[Atrushan]

So, if you've played this game before you know that you can increase stats with T.Points, which you gain by defeating monsters. The thing is, no one character's stats can be increased past the highest stat of another character's stats. For example, if you have two characters, both with 20 strength, you can't increase either's strength past 20. What this does is force you to stagger people's levels up, making the maximum strength constantly rise by doing so, making you have to keep two people at the max all the time so that you can increase each other's maximums. This kind of limits you to picking stats to focus on rather than giving you the freedom, for example, to increase Kos-Mos's strength, and Shion's EAtk separately. It's very frustrating to be having to worry about which characters are maxed at which stats and who has the highest at the time, etc. It also forces you to only work on 3 characters at a time, since the others won't really get any benefit from it at all. I tried using Cheat Engine(I have barely any experience with rom hacking and I read that really the only way to alter things like statistics was a game specific utility or something similar to cheat engine) to find the base statistics for the person with the highest of a possible stat, hoping to find the max value and/or the value of that person's stat and edit the maximum that way, but it didn't work. I couldn't even find the base value for the character, which felt odd to me. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? What I did, was I typed in the character's base str, leveled them up, looked for the changed value until only one was left. After doing that, I changed that value and it didn't do anything to the character's stats, nor could I raise it past that with T.Points, so it couldn't have been the stat of the character, could it?

If possible I might also like to edit the requirements of T.Points to raise the stat a bit to keep it from being able to raise one stat for the entirety of the game so they can one shot anything. Though the current requirements might be suitable to keep it from being that way as well, so it's not necessary.

[Atrushan]

Okay, so I figured out my problem in using CE, and I found some values. In searching for the max EP you can invest, I found something interesting. There were 3 values I found when leveling up to this point. One value changed the character's max EP to 99 when I changed it, obviously. Another didn't seem to do anything with what I wanted so I avoided it, but the third I found really interesting and I can only assume this is because it has a check for the highest person's EP and sets the max possible TP you can invest in a stat to that person's max EP. The reason I say this is, when I change THAT value to 99, and open the menu, it resets back to the person with the highest max EP. For example, KOS-MOS's max EP at this point is 22. When I change that value to 99, and open the menu, it goes BACK to 22. If I change KOS-MOS's max EP to 99, it changes to 99 while in the menu, and every time you're in the menu it always changes back, so I'm assuming there's some sort of check taking place to set it. Is there any way to fix this?

[Mauron]

It's possible the game copies the stats to a second location while in the menu. Try changing one of the other two locations outside the menu, then going into the menu.

Also, I would strongly recommend using a debugging PS2 emulator over Cheat Engine. Cheat Engine is designed to hack PC software, so it loads the emulator and game as one thing. You also can't easily see what the PS2 is doing, for when you get into more advanced hacking.

[Atrushan]

Just tried doing that(I think I did when I first found it but I don't remember). I've found 4 different addresses that didn't seem to change to anything except to KOS-MOS's new EP value when leveling her up. Changing two of them doesn't SEEM to do anything, whether in or out of the menu. The other one changes KOS-MOS's max EP(she has all of the highest stats atm so I'm using her to find the max EP value). They don't change back like the one value that I suspect is the max EP value. I tried finding out what writes to that address and replacing it with code that does nothing(like the tutorial in cheat engine teaches), and doing that gave me some really weird results. When I changed the value to 99 and went in the menu, both her and Shion's EP was 99, when I went into the tech point menu, every time I swapped from Shion to KOS-MOS, KOS-MOS's stats seemed to increase, then if I swapped back to Shion, her stats would then match KOS-MOS's. Correction, KOS-MOS's atk and vit go up(Shion's str and vit go up to match what KOS-MOS' were), Shion's HP = KOS-MOS' HP but it doesn't go any higher when swapping back and forth, while all the other stats remain as they were.