Yeah. It looks like a memory optimisation to squash more code and data into the gamecube's 24mb of memory.
It was one of the earlier gamecube games and it looks like they rolled their own custom solution rather than using one of the standard nintendo libraries for advanced memory management that most other games use.
It was one of the earlier gamecube games and it looks like they rolled their own custom solution rather than using one of the standard nintendo libraries for advanced memory management that most other games use.