoe	A handmade canoe that can travel swift currents.

Internally, the key items are ordered the same as they're encountered in-game. These items come between Gum Drop's Earring and Candy's Hairband, so they were probably meant to be collected during the Burger portion of the game. The Pip's Nest was likely intended for a scrapped event where Microwave's bad back would somehow impede the quest, but the Canoe has no obvious place in the finished game.

To overwrite the first item in the inventory with one of these, set RAM $C25A to the appropriate ID from the table.

Unused Enemies

Enemy ID 0x00 is a dummy entry, named マスターデータ (Master Data) in the Japanese version and shortened to MASTER in the English version. All of its data fields except the name are set to zero, resulting in an enemy that has the Sprout's artwork, no attacks (its only attack is the "dummy" action used when the player tries to cast magic from an empty spell slot), no HP or MP, zero in every stat, and yields no EXP or gold upon being defeated.

To see it, set ROM 0x4C32 and 0x4C34 to 0x00 to replace the random encounters around Port Village.

One enemy, "FOXEY", was also semi-removed from the US release (see Regional Differences for details). To encounter it, change the same addresses to 0x01.

Unused Text

To do:
Japanese version, and probably stuff I missed in the area word table.

Offset	Text	Remarks
0x265E	Yoichi	As part of a convoluted text-compression scheme, the game has several tables of commonly-used words. This is the first entry in the "global" table, which otherwise contains extremely-common words like "the", "you", and "this". Most likely this is a developer's name, used to test the compression system. All the words in these tables are actually stored with proper capitalization, despite the fact that the game can only display uppercase letters. The game ultimately has to convert the messages to uppercase before it displays them anyway, so perhaps it was originally going to use mixed-case.
0x2708	Sierra	This is the first entry in the "name" word table, which contains the names of the most commonly-mentioned characters and places. According to the English manual, the player character's "official" name is "Sierra Sam", which this is clearly in reference to. Since the character can be renamed, perhaps the idea was to let the player change the "Sam" part of the name while still using "Sierra".
0xFBD5, 0xFBEC	St. Hell	Part of the "area" word table. Selected words from this table are loaded into RAM when an area is entered and printed by message scripts as needed. The order of the words roughly corresponds to the structure of the game; these are near the end of the table, so they were probably supposed to be used near the end of the game.
0x7632	MONSTER STORE	Found with the names of the shops, such as "ARMORY" and "MAGIC STORE". Unused store type?

Regional Differences

Mountain Shacks

In the Japanese version, there are two small shacks along the mountain road between Caviar and Won Ton. Upon entering one, Gum Drop asks if the player wants to rest. Choosing "yes" - which most players will do, since this comes during a lengthy area with tough and frequent encounters - triggers a scene in which Gum Drop and the player character share the shack's single bed "to keep from freezing", which results in the player character literally battling against his "naughty delusion" (エッチなもうそう).

The Naughty Delusion is a pretty easy fight for this point in the game: 350 HP, 0 MP, 305 PWR, 190 DEF, 150 SPD, only uses basic attacks but will ambush quickly if the player doesn't attack first, and gives 100 EXP and 0 gold on defeat. Beating it results in full HP and MP recovery. (Note that the "defeated" art shows it turning into a fox.) Losing, however, triggers another scene where the player character runs around the mountains to "cool his head", causing him to not recover at all from lack of sleep.

Unsurprisingly, all of this was removed from the English version, which completely overwrites the shacks with standard inns. Interestingly, though, the Naughty Delusion was not removed from the game - despite being unused, it was renamed "FOXEY" and actually given two unique new portraits! Perhaps it was originally just going to be censored a bit, but ultimately got axed entirely.

This enemy was also removed from the monster encyclopedia in the English version (it was originally the very first entry). This leaves 113 entries total instead of the original 114.

Enemies

A few monsters' sprites were redrawn for the English version of the game to conform to Nintendo of America's ever-notorious content guidelines.

JP

EN

Lazedisc (マジックコースタ Magic Coaster) was redrawn for the English version to remove the prominent hexagram on its face. This resulted in the loss of its slightly different "attack" pose.