Uploaded April 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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It’s been known for a while that if you start a Shine Get cutscene while another cutscene is playing, the game will end up crashing. Today I found that this is not always the case, thanks to the way cutscenes are handled.

The game has 8 “slots” to store active cutscenes, numbered 0 to 7. It also keeps track of the slot number of the last cutscene that started and the slot number of the last cutscene that ended. When a cutscene starts, the last started cutscene slot number increases, cycles back to 0 if it would go past 7, and the new cutscene gets loaded into that slot. Once the cutscene ends, the last ended cutscene slot number increases in turn, becoming equal to the last started cutscene slot number. Since both slot numbers are equal, the game knows it ended as many cutscenes as it started, so there are no more cutscenes to process.

Since there’s usually no way to end more cutscenes than you start, and the slot numbers are being used in a cycle, any time the last started and ended slot numbers don’t match up, that must mean there are cutscenes left to process, even if the last ended cutscene seems to be ahead of the last started cutscene. But when a Shine Get cutscene starts during another cutscene, for some reason, it ends twice, leaving the game with -1 cutscenes left to play, which it sees as 8-1=7.

Now, you rarely need all 8 cutscene slots in normal play, so the remaining ones are just filled with garbage data leftover from what you did before. When the game tries to process those 7 cutscenes that never existed to begin with, it can’t make sense of that leftover data and that’s why it crashes. But if you played enough cutscenes in the area beforehand, all the slots actually contain cutscenes, so the game is able to replay them all, although you can’t see most of them because of the Shine Get fadeout. It looks like a softlock for a while, but then the save box finally shows up like nothing happened at all!