The fact that the channel uses the City Folk jingle is the weirdest part to me. Everything else is internal and wouldn't be seen by players but that melody is such a blatant connection...
I believe Nintendo wanted to rush out the patch as quickly as possible so not many players would experience the glitch, so they just chose something easy for the startup jingle. But it is definitely odd
@@lapielazoolieThe fact that they felt it necessary to give it any music at all speaks to how they wanted to maintain a certain level of charm, which is pretty cool, IMO.
The Wii channel every kid bought because we had no money, but wanted the rush of buying anything from the Shop. What a blast from the past, great video!
Leave it to Nintendo to make "change a flag in the save file" require two downloads, an internet connection every time it's used, an account, and the risk of deleting that save later due to a set of complex interactions. Did they contract Microsoft for this?
Back then the best idea before it was to mail your entire console out to the company and you might get your console back within a few months and you'll be lucky if the game is still inside of it if you left it in there. This is a huge improvement from that
i think it went something like "uhhh- hey we gotta fix this thing, uhh we got this scrapped animal crossing thing, yeah lets just slap something together with that lol"
I mean why not? All the necessary pieces were made already. That Animal Crossing thing is a channel that worked around the unintuitive limitations of the Wii, why bother making another channel from scratch
@@thewiseoldfox I just think its funny with a company so protective of their stuff like nintendo. not to say stuff hasn't been found by data mining, but for something relatively small, i'm suprised they did it so like haphazardly
The two data bytes you're talking about are slightly simpler: Try looking at it from a binary perspective, rather than hexadecimal. For example: "54" (which is a value of 84 in decimal) corresponds to binary value 01010100, while "15" (which is 21 in decimal) is 00010101. If we interpret each bit (the ones and zeroes in binary) as a FLAG (which is almost 100% definitely what is happening here), than it's clear that it's just some flags being set and unset, and a conflict with what they get set to. To go even further: The difference between D6 and E6 is exactly 16, which is a power of two. The difference between those values in binary is literally turning a zero into a one.
This is right, these addresses are about progression flags. I've looked into this softlock myself and this was my explanation to the problem. About the first address you pointed out, these are the flags it's tracking: 0x01 : The Eldin Eruption is ready to play (it's set after meeting Levias and after finishing each song of the hero quest but is unset when starting the Lanayru/Faron quests). If this flag is set, entering Eldin starts the Bokoblin Base sequence, otherwise you just enter normal Eldin. 0x40 : This is set by the Goron in Lanayru and unsets when obtaining the Lanayru song of the hero (this flag prevents you from doing the Faron song of the hero quest after starting the lanayru one by temporarely changing the layers of the maps in Faron to not have the imprisoned 3 fight available) Basically, these two flags are used to prevent you from doing the Eldin/Faron song of the hero quest when you start the Lanayru quest. Fun fact, 0x80 at that address is a flag that prevents doing the Lanayru part of the quest, but that only sets when doing the faron quest, so it's unrelated to this particular issue. The other flags that are set at that address are unrelated to the problem and we can just ignore them: 0x10 is the Fire Sanctuary Intro Cutscene being watched 0x04 is one of the cutscenes when going to rescue the loftwing during the prologue The reason the softlock happens is because Nintendo messed up their event logic with the Goron dialogue. Golo has several possible dialogues possible around that time in the game. Before having entered the Lanayru Gorge for the first time, talking to Golo makes him explain that there's a thunder dragon to be found somewhere. But after having entered the Lanayru Gorge for the first time, he has special dialogue instead congratulating Link for finding the thunder dragon territory. The way Nintendo failed on the 1.0 version was by both setting flag 0x40 and unsetting flag 0x01 above on the wrong dialogue option. On 1.0, these flag changes occur on the 2nd dialogue option (after entering Lanayru Gorge), which causes the softlock if the dialogue is triggered specifically after obtaining the Lanayru song of the hero as it's impossible to complete a quest again that's already been completed. On the following versions they fixed the event logic by making the first dialogue option (before entering the Lanayru Gorge) cause these flag changes, which cannot cause a softlock as it's impossible to obtain the thunder dragon's song without entering the Lanayru Gorge first.
An entire app created to fix a game breaking glitch is such a fascinating concept in modern day. Like, patching bugs was DEFINITELY possible when Skyward Sword was made, so the fact they even had to use this method is just.. so weird to me.
Wii patches are actually a thing, but they weren't a thing until after the WiiU already came out.(For more details, look into the Wii version of Dragon Quest X. It is sadly already shut down with seemingly no hope of a fan revival, but what they did to get it running is really cool)
very good video! nice to see an indepth technical explanation of this glitch, but it still manages to be simple enough for people to understand AND interesting facts and theories about the animal crossing content? say no more
Computer science is one of those things I'm sure I'll never understand, but I love listening to people who do understand it. Amazing how such a small thing can softlock you.
Thanks for the interesting deep dive! I've always wondered why this channel seemed to be related to City Folk but never was sure. Thank you for digging in and presenting it so well!
Great video! You beat me to covering this topic! 🫣 The theory of Skyward Sword’s update channel being salvaged together from a City Folk distribution app is pretty sound. After all, once they realized the glitch was game-breaking, Nintendo probably scrambled to put together a super quick solution to get a patch out as soon as possible. I imagine the most logical solution was to just piggyback off the work they did for City Folk and modify it to patch Skyward Sword.
This was a really cool deep dive! This glitch actually happened to me when I first started playing the game and I always wondered what that save data channel was doing, now I know
I remember finding a game breaking glitch in Twilight Princess on my first playthrough. I just happened to save inside the canon room and had to restart the whole game
Something I’ve never heard of relating to a game I’ve played 5 minutes of on a console I haven’t had since childhood? A perfect storm for a video to watch in full tonight. Full seriousness though this video was really well edited and I hope you get more views like you deserve
I remember Metroid Other M also had a softlock that a lot of people experienced, but I don't remember if it was serious like that one, because it didn’t get a patch channel like that...
It's the exact same type of thing actually, going back to a previous point in the game setting a flag incorrectly and preventing further progress. The reason it did not get special attention(I am pretty sure they never even fixed it in a revision, but don't quote me in that) is probably that Metroid is just not as relevant to Nintendo as Zelda is.
It was much earlier in the system’s lifespan so they opted to only do SD card or Wii system send-ins, which they kept around for Skyward Sword as mentioned in the video. I would also guess that Other M didn’t sell nearly as well as Skyward Sword, so it wasn’t nearly as much of a priority to develop a fixing tool from scratch.
I think the full reason here makes a lot of sense...but it's still bonkers. WW literally overwrites deliberately empty parts of the save data in order to ship DLC post launch, so Iwould bet good money that the "update" is actually a MANGLED WILD WORLD DLC ITEM that is patched over top of Skyward Sword's save file. Because if you've got a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I had Wii mini which does not have internet connection or SD card. I wrote an email to Nintendo asking how can I fix my save file, and they straight up told me, that I'm SOL and have to start from beginning.
Oh wow! I hadn't even considered the Wii Mini. That's a shame that Nintendo didn't allow you to send it in, but without an SD Card slot, it might've been more difficult. That was pretty much the same response given to Wii owners before the update channel was developed. Thanks for sharing!
Which song in the description is the one KK slider sings at the end? It's a cool cover. Or am I silly is this just something in animal crossing already?
This makes me think, could someone who works on wiilink make a wii channel available in the wii shop that would be able to act as a save editor by using this trick?
wouldnt the save data be associated with the secondary title that has the same game ID as zelda? also gods this is so needlessly complicated this is such a fucking nintendo moment omfg
The fact that the channel uses the City Folk jingle is the weirdest part to me. Everything else is internal and wouldn't be seen by players but that melody is such a blatant connection...
I believe Nintendo wanted to rush out the patch as quickly as possible so not many players would experience the glitch, so they just chose something easy for the startup jingle. But it is definitely odd
@@seereebeeAt least it seems they used instruments that seem to more closely resonate with TLoZ, which would make sense given your theory.
@@lapielazoolieThe fact that they felt it necessary to give it any music at all speaks to how they wanted to maintain a certain level of charm, which is pretty cool, IMO.
The Wii channel every kid bought because we had no money, but wanted the rush of buying anything from the Shop. What a blast from the past, great video!
So true
I feel attacked
Me downloading the demo of a unknown Pokémon game
Me when Pokemon Rumble
literally
Leave it to Nintendo to make "change a flag in the save file" require two downloads, an internet connection every time it's used, an account, and the risk of deleting that save later due to a set of complex interactions. Did they contract Microsoft for this?
.hack pfp?
good pick :)
With the way save data on Wii games works, it was really the only way to do it
Back then the best idea before it was to mail your entire console out to the company and you might get your console back within a few months and you'll be lucky if the game is still inside of it if you left it in there. This is a huge improvement from that
.hack mention
Fun fact: you can still get that channel and that patch to this day
i think it went something like
"uhhh- hey we gotta fix this thing, uhh we got this scrapped animal crossing thing, yeah lets just slap something together with that lol"
I mean why not? All the necessary pieces were made already. That Animal Crossing thing is a channel that worked around the unintuitive limitations of the Wii, why bother making another channel from scratch
@@thewiseoldfox I just think its funny with a company so protective of their stuff like nintendo. not to say stuff hasn't been found by data mining, but for something relatively small, i'm suprised they did it so like haphazardly
You type like a little Scott the woz junior.
The two data bytes you're talking about are slightly simpler: Try looking at it from a binary perspective, rather than hexadecimal. For example: "54" (which is a value of 84 in decimal) corresponds to binary value 01010100, while "15" (which is 21 in decimal) is 00010101. If we interpret each bit (the ones and zeroes in binary) as a FLAG (which is almost 100% definitely what is happening here), than it's clear that it's just some flags being set and unset, and a conflict with what they get set to. To go even further: The difference between D6 and E6 is exactly 16, which is a power of two. The difference between those values in binary is literally turning a zero into a one.
This is right, these addresses are about progression flags. I've looked into this softlock myself and this was my explanation to the problem.
About the first address you pointed out, these are the flags it's tracking:
0x01 : The Eldin Eruption is ready to play (it's set after meeting Levias and after finishing each song of the hero quest but is unset when starting the Lanayru/Faron quests). If this flag is set, entering Eldin starts the Bokoblin Base sequence, otherwise you just enter normal Eldin.
0x40 : This is set by the Goron in Lanayru and unsets when obtaining the Lanayru song of the hero (this flag prevents you from doing the Faron song of the hero quest after starting the lanayru one by temporarely changing the layers of the maps in Faron to not have the imprisoned 3 fight available)
Basically, these two flags are used to prevent you from doing the Eldin/Faron song of the hero quest when you start the Lanayru quest. Fun fact, 0x80 at that address is a flag that prevents doing the Lanayru part of the quest, but that only sets when doing the faron quest, so it's unrelated to this particular issue.
The other flags that are set at that address are unrelated to the problem and we can just ignore them:
0x10 is the Fire Sanctuary Intro Cutscene being watched
0x04 is one of the cutscenes when going to rescue the loftwing during the prologue
The reason the softlock happens is because Nintendo messed up their event logic with the Goron dialogue. Golo has several possible dialogues possible around that time in the game. Before having entered the Lanayru Gorge for the first time, talking to Golo makes him explain that there's a thunder dragon to be found somewhere. But after having entered the Lanayru Gorge for the first time, he has special dialogue instead congratulating Link for finding the thunder dragon territory.
The way Nintendo failed on the 1.0 version was by both setting flag 0x40 and unsetting flag 0x01 above on the wrong dialogue option. On 1.0, these flag changes occur on the 2nd dialogue option (after entering Lanayru Gorge), which causes the softlock if the dialogue is triggered specifically after obtaining the Lanayru song of the hero as it's impossible to complete a quest again that's already been completed. On the following versions they fixed the event logic by making the first dialogue option (before entering the Lanayru Gorge) cause these flag changes, which cannot cause a softlock as it's impossible to obtain the thunder dragon's song without entering the Lanayru Gorge first.
An entire app created to fix a game breaking glitch is such a fascinating concept in modern day. Like, patching bugs was DEFINITELY possible when Skyward Sword was made, so the fact they even had to use this method is just.. so weird to me.
Wii games didn't have patches. Maybe partly because the Wii had very little on board storage to work with.
Wii patches are actually a thing, but they weren't a thing until after the WiiU already came out.(For more details, look into the Wii version of Dragon Quest X. It is sadly already shut down with seemingly no hope of a fan revival, but what they did to get it running is really cool)
Pokemon Diamond and Pearl also recieved a similar program in Japan, because you could easily softlock going out of bounds in the Japanese version
Was it a channel or something?
I thought the bug would be reveal to be caused by having an a Animal Crossing save file, and the jingle would be a cheeky nod to that.
Rad as hell, I love your theories in the first half. Commenting for the algorithm
Oh yeah and this dude also took the helix fossil, I hear stating it but us asking about it anyway are good for thr YT algorithm too
ever since i saw TCRF page on this, i had this exact same theory myself, glad to know you went out of your way to try to prove it further
very good video! nice to see an indepth technical explanation of this glitch, but it still manages to be simple enough for people to understand
AND interesting facts and theories about the animal crossing content? say no more
Computer science is one of those things I'm sure I'll never understand, but I love listening to people who do understand it. Amazing how such a small thing can softlock you.
Thanks for the interesting deep dive! I've always wondered why this channel seemed to be related to City Folk but never was sure. Thank you for digging in and presenting it so well!
Great video! You beat me to covering this topic! 🫣
The theory of Skyward Sword’s update channel being salvaged together from a City Folk distribution app is pretty sound. After all, once they realized the glitch was game-breaking, Nintendo probably scrambled to put together a super quick solution to get a patch out as soon as possible. I imagine the most logical solution was to just piggyback off the work they did for City Folk and modify it to patch Skyward Sword.
I would still love to hear your way of explaining the theory if you ever get to it
I am here for the youtube gods.
Ive never seen people ask about this channel so its awesome to see someone go into it!
This was a really cool deep dive! This glitch actually happened to me when I first started playing the game and I always wondered what that save data channel was doing, now I know
Very nice video! Glad to finally have a technical explanation on why this happens. And wow, didn't know it was that tied to City Folk.
Ah hell nah, pikmin lost media :(
Pikmin *found* media
I remember finding a game breaking glitch in Twilight Princess on my first playthrough. I just happened to save inside the canon room and had to restart the whole game
Fun video. I love this kind of thing. I’m also fascinated with wirh Wii shop channel services
Something I’ve never heard of relating to a game I’ve played 5 minutes of on a console I haven’t had since childhood? A perfect storm for a video to watch in full tonight. Full seriousness though this video was really well edited and I hope you get more views like you deserve
Great video! I never knew about the animal crossing assets thing actually. I appreciate the in-depth look! Subbed
WIRESHARK JUMPSCARE AT 1:55
Wireshark the goat for network traffic inspection
Super high quality video once again! Excited to see something related to zelda c: Keep it up!!
Bro needs to get picked up by the algorithm immediately
I remember Metroid Other M also had a softlock that a lot of people experienced, but I don't remember if it was serious like that one, because it didn’t get a patch channel like that...
It's the exact same type of thing actually, going back to a previous point in the game setting a flag incorrectly and preventing further progress. The reason it did not get special attention(I am pretty sure they never even fixed it in a revision, but don't quote me in that) is probably that Metroid is just not as relevant to Nintendo as Zelda is.
It was much earlier in the system’s lifespan so they opted to only do SD card or Wii system send-ins, which they kept around for Skyward Sword as mentioned in the video. I would also guess that Other M didn’t sell nearly as well as Skyward Sword, so it wasn’t nearly as much of a priority to develop a fixing tool from scratch.
I think the full reason here makes a lot of sense...but it's still bonkers.
WW literally overwrites deliberately empty parts of the save data in order to ship DLC post launch, so Iwould bet good money that the "update" is actually a MANGLED WILD WORLD DLC ITEM that is patched over top of Skyward Sword's save file.
Because if you've got a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Awesome deep dive
Mysterious…
Skyward Sword Save Data Update Channel is my favorite Animal Crossing game.
Metroid Other M also had a game breaking bug but never got a channel. You could send your SD Card in to get the save fixed.
Amazing video!
This is a great video!
Love it when someone explains so deep level things to me 😊 I find it interesting, but I could never do this on my own😢
Boy... That's a bizarre way of modifying a few bytes...
VERY GOOD VIDEO X3 THANK UU
Never heard of this. Neat.
I had Wii mini which does not have internet connection or SD card. I wrote an email to Nintendo asking how can I fix my save file, and they straight up told me, that I'm SOL and have to start from beginning.
Oh wow! I hadn't even considered the Wii Mini. That's a shame that Nintendo didn't allow you to send it in, but without an SD Card slot, it might've been more difficult. That was pretty much the same response given to Wii owners before the update channel was developed.
Thanks for sharing!
awesome video
skyward sword banger game and banger video
Which song in the description is the one KK slider sings at the end? It's a cool cover. Or am I silly is this just something in animal crossing already?
It's something I put together myself! There's no full version of it since I only made it 20 seconds long.
This makes me think, could someone who works on wiilink make a wii channel available in the wii shop that would be able to act as a save editor by using this trick?
Good video!
Had to watch at x1.5
Nice video though bro
nice video
is it possible to edit the save file with a hex editor to fix this glitch
Not that easily since there’s a checksum to verify the save hasn’t been tampered with
*Deletes save data*
This is a very Nintendo thing.
How do you pronounce egg yolk?
Neat
wouldnt the save data be associated with the secondary title that has the same game ID as zelda?
also gods this is so needlessly complicated this is such a fucking nintendo moment omfg
Algo food comment.
TIL that I wasn't just a stupid kid and the game actually wouldn't work.
W
Hey James pin me
16m ago wow
Its always issues on US NTSC copies of the game, but never on EU PAL copies.
PAL Minish Cap literally can't get 100%. Stockwell's Big Bomb Bag just isn't there.
That's because games tend to come out last in the EU