Newly Found Hidden Cutscene?

[Truthordeal]

Long time no see, Compendium.

I was scrolling through /vr/ (4chan's retro video games board) and someone had created a thread asking about a peculiar cutscene he had triggered as a kid. The poster made a video demonstrating how the glitch worked and what the cutscene looked like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQsxrUODzqs

I looked through a bunch of different fansites, especially the Compendium's...compendium, seeing if there was some documented explanation of what's going on here, but I couldn't. The closest thing to an explanation I've been able to find is from the thread itself, where one dude wrote:

This is actually quite old. It's really a scene from The Prophet Seeks, but the event flags not being set cause it to not load the credits it's supposed to scroll, and for the subsequent "Magus flies down the shaft" not to work. It's a side effect of a location being replaced with an ending cutscene between versions.

I have no idea how trustworthy this anon is, but the whole thing caught my interest.

Any idea what's going on here?

[xcalibur]

the power of the internet... making new discoveries in games we played 20 years ago.

[Kodokami]

Here's the Reddit post covering the topic too, along with the guy who originally discovered the scene. Looks like you beat us to the topic 

I'm really curious to learn if there are even more hidden scenes.

EDIT: Forgot to add the link to the post 

[utunnels]

I think I saw something similar here before.

[froodo]

Some interesting opinions from reddit:

This is really odd. Why would that ever happen. Just so random...
Edit: just thought of something. There must be a secret portal from schalas room to the black omen. It's behind the book case. The only reason you knew it was there was because a nu and an imp marle met in the woods (who then later escort her to the fair before it's getting started )when she was running away from the castle, as it was knowledge passed down from nu to nu for centuries. Obviously this is extremely far fetched, so the cutscene was aborted before it was developed further.
It's genius.

I doubt the cutscene was hidden in the staircase.
Often times when you enter areas or spaces not meant to be walked in, the game can glitch out trying to retrieve some area of memory. Many famous speedrun glitches are based on this (Ocarina of Time teleport hack, for instance).
The cutscene is just buried somewhere in memory, and stepping in that spot triggers calling it because of a bug, most likely.

Hm. Having experience in working on games similar to this one, this looks like something that was used for testing to me. Maybe some programmer was checking the timing of music with screen scrolling, animations, screen transitions or something like that. The developers might have had any number of hidden tiles like that, but removed them from the game before release and this one happened to slip through the cracks. It could have been a scrapped scene, but it's sadly going to be hard to prove if so.

My first idea was that someone copy-pasted a room layout and forgot to remove an exit, making the undefined transition doing something at a memory offset with nonsensical flags but your explanation is probably more likely.
That or normal out of bounds weirdness.

[Vehek]

Found a mention in an old game genie code list!

Also, there is a "secret path" in the room where Janus and Schala talk,
right above the book cases.  It will take you to one of the ending scenes,
then dump you on the elevator shaft in the Ocean Palace with all characters
in your party, including Magus.  Credit goes out to the person on the
Gamewiz board who found this.

See, not new at all.
In any case, it's known that the bookcase led to the "Zeal Dungeon" in the pre-release. They just neglected to remove the exit.

You want a glimpse at a real unused scene, use the code 7F01A240 and go to the Dorino Inn. There, Toma delivers lines marked as unused in the Compendium's script and then the game warps you to the modern Choras Inn.

[Acacia Sgt]

I had no idea the exit to the Zeal Dungeon was still there. Interesting, even if it's not that new of a discovery...

[Dialga_Palkia]

Wonder what other secrets lie hidden?