Mega Man 3 (pt. 2 - The Other Stages)

Snake Man

On to the stages with no finalized Doc counterparts. Snake's stage uses most of its tiles to full effect, though you can see plenty of spots in the bank that appear to be dummied out. Aside from the one corner piece, several subtiles also go unused, and fit most closely with the third palette, to me, which makes sense as it's technically... unused too, from what I can gather. It is possible that they could've been used more extensively up in the air section, and that the other dummied-out tiles would've followed something similar.

Hard Man

Piecing all the rocks together was physically painful, but I managed. The ones that go unused actually all have something in common-- they're inverse corner pieces. They're made for when a chunk of rock bends inward. And there are structures where they could've been implemented but weren't, leading to some odd tiling here and there, implying that they were added later and forgot to be implemented properly. The black lines seem to be unused outlines for the foreground rocks, similar to the tiles in Top Man's stage. Lastly is some... mechanical piece... and some hypothetical supplementary background rocks that can be assembled with existing subtiles. As well as a couple cloud pieces.

Magnet Man

This one's a doozy...

Magnet Man's stage, like Spark Man's, has a crapton of unused Doc-esque graphics, and it really makes you wonder if 3's stages would've been better off merging its normal and Doc stage concepts and just skipping to the Wily fortress. Or at the very least repurposed Doc concepts for stages that ended up not getting any (which you can possibly argue Snake Man did). You can kinda see the ambitious plans seeping through 3's faultlines. I guess you could safely call Magnet's final stage the "part 1" to a grander experience; gameplay-wise, it has a lot of unremarkable fluff on its own.

I actually wouldn't have figured out that the electricity palette-animates without Skipper randomly suggesting it, and I probably wouldn't have connected it to a nearby unused palette animation [ID #01] without that intermediary step. As you can see, it fits pretty dang well. Kudos to him.

Now, this was actually one of the first stages I uncovered unused graphics for (which I posted to TCRF), a while before I started my ripping project, and since then, I realized that I've overlooked several details. For one, regarding these broken wire tiles, I corrected the wires to gray without thinking much of it, but the bottom-left example is what they're suppose to look like. Same dark yellow as the background.

The very bottom row of tiles includes an alternate assembly for the base loop with 2 unused pieces. Maybe the subtiles were originally intended to be assembled 4x4 and not 2x2 diagonally...?

Which, of course, raises the question of whether that weird brownish houndstooth background palette was intended to have different colors. So I switched some colors around to see if anything looked better. The third example comes close, but I'd say it's the far right example that actually looks the most normal. I know the greebling was intended for all 4 colors counting black, but it actually looks best when simplified to three colors. And the gray could still fit if it was solely used for the wires. Again, MM3's palette choices kind of make you wonder.

On top of the obviously Doc Robot-oriented broken tiles, though, you may also notice some extra background subtiles that complete the edges of that background greebling. With one explicitly correcting an incomplete tile. I could rib on 3 Revamped not catching this error, but realistically, no one's going to notice the tiles are unused to begin with unless you're piecing them back together by hand.

Going with the idea of this stage being paired with Doc Quick, perhaps the electricity would've been a nasty spike substitute... or perhaps all the broken wiring would've caused some blackouts. Or both. Yet again, we can only wonder and imagine.

Top Man

Like Gemini and Snake, a giant number of tiles got completely dummied out. As is well-documented on TCRF, the prerelease footage shows what tiles used to be there. Some supplementary hypotheticals are also provided. One note about the last frame of the animated lights, with the darker blue-- that frame is only seen when the lights are off, during the "Ready" animation; it otherwise cycles through the first four of them.

As a segue between this stage and the Wily stages, discovering Magnet's unused palette animation also led me to uncover this:

Another unused palette animation! This one is stored between the animation for Top Man's lights and the animation for the purple refight lights, so it could have plausibly been used in any of the Doc/Wily stages in between. However, plugging it in, it doesn't seem to fit with any existing graphics whatsoever, so it will still be a mystery as to specifically how it was used.

Wily Stage 1

3 planned to bring back vertical boss gates, who would've thunk. Don't believe they were ever really seen again, after 1. An oddity I recently discovered is that hugging the left wall (of where a vertical boss gate would've been) and then facing right causes you to get hit by Kamegoro Maker as it spawns in. A niche oversight, but I wonder if a boss gate would've prevented that.

Like with Shadow Man's background, the blue palette looks a lot better after swapping the middle two colors; that would actually make it at dusk with the clouds, closer to the nighttime intro Wily animation. Also like with Shadow, though, it's impossible to know for sure if that was the intent.

Wily Stage 2

One tile actually goes unused, though because this stage shares its TSA table with Wily 3, it could've been for either stage. Despite looking like a Wily Machine floor piece, this tile makes use of all 4 colors, so it was much more likely used for Devil Mark II.

If you want to palette-swap any assets from other Wily stages to fit this one, like the spikes and whathaveyou, then be my guest.

Wily Stage 3

It's.. a bit longer and more interesting than Wily 2, at least. One tile other than Wily 2's is actually left in the dust-- a background tile oriented in the opposite direction.

Wily Stage 4

Several tiles actually go unused in this level, including a handful of pipes, to no one's surprise; not sure what the one purple tile would've been used for.

Wily 5 and 6

These tiles are rudimentary to accompany the giant Wily bosses that cap each stage; not much else to say about them. As for some trivial info, the black used for the blue tiles in Wily 5 is different from the black used for the background; this makes it so that the spiky stilts used in Wily Machine 3 are completely hidden when embedded into the ground (a technique you may recall from Fire Man).

It should also be noted that the small girder piece for Wily 6--while used in the corridor-- is actually a sprite in the fight with Gamma, along with some of the bottom pieces of his body. The reason for this is to allow the fist to sweep in and out, which would involve moving the entire row of tiles.

Light's Lab

Another provisional tileset that's technically a cutscene. I only discovered how to rip cutscene graphics more recently, and mayyybe I'll get back to it in the future. A lower priority, since cutscene rips are a lot more prominent than tileset rips. Only a small piece for the IBN machine goes unused.

Thus concludes Mega Man 3. More graphically interesting than I first gave it credit for, though later games down the line would use the MMC3 chip a lot more efficiently.