------------------------------------------------------------------------ S P A C E C H A N N E L 5 F A Q / H E L P - Version 2.0 - 01.12.00 by Tom Callahan Story info, character names, and all Japanese translations by Sailor Bacon 'For all people who love music ,dance and game.' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ First, let me say that this is not a game that can have a real walkthrough. The patterns change a lot depending on how well you do, and each situation is a little different, but they all use the same basic method so once you figure that out you should be able to figure out how to do any of them. For exceptions see the Bosses and Hints sections further down. Let me also say that this game rocks... WHAT'S NEW ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -Even more details on Extra Mode (and more questions!) -Sailor Bacon has offered translations, character and boss names, and several corrections. Anything in this FAQ in [brackets] or any translated items, including story details, character names, and other corrections have been provided by Sailor Bacon. THE MENUS ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Since these are mostly in English, I'm just going to mention a few things: The tutorial option translated says to either read the instructions or to ask a friend how to play. [*] You must load manually before you can 'continue'. There are character info bios in the options. You have to rescue the character in the game before they become available here. Hit up and down to see different categories of characters. You can move, spin, and zoom the characters using the joystick and L/R buttons, and some of the other buttons remove the text and other onscreen stuff. The vibration option in the Device Options has two settings - 'Error' and 'No Use'. 'Error' doesn't mean something's wrong, it means it will vibrate when you make an error. After a while you'll really dread that vibration... try turning it off if you're having a hard time getting through part of the game. (Strangely, the manual seems to say that there should be four options - 'No Use', 'Error', 'Shoot', and 'Button'.) THE BASIC STORY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The 'Moroliens' have come and enslaved most of the people on Earth with their dancing prowess, and you, 'Ulala', are a reporter for 'Space Channel 5'. You have to out-dance the aliens to free the people, fighting not only the aliens but your rival reporters along the way. Only in Japan... MINI WALKTHROUGH (story spoilers!) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Thanks to Sailor Bacon for the character names and details on Blank in this section! *] The first level is the spaceport. You go around rescuing people. You go onto the roof where you dance against a rival reporter, 'Pudding', the girl from Space Channel 42. You can steal her guitar-playing sidekick 'Guitar Man'. Then you fight the boss 'Coco Tapioca' and move on. Each level has one rescue situation that seems more important than the others. This one has two guys taking pictures wearing candycane-striped astronaut suits. The second level is the spaceship. You rescue the crew and captain, then move through the ship rescuing passengers. Next, you dance against the other rival reporter 'Jaguar' and steal his sax-playing sidekick 'Brass Man'. Then there's another boss. The special rescue this time is a lady in a frilly dress. The third level is the asteroid field. You fly through the field blasting asteroids and guys on space bikes, then you fight Jaguar again, this time in a shooting situation. Next, you enter a big asteroid (the alien base), and on the way in through a long, fast tube you fight Pudding from the first level. Then you fight the alien boss, and during the fight Jaguar joins your side to help. At the end of level 3 as the aliens are closing in on you, you destroy the giant TV that's mind-controlling the aliens, thereby freeing all of the aliens, who start dancing happily, then they join your side. They were being controlled by Blank, the guy that runs Space Channel 5. You escape out of the asteroid just ahead of a giant fireball. The last level is Space Channel 5 studios. You start in the board room, where you confront what first appears to be the head aliens (only they turn out to be holograms), then Blank who is also a hologram. Then you rescue Michael Jackson, then a little girl playing a keyboard, then you confront Blank again. He drops a bunch of aliens in to delay you, then retreats. After that fight, you fight a robotic version of you, then Blank reappears, transformed into a giant orange ball-thing with a head in a glass bubble. You fight him, and the head pops off and turns into a TV floating in space. He sucks you into the TV and you fight him while all of the people you rescued show up outside. Eventually you escape from the TV and finish him off by blasting him with a big antenna. Finally, you all walk off into space on a road made of sparkly things. Makes sense to me! CHARACTERS ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ulala: Birthdate: May 30, 2477 Age: 22 Blood Type: B She's a reporter for Space Channel 5, the main character of the game. You control her. Moroliens: The aliens that have come to enslave the humans with their dancing. They look sort of like teletubbies with TVs for faces instead of in their stomachs. They're much less annoying, too... Pudding: Birthdate: September 5, 2480 Age: 19 Blood Type: AB She's a reporter for Space Channel 42, one of Space Channel 5's competitors. You meet her in the first level. Fuse: Birthdate: Septembet 21, 2456 Age: 43 Blood Type: O He's the director of 'Ulala's Swinging Report Show' (the guy on the radio). [Thanks to Sailor Bacon for info on these next two *] Jaguar: Birthdate: ? Age: ? Blood Type: ? He's another rival reporter. You meet him in level 2. Blank: Birthdate: ? Age: ? Blood Type: ? The head of Space Channel 5. See the Mini Walkthrough for more on him. HOW THE LEVELS ARE DIVIDED UP ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Each level is divided into several segments. Each segment has a few situations in it. At the end of the level is the boss. After each level, if you did well enough, it will offer to save and continue to the next level. If you choose continue and you didn't have a high enough percentage, you just start the previous level over again. STARTING A LEVEL ----------------------------------------------------------------------- When you start a level, it will display a percentage in the middle of the screen. That's the percentage necessary to finish the current level and go to the next. Your percentage is affected by your performance. Dance well and it rises, dance poorly and it drops. It starts you at 10%. The levels and the percentages necessary to finish each are as follows: Level 1 - Spaceport - 15% Level 2 - Spaceship - 25% Level 3 - Asteroid Field - 45% Level 4 - Space Channel 5 - 70% After you start a level, you will see Ulala walking along. She will then come upon a dancing 'situation'. BASIC GAMEPLAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- There are two types of dancing situations, a dancing one and a shooting one: DANCING SITUATIONS The opponent (usually aliens) will be on screen with hypnotized people in the background. Your job is to out-dance them to rescue those people. Along the way you'll rescue generic people as well as important people like the captain of the spaceship and, yes, Michael Jackson. You have a given number of hearts. Each time you screw up, you lose a heart. Lose all of your hearts and it's game over. If you do well, the aliens will spin around and disappear, and the people you rescued will appear behind you. As you rescue more people your entourage grows. If you're good, you can get up to about 15 people at a time following you. If you suck, the people will be taken away by the aliens. SHOOTING SITUATIONS You can't lose the game by sucking at these, unless it causes you not to have a high enough percentage to continue. Targets will pop out from behind things or just materialize in mid-air. Some will be aliens. Some will be people. Some will be objects. You have to hit the correct directions and buttons to save the people and kill everything else. More on this later, but every person you shoot with the good gun in this part appears in your group. HOW THE DANCING WORKS ----------------------------------------------------------------------- In the bottom left corner is an indicator - blue for the enemy's turn, orange for yours. There's a little chime that sounds when it switches. The enemy will say a series of directions (up, down, left, right) and and/or a 'noise' which sounds a little different depending on who's saying it. Sometimes it sounds like 'nyah', sometimes like 'chin', sometimes like 'chew', sometimes like 'shoot'. At any rate, that's the cue to hit the A or B button. In the dancing situations it's always A. Never B. In the shooting situations, A is the kill weapon, B is the rescue weapon. Shoot aliens and objects with A, people with B. Just do everything in the time to the way the enemy did it and you'll get it right. Mess up anything at all and you get it wrong. Each time you screw up, you could lose one of the people following you - they'll become hypnotized and at the end of that situation will leave your group. After each situation, Ulala moves on to the next one. If you did well, she and everyone following her will walk tall (or dance tall - she never just 'walks') for a while until they reach the next situation. The dance they do changes depending on your ranking and what section of the game you're in (there at least a dozen that I've seen). If you didn't do so well, they'll walk hunched over and depressed, or sometimes with their hands on their foreheads, and the music will be out of tune and screwed up. That, and the director will yell at you. BOSSES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Thanks to Sailor Bacon for the boss names! *] First Boss: 'Coco Tapioca' Just like a normal dancing situation. You have hearts, you have to repeat what it does. Eventually it changes modes and it becomes a shooting gallery. Second Boss: 'Mororina' It will dance around and hold out various things in it's arms. Sometimes they're aliens, sometimes they're people - shoot the appropriatebutton (one clue is to look for the hypnotizing ring around the people's heads). Eventually it picks Ulala up in it's tongue and you have to fight it off. Creepy. Third Boss: '?' It's a happy/sad monster. It starts out with the monster drawing patterns on the screen, then he hits you (you can't avoid it). Jaguar, one of the rival reporters shows up and helps you out, and it starts shooting out a series of pictures - some aliens and some people. You know the drill. Fourth Boss: '?' The key to this one - hit the OPPOSITE direction. The button hits are all button A, but if it says UP, hit DOWN. Do the opposite. It gets pretty screwed up, and eventually there's one you're just not allowed to do. You get knocked away and picked up by the male reporter, then you go back into the fight for two very hard patterns, and you only have two hearts. You just have to get one of them right and you can go on to the last boss. Final Boss: 'Blank' The guy behind it all. Back to normal directional buttons. I think he's the president of Space Channel 5 turned evil. He says 'I've always watched over you.', then yells something about a TV, and sucks you into his TV. All of the people you've rescued (or could have rescued) and the aliens and bosses show up. You fight him for a while in the TV, then you break out of the TV to finish him off. It's pretty straightforward. He alternates pictures of you and him on his various TVs. A for him, B for you. Once you get out of the TV and he turns into a big TV-monster, it's all A button hits. It's really pretty easy compared to the fourth boss. Watch out for a really easy way to blow it and LOSE THE GAME. When you escape from his TV and it shows all three reporters (Ulala and her two rivals) say something to him, then power builds up in the big antenna, you have to hit A three times. IF YOU MISS ANY OF THEM, you LOSE. Aaarghh... My highest final ranking: 99% (Sooooo close!) PROBLEMS WITH THE GAME AND HOW TO WORK AROUND THEM ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -There's a big problem with the syncing of the video backgrounds with the polygon people. Especially towards the end of each little section, it can get very out of sync. If you're having trouble, try not really focusing on the on-screen action. It's the sound that matters so it sometimes helps to stare at the LCD screen on your VMU. The face on that changes just like the enemy/you icon on the screen so you can still get a visual cue of when it's your turn, but you won't be distracted by weird video stuff. Sometimes pausing the game and waiting a few seconds then unpausing it seems to help. Let's hope they fix this before it comes out here. Japanese consumers will put up with stuff like that - Americans won't. -Related to that, the first thing (enemy does something/you repeat) you do in each section is hard because the game seems to be re-syncing the video and polygons, so the actions skips a little. You'll get used to it and after a while it's just second nature to do things a little different for that first thing. HINTS ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -Don't focus too much on the video - it's the sound that matters. The moves the people onscreen are doing aren't always 100% in line with the buttons you're hitting, and if you're watching too closely you'll just throw your rhythm off. -Sometimes the noise and lights from you getting shot or something else dramatic happening onscreen will screw you up. In particular, I'm thinking of the fourth boss when he whacks the other reporters, Ulala screams their names as they fly off, but at the same time the boss is moving on with the next pattern, and it's easy to miss something. If you're having trouble, try to ignore everything except the patterns. Once you get through a part you can always come back and pay attention to the wackiness. -Pay attention to whose turn it is. There's a lot of variety in the length of the things you have to repeat, so one time it may say 'UP LEFT RIGHT DOWN SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT' and the next just say 'UP', then it's your turn again, and you can miss your turn entirely if you're not ready for it. -In the asteroid field level, in the first segment, there are no 'good' people. All the guys on the space bikes are baddies. Blast away. -The fourth boss is crazy. See the Bosses section for help on that... -At the end of most sub-sections, there's a little 3-shot shooting situation, where three aliens or gun turrets or something jump you as you move on to the next section. Just be ready for it and it's really easy. -If you have no rhythm, you will suck at this game. -If you're having a bad day or you're tired, you will suck at this game. COOL STUFF ----------------------------------------------------------------------- -After the credits, there's one more thing to do. It's always said 'UP' for me, and it never seems to give me anything for getting it. If anyone knows if that does something let me know. -The director says a bunch of cool stuff (in very heavily accented English) to rate you as you go. Listen for them: Bad: 'Never give up.' (I think most of the other bad ones are entirely in Japanese) Good: 'Perfect!' 'Good shooting!' 'Great shooting!' 'Dynamite!' 'Miraculous shooting!' 'Shooting, shooting, shooting!' 'Excellent!' 'Sticky!' 'Sticky, sticky, sticky!' (I love that one!) [It's actually the word "suteki", a Japanese word meaning "lovely, dreamy, beautiful, great, fantastic, superb, etc." Basically, he's really really impressed *] Sometimes he sings along to the music, too. -You fight your robotic doppelganger right before the fourth boss. -Ulala's outfit changes for each level. Check out the sunglasses she's got on at the start of level 3. -In the part of level 3 where you're running from the explosion, there's an alien with drums. If you rescue him, he flies along with you and plays drums. He goes away at the end of the level and seems to server no purpose except to add crazy drumming to the music. -There are character info bios in the options. You have to rescue the character in the game before they become available here. Hit up and down to see different categories of characters. You can move, spin, and zoom the characters using the joystick and L/R buttons, and some of the other buttons remove the text and other onscreen stuff. -If you get above 95% ranking Ulala glows with purple flames. [this is possible towards the end of level 3 in the original mode, or anywhere in extra mode *] -YES, you do indeed rescue Michael Jackson (or Space Michael, as he's called in the game. And yes, it's really him - it's in the credits. It says: 'Space Michael.............Michael Jackson (Thanks!)'.) He's in the last stage, the second situation. While you're trying to rescue him, whenever it switches from your turn to the enemies or vice versa, he says 'woo!' and if you rescue him, he says 'Thank You, Ulala!' when he appears on your side. Then you walk like him as your celebration dance. -The credits also credit Ulala as 'Ulala................Herself'. EXTRA MODE ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Once you beat it and save, you can choose which level to load from that saved game (hit left or right when loading to switch). If you load that game, then continue, the game is different in some ways. So far I've found: ALTERNATE PATHS Level 1: -A different path that goes through a transport system of some sort (sort of like the tubes in Futurama). It starts at the end of the first area at the elevators. At one point you have to resuce a bunch of things that look like rabbits. This path replaces the part on the roof. You can see a section of this part if you let the game sit at it'stitle screen for a while. (I think it's the second clip it shows) Once you get through this you rejoin the original path at the boss. -A path that replaces the same part of the original path as the first alternate path, but this time I want through the waiting area. I rescued a guy with sideburns that looks at his watch while he dances after a VERY long dance situation, then something zoomed in from the outside and there was an explosion that blew Ulala onto some hanging Neon rockets, where you had to hit Up three times to avoid falling, then you rejoin the original path at the boss. Level 2: -A different path through the second level, diverging from the main path after you rescue the ship captain, in which you go into a dark tunnel and rescue a guy with a raygun-looking thing. There are glow-in-the-dark rat-things running around. Then you go into the trash processing area and fight aliens jumping out of garbage cans and rescue people, then you go back to the original path to fight the boss. Level 3: -No alternate path even though I started at 95% and finished at 99%, never went below 96% once I got over it, and held 100% for about 1/3 of the level! Level 4: -After the Michael Jackson section, there is an alternate path where you go through the studios, including a news desk with news anchors to rescue and a game show with a game show host to rescue. At the end you catch a glimpse of the final boss who runs away. Once you make it through this part, you rejoin the original path at the dance against the robotic doppelganger. (After finding a second alternate path to the first level I have NO IDEA what triggers the alternate paths. I'm going to say a certain ranking at the right point in the original path gets you in. I'm going to list the percentages I had for each alternate path and maybe somebody can figure it out. It seems that 90% or better gets you in, but what determines which path? Then there's level three which completely defies that logic: Rankings that were enough to get in: Level 1, alternate path 1: ??% Level 1, alternate path 2: 91% Level 2, alternate path 1: 92% Level 4, alternate path 1: 91%, 95%, 97%, 98% Rankings that were not enough to get in: Level 3: 95-100% Level 4, alternate path 1: upper 80%s If anyone has any better idea how this works let me know!) ALTERNATE PEOPLE TO RESCUE -3 of the robotic doppelganger's robots instead of Michael Jackson in the last stage. -an old lady with a cane instead of the lady in the frilly white dress on the spaceship. (I'm sure there are other different people to rescue, but I have no idea what triggers the different people to show up - sometimes it's the normal person, sometimes it's their alternate) If anyone figures out more specific info on the extra mode, let me know. CONTACT INFO ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If you can send me something good like more info on extra mode or some real extra that I missed, go ahead. Or if you know where to get a soundtrack CD or those T-Shirts I've heard about... I don't, however, want to hear about all the different people you rescued or 'I can't do such-and-such' thing.' email: t o m @ c a l l a h a n . o r g (take out the spaces to make this address work) CREDITS/THANKS/LEGAL INFO ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * Anything in this FAQ in [brackets] or any translated items, including story details, character names, and other corrections have been provided by Sailor Bacon. Thanks! Space Channel 5 and all game-related names and terms Copyright 1999 Sega This walkthrough Copyright 2000 Tom Callahan ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sticky, sticky, sticky!