I've had this sitting around for almost half a year, but i'm not the most confident person in the world and never signed up to post it.
Someone said before that the "Strange Gun Emplacement" was an early form of the Guardian that was unfinished. Taking another look at the images with that line of thinking I immediately realized what it was. It's not an unfinished version or seperate monster, its a set of overlay attack sprites. I grabbed the proper images and messed around and they lined up perfectly.
However that wasn't enough for me, so I looked a bit closer into things. I figured that if this really was another attack why hadn't anyone seen it before? Which led to realizing that maybe no one had been able to get to the Guardian boss to face it properly. So I went into the game and played through to check, going through from the opposite direction the game would normally take and obviously nothing happened. So I decided trying the opposite way.
Apparently, if you walk at the spot on the map in the castle dungeon after the Dragon Tank that normally ends the scenario in the prerelease from the back, rather than the front, instead of ending it continues to the castle tower as normal.. yadda yadda.. run downstairs, guards swarm (a few positioned differently), princess yells, run into the forest, take the gate in the clearing, head to the future. Go through the wasteland, across the ruins, into the dome.
If you head from there straight to the Guardian room.. the alarm sounds as it should and the boss drops from the ceiling, and indeed uses the attack. if this is a bit complicated I made a savestate back then somewhere around the boss that I can upload later. After the boss is dead the party heads to the back room and finds the seed like in the final, which is odd as no one was in the dome to mention it, and then the game stalls entirely as the next part with the map room doesn't work, even if you try going there.
Anyway, what follows are the appropriate images Top line is how the overlay looks and is used in the proto, second line is how it would have looked had they properly corrected the palette issues for the final, third line is whats used in the final and shows that they never fixed the palette fully. After that are three screens of the attack being used: the text window appears, the guns whip out in a quick animation, orbs zoom in at one character from several directions as that affected character winces, and an explosion appears and dissipates.
I hadn't posted it yet because i've been expecting someone else to realize the same thing.. but I guess the latest news post with the updates to the various prerelease maps just was enough of a trigger to get me to put this up.
