Lost Scenes of Final Fantasy VII

I like debug rooms, and FFVII has some fine ones. It's been known for some time that outtake cutscenes could be accessed thereby, tantalisingly hinting at what might have been in the same manner as the lost Northern Cave area and unused key items. Trouble is, the stage of the plot you're at on entering the debug rooms can alter the results of some options in such striking ways that one person may see an outtake and another not. (In each of the first two video sets, the first recording is from the Japanese PlayStation version of the game, the second from the English PC version.)

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Point of access: the train guard in the 3 o'clock debug room (Toriyama's); select 'Cargo', but see below...

I have never seen this particular scene before. It plays the 'nightmare' music, and turns the screen red (similar to when Cloud hears the 'Stop! This isn't just a reactor!' message in the Number 1 Mako Reactor). Afterwards, the screen fades to black and never loads back in...
(From Matt Hobbs's FFVII FAQ, v. 9.0)

Begins after you've met with Barret in the train cargo carriage, then leaps to the conversation with Jessie about the train ID system.
(From Andrew Dean's FFVII Debug Guide v. 1.7)

What's shown here answers the first description, except that on the PC version the screen fades to black rather than red. (The reddening effect works elsewhere in the game, though...) Which scene you get seems to depend on what stage of the plot you're at before entering the debug rooms; the following is correct as far as I can tell:

• If you haven't viewed it yet, or use the 'reset flag' button in the debug room: Cloud's grand entrance after jumping onto the train, just as in the game proper.
• If you've played through that scene, but haven't yet played through the Seventh Heaven events: what Andrew Dean describes.
• Else: what Matt Hobbs describes.

[A note on the 'reset flag' buttons: in the 3 o'clock debug room, some buttons have special functions, among them a 'reset flag' function that undoes changes brought about by your progress through the game, e.g. resetting the flag that tells the game you've already seen the cutscene with Cloud entering the freight carriage. I experience an odd side-effect using the PC version: the first time I try to access the menu after resetting the flags, I get half a disc change screen. Ejecting the disc gets rid of this, but the game may crash when one tries to change location; also, the ejection trick seems not to work on menu tutorials, and again crashes the game. Note: I've tested this only with the Standard install, not Maximum.]

My first thought was that this would have happened in the freight carriage once Cloud was left alone; Tifa's 'Mou!' ('Again!') as Cloud wakes up at the beginning of the 'Materia' outtake (see below) may support this. (She could also be referring to the state Cloud was in when she found him at the station, but that would be plain confusing on a first play-through.) However, the fact that this scene becomes available only after the Seventh Heaven scenes suggests that it might instead have been intended for the second bombing mission, with the freight carriage, like the one with the rail system map, being reused. Perhaps originally the party would have jumped from this carriage, and 'It's not ready yet' should have been something like 'We're not ready yet'. ('Mada dekite nai n da...' doesn't have an explicit subject.) A disadvantage with this hypothesis is that it doesn't explain why Cloud appears to be alone in the carriage.

Point of access: Sephiroth in the 2 o'clock debug room (Nojima's); select 'From pinball'.

Scene on the back of a dark truck. Someone is explaining how materia is made... Game hangs afterwards. (I've never seen this scene before...)
(From Matt Hobbs's FFVII FAQ, v. 9.0)

'From pinball' suggests a possible association with Seventh Heaven and the lift that looks like a pinball machine or similar. [Update: definitely a pinball machine. I checked the Perfect Guide disc.] I suspect this would have been followed by the video below, which starts with Cloud waking up by the pinball machine (see screenshot). The fact that what's presumably Sephiroth's speech is displayed without an associated name may be an indication that Square wasn't intending to reveal who the character in black was, which would be consistent with its being intended for the early stages of the game (before reaching Kalm).

Point of access: Barret in the 3 o'clock debug room (Toriyama's). (Use the 'reset flag' button if you've played as far as the Sector Seven scenes.) Select 'Materia'. For the second outtake, keep going until you can walk outside.

The results you get when using the collapsed Barret's menu tend to vary depending on whether you've played through the Seventh Heaven scenes before entering the debug rooms; and if you've played even as far as Sector Seven, you'll get an empty room instead of the outtake. Worse, on the PC, I get a usable but stubbornly uncancellable menu popping up where the Materia tutorial should be. (I was later to discover that there's an invisible option to decline the tutorial: when you see a small, square text box, as in the screenshot below, press Down before continuing.) Having read about this scene in an article at Platypus Comix I knew there was more, and initially I thought I might be accessing the scene in the wrong way; however, after getting in touch with the person who runs Platypus Comix and being told that 'start of new game' conditions should work I decided that this probably was a problem with the PC version. The innards of FFVII are fairly well understood by now considering the circumstances [PDF], but not by me, so...

Cue Plan B: I obtained a copy of FFVII International, the improved version of the Japanese PlayStation release. This comes with a 'Perfect Guide' special features disc, and a video on that disc includes some footage of in-development versions of the game—including the 'Materia' outtake. Note the news anchor (more realistic than in the final version) and the beta Save Point model (bottom right).

Charles MacDonald's debug room code for the Japanese version of the game seems not to work on International; I accessed the debug rooms with the code 800996B0 0041. (I was using CEP with ePSXe, but that shouldn't have altered the required code.) Once there I got a minor surprise: compared to what I'm used to (top), Barret's menu was a bit different (bottom). The '7th Street' option has been replaced with an unselectable header using the Limit Break colour effect, and someone has added a bracketed 'debug' after several options.

Luckily the outtake is still accessible, and as you can see, unlike the footage of the translated game featured in the Platypus Comix article, the Japanese version still has text. (The tutorial is also fully scripted and different from the one in the game proper, but I thought it would make a dull video.)

Based on this evidence, I think we can tentatively reconstruct some of what the early stages were going to look like before some mid-development alteration. In Seventh Heaven Cloud would have collapsed on the lift and had a flashback to Sephiroth's account of Materia manufacture; this would have been followed by a conversation about Materia, in which Cloud can give his tutorial. Either before or after this, on the train, Cloud would have had another fit: the combined effect would have been to give a much stronger impression of his fragile psyche in the initial stages of the story.