New Costume, Debug Screen Discovered in Fighting Vipers

The Japanese version of Sega Saturn fighting game Fighting Vipers famously has more unlockables than the U.S. and even PAL versions. More unlockable characters, unlockable portraits — or different unlockable portraits in PAL’s case — unlockable pervy Honey-related secrets … not to mention a tasty Pepsi sponsorship plastered all over the game.

But the Japanese version held more secrets than anyone realized. Four months ago, Saturn hacker Bo Bayles discovered a costume for Honey and a Backup Debugger screen that had gone unseen since Fighting Vipers’ 1996, and today he released a patch on SegaXtreme to let everyone try them out for themselves.

The hidden Honey costume is only selectable in Arcade Mode and Versus Mode, not Team Battle or Training. And the patch, which uses the XDelta patcher, is only applicable to the Japanese Revision A version of Fighting Vipers.

Honey’s hidden costume

The costume resembles the cheongsam worn by Pai from Virtua Fighter, another fighting game made by Fighting Vipers’ developer, AM2.

Pai from Virtua Fighter is on the left; Honey from Fighting Vipers in a hidden costume is on the right.

Normally, Honey has two unlockable extra costumes that are only in the Japanese version of the game — a school uniform and a Hawaiian-themed outfit. Fighting Vipers treats these essentially as different characters, even though their movesets are the same as regular Honey’s — with the exception of Hawaiian Honey having access to a special ukelele attack.

The Pai version of Honey, sadly, doesn’t have any new moves. But she does have her own slot in the roster code, as Bayles found out. It’s right after three unlockable characters — Mahler, Pepsiman and Kumachan — and before the other unlockable Honey costumes, the unlockable last boss B.M. and the version of Honey whose skirt can be broken off, which is another Japan-exclusive secret that’s apparently treated like a separate character.

But there’s apparently no way to unlock Honey’s Pai costume through normal gameplay. So as Bayles explained on his blog, he had to redirect the code from one of the normally selectable characters to Pai Honey. For the patch he released today, he replaced Honey’s default version.

Pai Honey — or Honey Pai? — causes more problems, too, as a Honey vs. Honey match in Arcade Mode caused graphical glitches to show up. To get around that, Bayles replaced Honey with Kumachan in his patch’s version of Arcade Mode.

For those wondering, breaking the top or bottom of the Pai costume makes Honey look the way she does in her default outfit, minus the skirt.

It’s unknown whether Honey Pai was seriously planned to be another unlockable costume in Fighting Vipers and was cut late in development or whether she was just a test character.

While the outfit doesn’t exactly fit the ones that Pai uses in Virtua Fighter, there’s evidence in the code to suggest that this is a Pai outfit on Honey. Bayles said on the SHIRO! Discord server that Fighting Vipers refers to the hidden “Honey in a costume that looks like Pai’s” as “HP.” All the other characters are referred to by the first two letters of their name: GR for Grace, BA for Bahn, etc.

The two-letter initials for each of the five Honey characters are as follows:

• HO — Honey’s default outfit
• HP — Honey in Pai’s cheongsam
• HN — Honey with no skirt (breakable skirt, really)
• HE — Honey in a school uniform (unsure what E would stand for, as the Japanese word for a school uniform is “seifuku”)
• AL — Aloha Honey, the name used in Japanese strategy guides for Honey in her Hawaiian outfit

Not only that, but a Honey-Pai fusion was referenced an interview with the game’s director, Hiroshi Kataoka, and game coordinator, Daichi Katagiri, in a 1997 Japanese player’s guide for Fighting Vipers pseudo-sequel Fighters Megamix called Fighters Mega Books. In the interview on page 232, Katagiri mentions putting Pai’s head on Honey’s body when coming up with the concept for Fighters Megamix right after development on the arcade version of Fighting Vipers wrapped up.

“It was like cosplay,” Katagiri said with a laugh.

The costume hidden in the Saturn version of Fighting Vipers, which released nine months after the arcade version and four months before Fighters Megamix, is the opposite — it’s more like Honey’s head on Pai’s body. Perhaps Katagiri misremembered in this interview, or he tried both combinations and only one of them stayed on the game’s disc. Either way, it’s clear that the combination of Pai and Honey existed at some point.

The Backup Debugger

Bayles’ patch does more reveal Pai Honey, though. Bayles took the liberty of making it unlock all of the game’s secrets, from Big Head Mode and Wall Display to the dozens of portraits that normally unlock after beating the game’s arcade mode with each character.

The patch also enables one more secret that Bayles discovered: the Backup Debugger.

The Backup Debugger actually could have been unlocked by a heretofore unknown button code all this time. Bayles found that a new menu option leading to it appears when, on the mode select screen using player two’s controller, you type Up, Up, Up, Up, Y, Down, Down, Down, Down, Z, Left, Left, Left, Left, Y, Right, Right, Right, Right, Z.

“You have to do it very quickly,” Bayles said on his blog. “There’s a counter at 060880d8 that tracks the number of correct entries you’ve made. A sound effect plays when the code takes effect, but you have to press B to drop back to the title screen and re-enter the mode select screen to see the result.”

With Bayles’ patch, the option is present at the bottom of the mode select screen by default.

Launching the Backup Debugger puts a special save file on your Saturn, so Bayles warned against doing this with a save file you care about — no one knows if the special save file might corrupt anything accidentally.

The debugger screen itself is a mystery, too. Bayles said you can select various things with the D-pad and adjust them with the A or C buttons, but he doesn’t yet understand what any of them do.

Still, the debugger as well as Honey Pai are exciting finds for a game that seemed to hold no more secrets 28 years after its release.