Under the Microscope: Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV

Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire is a historical simulation title from Koei, the premier publisher for that sort of game in the ’90s.

Wall of Fire was the first game in its series to appear on fifth-generation consoles. It was also one of the few Koei sims to get international releases — localized versions were published for Saturn, PlayStation, and SNES in 1995 and 1996.

Japanese cheat sites have a cheat code listed for that country’s Saturn version:

99 bonus points: When creating an officer, use the name 主人公. You will get 99 bonus points to use on the stat allocation screen.

Does this cheat work in the English language versions? Let’s take a look…

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The English language version

The English language version of Wall of Fire doesn’t let you use Japanese characters on the name entry screen, so inputting 主人公 is right out.

Did the localizers change the special name? To find out, I put in a distinctive string as my name. Then I searched for the ASCII-fied version of it in the game’s memory. I got a hit at 060e2470:

Ghidra finds a handful of code references to that address. One of them looks like this in the decompiler (I’ve added labels for the variables):

available_points = 70;
cmp_result = compare_strings_06071d22(&officer_name_060e2470,"Fun4 Yu");
if (cmp_result != 0) {
  available_points = 99;
}

Aha! The special name is Fun4 Yu. That is, first name Fun4; last name Yu.

As the decompiled code suggests, the effect matches the one in the Japanese version — you get 99 stat points to allocate to your general.

After entering this name, your officer also will get three extra “special talents.”

But wait, there’s more. This Fun4 Yu name also gets checked when you go to the Change officer data screen. If it’s detected, you’ll be able to totally max out their stats! Furthermore, you can enable as many special talents as you like.

This extra effect isn’t listed on the Japanese cheat sites. Is it exclusive to the American version?

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The Japanese language version

If you try the Change officer data trick in the Japanese Saturn version after entering the 主人公 name (which means “hero” or “protagonist”), you’ll find that you don’t get extra stat points or talents.

Why is that? Because that cheat requires a different special name in this version. Here’s Ghidra’s decompilation of some code that runs when Change officer data screen loads:

cmp_result = compare_strings_06070f2e(&officer_name_060e0e3c,"サターン");
if (cmp_result != 0) {
  saturn_name_effect_060c6ec0 = 1;
}

サターン is the comparison target here — this is “Saturn” in katakana. Putting that in as your officer’s name gives you the additional stat and talent upgrades.

It seems that the localization team collapsed two secrets into one — they used Fun4 Yu as the comparison target for both. The “hero” name was meant to give a minor boost; the “Saturn” name was meant to give a major one.

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Outro

I checked the other Saturn Romance of the Three Kingdoms for similar features, but didn’t find any. I did find this strange feature in Sangokushi V, however: there’s a 1 in 2 million chance that you’ll get maximum stats when you’re randomly rolling for character stats on the editor screen. There’s special jackpot logic for this! I wonder if anybody’s ever had it happen naturally.

Thanks for reading. There will be another Under the Microscope article next week! Check out my blog for more retro game reverse engineering articles in the meantime.