Granville has wrote an interesting topic in the U64 Forum, in which he showed us some misterious textures that seems to have been found by The Spriters Resource in the Megaman Starforce code. In these textures we can recognize various 3D models from the Megaman Battle Network series!
The problem is that there was no 3D MMBN for the DS and MMBN5 DS was just a compilation port of both GBA versions of Battle Network 5. It was pretty much identical to the GBA as it had the same 2D graphics apart from a couple of models. There were a total of 3 3D models in MMBN5 DS- Megaman, Protoman, and Colonel. The Megaman model that was found in MM Starforce could be from BN5, but that’s about it. Hidden in the MMSF code there’s Lan, some kid, a town, Lan’s room, and some net areas all in 3D and can’t be found anywhere in BN5DS.
As Granville has wrote, it could be possible that Capcom used “MMBN5’s engine as a base for Starforce at first. Likely they intended Starforce to be a true Battle Network 7 originally, but then they modded the game so much that it became its own series.” If this is trye, then these Battle Network 3D models could be the only remains from the original Starforce prototype.
You can read more info about these unused models at Mega Rock Blog!
Here are some beta images from MHFsilver, used in promotional videos and articles:
These images show a wide difference between the beta and final version. Some images include their beta version compared to their final version. For more information, you can check the Rockman EXE Zone Forum!
Thanks a lot to Granville, MegaRockReborn, tgarciao and MHFsilver for the contributions and huge props to MegaRockEXE for the find!
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