[UPDATE] The last FFXED version can finally change the names! This guide is obsolete, however I'll let it be because of the "Lore mystery" I found.

If you want to use FFXED to easily change your character's names, go see my main guide:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=685356413



Hi there! I'm back! this will be my 3rd guide, and all of them are about FFX's stuff. You can check my other guides if you want. I'm Spanish, so I'm sorry if I make any mistakes, I appreciate your support and feedback. If you like the guide, make sure to give it a like! :)

So FFXED (the save file editor for Final Fantasy X) doesn't change the names of the characters properly. It works if you're playung Final Fantasy X in a PS2, but PC somehow corrects the names to whatever the default names are.

I have been researching this, since in my FFXED guide someone told me a convoluted way to change the names to whatever you want. I was interested, so I became curious and took a look at the hex values of the save files. I found exactly what's going on.

In this guide I'll explain how to change the names easily, and why it works (if you understand how it works, you can vhang the names in various ways). This is a work in progress, I'll be adding images to the guide, and polishing everything up. If you spot any mistakes, please, notify me in the comments.

Here we go!

The easy way to do this is by using FFXED.

The first thing you must do is being able to open the file with FFXED. If you don't know how to do that, you can follow my guide on how to do it, or you can try the manual method.

http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1806968624

Once you've opened the save file with FFXED, go to the "Character" section, select the character whose name you want to edit, and change it's name to a 19 characters long name (it doesn't matter the name itself, it can be "1234567890123456789" so you can count easily while you write).

You don't have to remember the number, if you put the mouse over the name of the character, it will tell you the maximum amount of characters it can have (you can see that you can use 17 if you use a font, however i find it easier to use a 19 character long name).

Once you have entered the 19 char long name, press the Edit button. Now you can change the name of your character to whatever you want, press Edit again, and save your file (or change whatever you want from the save).

Remember to use MemorySumChecker before loading the save. Now your file is ready to be loaded, and your character(s) will have the name(s) you gave them.

Ok here I'll explain why and how does this work. It's goin to be a little bit technical, but I think I've made it easy to understand.

First of all, you need a Hex editor to open the save file.
HxD[mh-nexus.de] is a good Hex editor, and it's free.

Open the file, and go to the 0x638C address. All the values from here to 0x64F3 are the names of all the playable characters and aeons. Every 20 bytes (14 in hexadecimal) starts a new character's name.
The game reads the name starting on he first character, and stops reading whenever it finds a NULL address value (NULL=00).

The characters are coded in a particular way, it's not unicode, but it's a little bit similar.
Here I have[t.co] a Excel file that tells you all of the aviable chararacters if you play the game in a non-asian language. You don't actually need this since FFXED does this automatically. In fact I used FFXED to make the excel faster than loading the game over and over.

But this has some consequences and mysteries that you can see in the next section of the guide.

The order goes like this:

At the end of each name there are two bytes that indicate the language in wich the game was saved, and if the game must correct the name itself. The code is:

So as you can see, the "language" byte doesn't matter, since it's the game launcher the one that decides the language you are playing. the only thing that matters is that "01". If the game sees "00" there, it won't check the names and will let them be untouched. The only way to get this in vanilla FFX is if you edit Tidus' name at the beginning of the game. The game will save Tidus' name ending in "00", so it remains edited. But this will only let you edit Tidus's name.

So the manual way to let FFXED edit the names, is to go with HxD to the final byte of each name, and change it to "00".

But... Why does the previous method work? (the FFXED long names one).

Easy. This is an untouched new game save (created in english) from 0x638C. I've decripted it so you can see what's going on here: (you can see this save decription in the Excel file[t.co] I mentioned earlier)

RAW:

Decrypted:
(NOTE: when 00, I've put ".", not because it means a dot, but because it means NULL, and it's easier to put a dot there, and I've deleted the 01 01 wich only serves the purpose of pointing me out when a new character's name comes)


As you can see, what the game does is print all the names in order separated by "00", and starts over, but one character ahead, each 20 bytes (14 in Hex).

I don't know why does it do it like this, since whatever is after the first 00 it encounters, doesn't mater (except for the "edit" byte at the end).
So they are 20 characters long. But since the game needs a "00" to read at the end, the longest name we can give them is 19 characters long. This is what happens when we edit the name in FFXED. It sets the 20th byte to "00" so the game reads it as the end of the name. But the 20th byte is also the byte that the game checks to see if it must let the names be or if he must edit them.

That's why giving FFXED a 19 char long name lets us edit the names.

Now that you know this, I'll start with something weird I doscovered while doing this.

Ok so lets begin with the mystery I think I've discovered.

As you saw, the names of the characters appear before they should for unknown reasons:
Tidus.Yuna.Auron.K 01 01 <- Here only "Tidus" matters, it doesn't matter what's after the first 00 (".")
Yuna.Auron.Kimhari 01 01 <- Here is where Yuna's name is important.

But... what happens when we go to the final row? once we don't have any other character, what does the game put there? lets see what's ther in various files:
(you can see all the files decrypted in the Excel file[t.co] I mentioned in the previous section of the guide)

New Game (English):
Mindy...úúúúúúúú.⋯ 01 01 (nothing important)

New Game (Spanish):
Mindy.Humano.Eón.ú 03 01

Here it starts becoming interesting. "Humano" is Spanish for "Human", obviously. "Eón" is Spanish for "aeon".

New Game (Italian):
Mindy.Umano.Invoca 05 01

"Umano" is Italian for "Human" and "Invoca" is the beggining of "Invocazione", that is Italian for "invocation" (an aeon obviously).

New Game (French):
Anabella.Humain.Ch 02 01

Anabella is the name that French translators gave Mindy (Magus sisters are "Maria, Samantha and Anabella").
"Humain" as usual means "Human", and "Ch" is probably the beguinning of "Chimère", French for Aeon (Thanks Scaremenow)

New Game (German):
Rug.Mensch.Beschwö 04 01

Rug is the name that German translators gave Mindy /Magus sisters are "Mug, Dug and Rug").
Mensch = human and the other word is "Beschwörung" = invocation,

I would do the same for Japanese (It would be the best source since it's the original source) but I don't know how to decode the japanese characters (I've a japanese friend that could tell me what they mean, but I don't know how to decode it).

It seems to be some kind of deprecated stuff that the original developers had in the code... "Aeon" is kind of normal. You select Aeons constantly in the game. But... "Human"?
What could it mean? What would that be used for?

My guess is that at some point in the developmnt of the game, they thought you could use some helpers, maybe like FFXIII-2, some would be fiends, and some would be humans. Maybe at some point you were Sin and you had to summon creatures to fight, some of those would be "Aeons" and some would be "humans".

What do you guys think?

Author: Rodrigo_vda
If you repost the guide somewhere else (or you use some of this info somewhere else), please, be nice and credit the original author :)

Credit to:
Steam users Booshki and Warfighter10000 I Trade tf for pointing me out that the names could be edited and providing me with edited/unedited files so I could do my research on them.

Take a look at my other guides:
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=685356413
http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=699497723

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How to change character's names + Lore Mystery Guide by Rodrigo_Vda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License[creativecommons.org].