At the end of the game, three enemies have untranslated text for names, and one of them can never be encountered.
Tenzan Pass Enemies Issue
Bug Details
System(s) |
Playstation, PSP, PSN (POPS) |
Bug Type | Gameplay |
Region Introduced | |
Patch Version | 2.01.065b |
Regions Affected
Late in Suikoden II, you can access the Tenzan Pass area again, which is where the whole game began. Along its trails, you find two enemies. The first is the Minotaur and the second is the Magus; both of which are more powerful versions of enemies encountered earlier. However, in the North American version, they have names that were not translated from the original Japanese encoding. The later European versions fixed the translation problem. Another, less obvious issue, is that the area actually contains a third enemy, a more powerful Chimera, that is never seen. This is the enemy that drops the Cyclone Rune, which is otherwise not dropped by any enemy in the game. Other enemies drop the remaining second-tier elemental runes (Rage, Flowing, Thunder, and Mother Earth), and it had long been a mystery why nothing dropped the second-tier Wind Rune.
Cause
The cause of the translation issue is immediately apparent. The reason the Chimera is not accessible is a little more difficult to fathom. Its data is complete, and the game can spawn it without issue. It is also present in three of the enemy formations defined in its area (see
CDROM/010_ARA/VA11.BIN on the game disc). Despite this, it can never be encountered because, of the ten slots allocated for random encounters, none of them references a formation with the Chimera in it. There are 9 formations in total, and there are four duplicate references to formations containing only the Magus and Minotaur.
Fix
For the translation issue, replacing the name strings is easy enough, but it would make cheat codes a little too lengthy, so only patches will offer this fix. It is also a simple matter to replace three of the formation pointers in the encounter array with references to the Chimera's formations.