Super Robot Taisen D Secrets & Hidden Mechanics

How the route system works

D has 52 scenario records. Two of them (Ice Doll Glacies and Where Resonating Souls Go) carry a second title for Lim’s game, which is why fan wikis count 54 scenarios. Every route choice stores a story flag, and the following scenarios read those flags to decide who leaves, who comes back and which lines play.

The partner system

Each hero can win over one Ruina pilot: Joshua can recruit Glacies, Lim can recruit Ventus. The script keeps a “partner” flag and a small state value that several later events read:

• Your hero’s mech upgrade in Spell of Life and Death (Geant Chevalier / Dea Blanche Neige).
• When Ganadur and Strega combine into Fortegigas, and who pilots it.
• Whether your sibling comes back after Where Resonating Souls Go / Say Goodbye to Me: with a partner, the sibling doesn’t return.
• The last two stages: the partner (or the sibling) becomes a defeat condition, and the ending changes.

See Glacies and Ventus for the exact steps.

Kill counts the game checks

Every check reads the total at a fixed moment, usually the opening of a scenario, so kills in that scenario no longer count.

Talk chains

D’s secrets are built from short chains of story flags. A Talk (説得) in one map sets a flag; the next Talk only counts if that flag is set; the last step sets the join flag. That means you can’t make up a missed step later. The chains: Glacies (2 steps), Ventus (2), Marg (4), Katejina & Chronicle (3), Gavil (2), Sivil (2 battles in one map) and Rose (1).

How retreating works

A table in the ROM gives some bosses a retreat line (for example Chronicle at 30%%, Duker at 20%%, Ignis at 10%%). When the boss’s HP falls under it, the “defeated” event plays and the boss leaves the map with its part. Some events also read the boss’s HP at that moment: B.D. only joins if he was brought down to the line, and Katejina and Chronicle only stay recruitable if they leave instead of being destroyed. The walkthrough lists each boss’s retreat line.

Two-part maps

20 scenarios load a second (sometimes third) battle map in the middle of the stage: the script ends the first battle, plays a scene, then builds a new map with a new sortie and new victory conditions. Some secrets live only in one half (Haman’s kill total is read when the second half of Angel Halo in Frenzy begins). In Nightmare Assault the second half won’t let you use the units you sent into the first.

Small things the script does

• Marg’s random start. In Showdown! Mars and Marg the script rolls a number from 0 to 4 and deploys Marg in one of five places.
• Searching for Gamlin’s plane costs two turns. In Fighting Mayor, Ace Milia! the search changes the enemy formation and the turn limit from 8 to 6.
• Oliver’s death is fixed. The Unheard Requiem has no branch that saves him.
• Takeru’s bomb. From Assault on Kailasa-Giri on, nearly every map adds “Takeru is destroyed” to the defeat conditions, unless the bomb was removed in Death Match!.
• Lim’s maps. In several scenarios Lim fights different Ruina than Joshua (Ventus instead of Glacies) and some victory conditions differ (part 2 of Say Goodbye to Me has a 10-turn limit and a target area).

Special battle conversations

Almost every map has special lines when certain pilots fight each other: 194 pairs across all 52 scenarios. Most change nothing mechanically (the Secret Units page lists the ones that do), but many are the best scenes in the game. “A vs B” means the lines play when those two meet in battle; “Talk command” is a Talk next to the unit.

Tsume Super Robot: the 39 puzzles

The main menu has a puzzle mode with 39 fixed scenarios (“Tsume Super Robot”). Each one gives you a set of units and asks you to win before a set enemy phase. The table lists what the ROM sets up for each puzzle. Solutions aren’t written yet: the puzzle state is easy to test with the debug menu, and we’ll add them in an update.

“Turns”: the puzzle fails when that turn’s enemy phase starts, so you have that many player phases.

The built-in debug menu

The retail ROM still contains Banpresto’s debug menu. The usual cheat to open it writes 31 to address 03001330 (the game’s “current program” variable) and then turns the code off; the menu then lets you jump to scenarios, view portraits and test sounds. We used it to check the translation scene by scene. It is unstable, so only use it on a copy of your save, and don’t use it for a real playthrough: it can skip the flags that secrets depend on.