Suikoden II Bug: Fourth/Second Lamb Becomes Unobtainable
This bug is one of the more frustrating problems that players can encounter in
Suikoden II. After collecting her three lost sheep, and recruiting Yuzu, you should find another sheep wandering the clearing two screens into the Unicorn Woods. When you run afoul of this bug, the lamb becomes impossible to acquire.
This bug affects all versions.
Cause
In this case, the bug has properly attributed for a long time. The lost lamb shares a "treasure acquired" flag with the first chest in the Unicorn Woods. The one immediately north of the entrance from Kobold Village. The chest only contains a necklace, so it is easy to avoid the temptation to take it, if you know about the conflict. One byte is allocated to the Unicorn Woods, and it breaks down as follows.
- Bit 0: The Necklace chest on the third screen from the village.
- Bit 1: The Necklace chest on the first screen from the village, in the northwest corner.
- Bit 2: The Necklace chest on the first screen from the village, in the southwest corner.
- Bit 3: The Necklace chest on the first screen from the village, north from the entrance OR the lamb.
- Bit 4: Mangosh.
- Bit 5: Guard Ring.
The actual problem resides in
/CDROM/080_ARH/VH10.BIN. Every treasure that can be obtained in the Woods is defined in this file, along with a mask used for setting its bit in its flag byte. There is also a "hotspot" definition that contains the same mask, that is used for determining if the chest should be open, or the lamb should be absent, etc. Konami just happened to use 0x08 as the mask value for the Lamb and the conflicting chest.
Fix
Since the upper two bits of the byte are left completely unmolested, the game can safely be modified to set and check one of them for the lamb.
GameShark Codes
Fix 4th Sheep Bug
(North American Version)
D0167A9E 3007
30167AA9 0040
D0167A9E 3007
3016771D 0040
I've been told this works on the German version as well. It may work in all versions.
Patch
See the Patch Files page for your version.