#melonsaurus

[techno-dragon]

Literally cannot find melonsaurus anywhere. Please share the horror I'm so curious

Hi I just reblogged that post with an explanation but I'm happy to put a longer version here too lol

So like six years ago when I was a member of the Fossil Fighters Amino (hell app) I was looking at stuff about Frontier on YouTube when I stumbled across this video.

Birby here uses emulators and managed to find a lot of unused stuff for Frontier, including unused Paleo Pals (like Stryker, Professor Little, etc.) but they also found a bunch of "unused" vivosaurs. These were really placeholder vivosaurs cuz the assets/models of what they were supposed to be weren't actually made (unlike the Paleo Pals, which uses characters that already exist in the actual game.) These included the Dummy vivosaurs and what we refer to as "Melonsaurus."

And yeah these things are weirdly enough kind of creepy. First we have this "wooden dummy dino."

Yeah it's literally just a theropod with a wooden texture. Maybe these were originally going to be training dummies or animation testers but whatever they were they somehow move. Also it has a placeholder icon in the Battle Prep menu!

Now onto the famous "Melonsaurus." It's this thing.

Once I found this video of course I started talking about it on the Amino, and we sort of dubbed it "Melonsaurus" because its body kind of resembles a watermelon. It's also a better name than "pict_book_help." There's actually multiple of these which means there were probably going to be more vivosaurs in the game but were ultimately axed (if I had to take a guess I'd blame crunch time.)

So yeah. This creepy little thing even spawned some fan art that may or may not still exist. I still have my drawing of it from back in the day!

[techno-dragon]

I know what that is! It's one of the placeholder models. It either got in the team through a glitch (that I have never seen before) or they hacked it in somehow.

Need everyone to see this absolutely horrible thing I just saw on Reddit, posted but u/HoodedSpex

There's no way they're not trolling here right. What Is This Fucking Thing.

[melonsaurus]

Also! I recently changed my username from Spacefur9 to Melonsaurus! :)

[techno-dragon]

Okay real talk I like Frontier a lot, love it even, but the biggest problem with it was the fact that a lot of content that people wanted was missing, like more vivosaurs. I actually have a sort of theory that the game had to be wrapped up prematurely, and so far my leads are:

1. The numerous placeholder vivosaurs (dubbed by fans as "Melonsaurus"): https://youtu.be/PS8La2P-ySY

2. The fact that there's a song that has vocals in Japanese but no vocals in English (compare BGM_DEMO_ED with BGM_DEMO_ED_US): https://mail.ninjaproxy.com/music/nintendo-3ds-3sf/fossil-fighters-frontier

3. There's also this giant export of assests dug up by @/andydrarch compiled here: http://aminoapps.com/p/zh2moe

There's probably more stuff to find out about, I'm thinking about looking through the game credits and seeing if I stumble upon anything.

So like, it probably would've been way better if they gave it more time, but they most likely didn't because they needed to release it by holiday time and they not only feared that Fossil Fighters was a dying franchise that needed to be given another installment ASAP in order to keep fans but they may have also wanted to shift focus to more popular projects, or maybe it had something to do with the fact that the development team was different. I dunno, I'm no expert.

Though I think the real biggest problem with Frontier is the fact that if anyone said they liked it at all we were practically jumped on and bullied off of whatever platform we said it on so the support it could have gotten from people giving positive reviews and talking about it more to new fans or in general was kinda wasted in the window of time where it would have been especially helpful to the franchise.

TL;DR: Maybe if they released it later it would've been better.

(Btw sorry if this comes off as passive aggressive or anything, I actually think the reception of Frontier is a really interesting subject and I kinda wanna dig more into it to see if it sheds light on anything regarding its development)

[tiggyloo]

Are there others???? Why do they look like this 😭 Also your tag: I have not seen "melonsaurus" what is that

Need everyone to see this absolutely horrible thing I just saw on Reddit, posted but u/HoodedSpex

There's no way they're not trolling here right. What Is This Fucking Thing.

[techno-dragon]

So basically this person on YouTube who emulates games found this placeholder Vivosaur that looks like... this.

And there's a whole bunch of identical ones, which may imply that more vivosaurs were originally supposed to be in the game but were most likely omitted due to crunch time. Me and the other folks in the Fossil Fighters Amino (god forbid, I know) started calling it "Melonsaurus" cuz its body kind of resembles a watermelon.

Why they all look like they came out of a Creepypasta is beyond me though.

Need everyone to see this absolutely horrible thing I just saw on Reddit, posted but u/HoodedSpex

There's no way they're not trolling here right. What Is This Fucking Thing.