New Glitch - Level 99 Hellion

[tomm88]

After recruiting Hellion (make sure you've exited and re-entered the Teien inn at least once), with Camille in the last formation slot of your party, "speak" to this spot:

Hellion Spot.PNG

It will walk you over between the beds and her recruitment scene will play out again. You can recruit her over and over and her level will increase by 29 each time (capped at 99). So recruit her a total of 4 times (including the first, legit time) and boom, Mecha Hellion

[Raww Le Klueze]

Interesting. Wonder how many of these types of glitches there are. Now we just need to find some for characters that can transfer to S2 or at least are slightly better than Hellion.

[Pyriel]

This is just the invisible character glitch with an extra side effect, I think. There are an ungodly number of those. Impossible to say how many might lead to exploits like this, or sequence breaks, etc., but it's probably a fair few.

[Z3R01337]

So far Tom has found Hellion and Sonya. There might still be more out there though, I look forward to exploring this in the future. This being exploitable makes a ton of sense in hindsight. Internally, the game stores all characters at LV1 until you recruit them. Once you do, it levels them up to whatever level they're supposed to join at. So when you recruit a character more than once, it just reruns the leveling code again.

[Chino Kafū]

That's pretty cool. Gunna try this. Wonder if remastered will have this. The first remaster for psp took out the Matilda glitch.

[Pyriel]

It probably won't have it. The remaster, whatever else you might say about it, appears to be updating to a much more modern engine, and it's probably licensed rather than in-house. This whole species of glitch probably stems from two main things, a dodgy engine, and having to manage memory on a system with on 2MB of RAM. There's still a lot of leeway for screwups, but I'd be genuinely surprised if they manage to replicate this particular one.

I wonder if this is even in the PSP remaster. It's really the kind of glitch that could be fixed by accident. All the team doing the port would have had to do is set aside a few extra KB of memory elsewhere, or change how they handled decompression of assets, or decide it wasn't necessary given the available storage.

[Raww Le Klueze]

No, these glitches don't work in the PSP version. And since the Remasters are working off the PSP version it's unlikely to have it.

Saturn or PC are a possibility I guess.

[Julian]

I'm 99% sure these aren't on the PSP. I've tried replicating with zero success.

Most of the game data is compressed via gzip. Uncompressing that you get the familiar va/etc module files. Stuff inside those modules that used to be compressed (like map data) are again compressed with gzip.

The overall memory map has been updated, so you shouldn't get issues with competing data in memory or something overflowing into something else. (Which I think is what causes these glitches to even happen in the first place?)

(The game does have quite a few unsafe buffers that you can overflow if you manipulate the data, but nothing in the vanilla version of the game should cause that.)

[KFCrispy]

amazing! so you can also level up Sonya the same way?

[Z3R01337]

amazing! so you can also level up Sonya the same way?

Yeah, any character that can be recruited multiple times and is a combat character can be brought up to 99 this way.

Speaking of, found 2 more, Fuma and Kreutz!

For Fuma you need Luikan last, which works out nicely since you need to bring him for story anyway. He also ends up essentially at the same spot, just other side of the building which I find hilarious. If you have Castle Level 1 or 2, you can recruit him via the invisible setup right away. Otherwise, you have to recruit him normally, then recruit him at the invisible spot.



For Kreutz, there's 2 different setups. The special one is done right after Black dies. The reason it's different is because there's a cutscene where Flik & Humphrey talk to you, which changes the game's internal room data layout. These characters work for that:
Eileen: X26 Y26
Luikan: X31 Y30
Cleo: X28 Y28

Any other time, Stallion will put him at X21 Y21