FFTA2 - Ghost Glitch?

[Chronovore]

I am play-testing some changes and ran into a problem in the mission "A Plea for Help". It is enemy formation C5, which includes a Wraith and some Ghosts. When deploying characters to start the mission, there is an issue with deploying characters but only if I've already checked the enemy status screens. As I add a character, it occasionally cancels ones that I added before it. This means I have to start the mission with just a few units. I also can get a blank frozen screen glitch when checking enemy status screens once the battle begins.


I want to say that I encountered this on the cartridge back in the day but I'm not sure. I know it happened on a previous play-test with fewer alterations, but in a different mission that also involved undead enemies. (Curiously, I have encountered an eerily similar type of repeatable glitch in the PS4 release of Disgaea Complete when scrolling through the enemy lists in Item World. I'm the kind of guy who always looks over the enemies to check for good steals, etc. The possibility of the same king of glitch occurring in two similar games on different platforms is very interesting.) I'm guessing it is a problem with the enemy list or something.

The last time this happened on my rom-hacking exploration, the enemy formation editor had not been released. Since this is the first time it has happened on this play-test, I checked the editor. I confirmed that this is Formation C5. I notice that there are seven enemy units in the formation but only six appear at the beginning of the battle. Could there be an issue with enemies waiting to enter battle, or perhaps with the mechanism by which undead get uniquely removed?

Any thoughts would be appreciated. I don't want to advance until I get this figured out and hopefully fixed.

[Chronovore]

After several more attempts, I've had the deployment problem start when scrolling left through my character list before deploying a unit. I've also had it happen such that I can't get a unit to actually deploy. When this happens, it looks like a character has deployed but it still says zero and deploying another one just causes the currently displayed one to disappear. Again, this is only happening against the undead formations at "A Plea for Help" and "Aiding the Serpent" as far as I can tell.

I still swear that this happened to me on an unaltered cartridge once upon a time. (I can't be sure but it feels like a real memory.) I really hope someone who has even a remote idea of what is happening here reads this and replies.

[Chronovore]

BTW, here are more notes:

Changing all the enemies to another class did not help.

Setting the hidden seventh enemy's faction to 0 caused him to exist in battle but overlaid on another enemy... that seemed bad, and it didn't help.

The "unknown bytes 0D to 06" in the formation editor seem to affect the enemy's starting position. In this case, changing the seventh enemy from 00000000000000FF to 00000000080200FF puts that enemy on the map normally.

I'm too much in the dark to start messing around with all the other unknown bytes. I'm going to leave a save at the beginning of this battle and move past it. So long as I get a few guys dispatched and don't check enemy stats during the fight, it seems fine.