You don't need Feather to recruit Ayda

[Pyriel]

He means he thought Rulodia and Chuchara were both mistakenly non-stars, with Rulodia taking the place of Feather, and Chuchara filling in for Ayda. Now that we know it's possible to recruit Ayda without feather, even if it is a little tricky, and you can get both Abizboah and Sigfried while still getting all 108, that theory loses some traction.

[bluemask]

I get it. I'm just implying that the "No-Feather/Yes -Ayda" path might have been an unwanted feature considering no official sources tells us that, that path is possible. In which, the Octopi path might still be plausible after all.

[Pyriel]

They wrote scripts with dialogue specific to losing that battle, and then moved the character to a different location on the map where you initiate a recruitment script you otherwise wouldn't see. I don't think it was put in by mistake.

The squid path is barely plausible anyway. There's zero evidence that Konami intended Rulodia and Chuchara to be stars. All we had is a bit of innuendo based partly on Feather being required for Ayda, and now that's known to be untrue. Granted, you can't really feel like a hero when following that path. However, it's just as likely Konami saw making failure an option as a bit of fun, and didn't see a need to give you another alternative path to 108 stars.

[Wolkendrache]

I know it's just speculation, but I agree to what KFCrispy said a while ago...

in my opinion it was a mix-up between the designers/writers and the developers due to such a complex idea (swappable stars). the structure of the game makes it seem like you should be able to fill all the stars by doing the octopi path or the beasts path, but there was likely a misconception when developers were coding in Rulodia's recruitment information assuming she was yet another extra non-star that is accessible any time.

...because the only alternative would be that Konami created the Octopi to annoy the players by destroying the best ending, and I believe that's not very likely.

[Pyriel]

The threshold for "likely" ought to be higher than a combination of, "this feels right", and "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", though. I agree it's always possible that there was a miscommunication that led to them not being stars, and further to the complete lack of evidence that they were ever meant to be. I just don't know why you would apply the opposite of Occam's Razor when ranking the possibilities by their likelihood.

Also, Konami required you to have all the stars before a particular point, gave a character an invisible speed requirement, and forced you to choose a dialogue option within 2-3 seconds, on top of everything else you have to do right to get the best ending. I don't remember all the other stuff, but how many people accidentally miss Clive? I don't know that they were as concerned about giving you alternative paths to the best ending as you think.

[Wolkendrache]

Thanks for the short but free english semantics lesson to me as a non-native speaker, you live and learn

I've read somewhere that the key-code or something is lost, so does that mean it's unlikely that Rulodia becomes a SOD in a future remake of the game? (I know that a remake itself is already unlikely, but still)

[Pyriel]

You mean the source code for the game? It's possible they ditched it, but they must have had it as recently as 2006 for the PSP version. Unless they made the company that developed it do hacky stuff like what I do, and the whole thing is just a mod that runs under an emulator.

[Raww Le Klueze]

Well there's a whole unique path for Suikoden V that ends up killing Roy and precluding you from the best ending so you can hardly claim that Konami are unwilling to screw over your chances of the best ending. Rulodia and Chuchara are a mild case in comparison to that one because that's a whole story sequence most players will never even attempt.

[Antimatzist]

I get it. I'm just implying that the "No-Feather/Yes -Ayda" path might have been an unwanted feature considering no official sources tells us that, that path is possible. In which, the Octopi path might still be plausible after all.

Which official sources are there, anyway? Is it in the official Japanese guide? It's like that Final Fantasy IX "secret" side-mission that wa suncovered lasty ear or so - but it was in an official Japanese guide from the very beginning.

It's just that all western guides are based on player experience, and a sit is really hard to lose that battle, rarely anyone got to see this path.

[Wolkendrache]

You mean the source code for the game? It's possible they ditched it, but they must have had it as recently as 2006 for the PSP version. Unless they made the company that developed it do hacky stuff like what I do, and the whole thing is just a mod that runs under an emulator.

Don't get me wrong, but I get it as you could do it if you wanted to... (and assuming there were no legal issues, I don't know much about mods, are there?)

Well there's a whole unique path for Suikoden V that ends up killing Roy and precluding you from the best ending so you can hardly claim that Konami are unwilling to screw over your chances of the best ending. Rulodia and Chuchara are a mild case in comparison to that one because that's a whole story sequence most players will never even attempt.

I agree, Konami isn't really pushing you towards the best end, especially in S5. However, I don't agree calling the bad ending by Octopi "mild case". The Roy plot feels like a you're confronted with a riddle, and if you choose the wrong path, you'll see dramatic special scenes and ultimately a bad ending, where you already know what you've done wrong. But watching the ending after choosing the Octopi path felt like a slap in the face out of nowhere, mild in no way

[Pyriel]

Don't get me wrong, but I get it as you could do it if you wanted to... (and assuming there were no legal issues, I don't know much about mods, are there?)

Not sure what you're saying, or asking. Are you asking if I could make Rulodia and/or Chuchara stars if I wanted to?

Just in case, I'll answer. It might be possible. I have a feeling it would require changes in 3-4 places at minimum, so it's a bit more spread out, and would take a fair bit of work to test. There's a bit of a legal grey area surrounding patches and mods for games of this sort. I won't be too fussed about it until Konami starts sending cease and desist orders. I doubt they ever will.

I assume a team of people with a background in writing gaming software could do the hacky stuff better and faster. However, thinking about it more, I'm pretty sure the PSP remake was done with the source code. If I remember correctly, all the text was re-encoded into Unicode (UTF-16), which would have been a massive pain to do as a hack. Coupled with all the other minor changes they made, and the fact that the PSP remake exists at all, I think it's reasonable to assume they had access to the source code and development kit. Most of the work was probably a few changes to the script compiler. After that, tweak the display dimensions, add a menu or two, recompile, and bam, you have the last new game we're ever likely to get in the main universe.

[Sasarai10]

Well there's a whole unique path for Suikoden V that ends up killing Roy and precluding you from the best ending so you can hardly claim that Konami are unwilling to screw over your chances of the best ending. Rulodia and Chuchara are a mild case in comparison to that one because that's a whole story sequence most players will never even attempt.

Don't forget that in Roy's case Lucretia will ask you 3 times if you are sure that you want to remain in castle,which makes sense. When something bad is going to happen,they don't ask you only once,like this scene in S4 where they force you to use the Rune Of Punishment.

Now,most players i guess recruit Sigfried and Feather. Especially Feather,because for years and years we thought that Feather is needed in order to recruit Ayda,til we found out that's wrong recently. But still why Rulodia is a non-star it makes me wonder. OK about Chuchara i understand,it is consindered a small monster so it's more like an extra,if you get the 2 Octopi... but Rulodia is a big monster where you have to use a crystal to get her,just like the other 3....so why not? I guess it might be an error actually,and they didn't do it on purpose.

[Wolkendrache]

Not sure what you're saying, or asking. Are you asking if I could make Rulodia and/or Chuchara stars if I wanted to?

Just in case, I'll answer. It might be possible. I have a feeling it would require changes in 3-4 places at minimum, so it's a bit more spread out, and would take a fair bit of work to test. There's a bit of a legal grey area surrounding patches and mods for games of this sort. I won't be too fussed about it until Konami starts sending cease and desist orders. I doubt they ever will.

Yes, that was my question. Sorry, but as the no. 1 hacker on this board you have to put up with the question why Rulodia hasn’t been turned into a SoD yet.

In the end the weighing up of gain against effort will decide. Let’s face it, gain is not much, and effort very high. God, I’d be the worst hacker out there…

Before your last post I thought the only reason why you never dealt with it was that Konami gave no indication that Rulodia is supposed to be a SoD (and they indeed didn’t), but this would have meant you only make bug-fixes, you don’t make mods, so I misunderstood that.

[Pyriel]

Well, I'm perfectly fine with making modifications, or improvements that aren't strictly bug-fixes. That just wasn't the scope of the original bug-fix project.

If I ever get around to a re-translation effort, I will probably include optional patches for features like Rulodia & Chuchara, breaking the time-limits on Clive's quest, expanding the inventory in the castle shops, and whatever else I can think of and actually manage to do. Part of the problem is that I spread myself a little thin when doing the bug-fix by trying to make it work on all versions. I don't have anyone assisting me, so that means I do the actually hard work of figuring out how to fix something (which I actually enjoy), then I have to test it thoroughly (which I enjoy less), and finally I have the tedium of porting the fix to the English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Italian versions. The last bit is the worst for me. It's not too difficult, but it's fairly thoughtless, assembly line work that I have to repeat half-a-dozen times. And since I didn't originally have the French and Italian versions, I still haven't finished the first pass on them, since I had to port 20-30 patch scripts twice.

In the future, I may just decide that I work on the US and Japanese versions, and all the source code and documentation is available on GitHub and the wiki, if anyone wants to apply it to other versions.