Emulator

Video of issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs9Mxi729Vc&feature=emb_title

This game normally works, just point the arrow down slightly during the black screen until you hear a sound and press the A key.

I bought a copy; the game actually comes with debug symbols!

The relevant function is CFadeManager::RenderFade (at 801d5eb0, called from 801d59ac). It draws a rectangle across the whole screen, at the near plane (explicitly, the variable is called nearSz; that rectangle has a varying alpha value based on the current fade and blending is set up so that the rectangle's alpha is multiplied with the existing screen contents. My previous testing determined that something weird was happening with it being at the near plane, but I haven't done further testing to determine the exact behavior yet.

I did manage to fix the issue with a game patch to remove the call to RenderFade; this probably breaks other fade effects though:

[Video_Settings]
# Needed to fix text in menus (medium isn't enough; it fixes some menus but not the new profile one)
SafeTextureCacheColorSamples = 0
[OnFrame_Enabled]
$Fix black screen
[OnFrame]
$Fix black screen
0x801D59AC:dword:0x60000000

As of 5.0-17143 the given patch is available in the gameini (but not enabled by default) for the US version of the game.

The game is patched now for all regions.

A patch was made available for the PAL release in 5.0-20362 -> https://dolphin-emu.org/download/dev/3b74a9195df6ffc173170f87198f0bab5d52c9ec/

I think this should be left open until there is a fix without patches required.

I think this should be left open until there is a fix without patches required.

Agreed. The game is clearly trying to do something (fading the screen, based on symbols) that we aren't handling correctly. I haven't analyzed whether it works correctly on real hardware. But it'd be better to correctly handle whatever edge-case is going on than to rely on a patch (which is also why the patch isn't enabled by default).