Those of you who’ve read Shademp’s Unused Text Series will have encountered the “Travelling Salesman”, an unused character whose text in Gongaga may refer to the “Titan” materia and other text indicates a link with the hidden key items “Letter to a Daughter” and “Letter to a Wife”.
Translator Glitterberri, whose own site can be found here, today posted an article in which a developer responded to her questions regarding the unused text related to the mysterious NPC.
Regarding the travelling salesman, the developer had this to say:
“I think the travelling salesman’s Gongaga lines were created in order to inform the player of the Materia they could obtain in the ruins of the Mako Reactor close to the village.
Because the development of FFVII took place in such a short period of time, there’s definitely still data in the ROM that went unused for any number of reasons. By all rights, it should have been deleted, but because the size of the ROM would change once the data was removed, all the debug work we’d done up to that point would become useless. That meant that if a glitch occurred, our efforts would be unrecoverable. Therefore, a small quantity of flawed or stored data was left in place, just to be safe.
I believe that the text you’re asking me about was linked to this. I wonder if you’ll understand if I tell you that the reason it wasn’t used was due to the fact that we only had 5 months to implement the data in FFVII. I think that, perhaps, there wasn’t enough time to link it to the event it connected to, so it was cut.”
Although much of what was left in the game and unused is suspected to have been left there due to time constraints, it’s quite another thing to hear it from someone who worked on the game itself. He also had a bit to say about current generation Final Fantasy games and the state of JRPG’s vs. the current climate of gaming in the western market. For more, follow the link above to head to the article on Glitterberri’s website.
Want to get into the discussion? Go to this thread on our forums.
Unfortunate timing: right now that link redirects to a domain parking page. Presumably the domain registration suddenly lapsed.
It was down for a day, but has been renewed. If it’s not loading for you, try clearing your cache.
I’ve just tested the links and they’re working fine on this end ^_^.