But no, I don’t think that was intentionally designed into the game. They had a unique ‘savegame’ format that didn’t use battery save.
Instead, they used a 48 character table, where each character could be any of 32 different possible characters, where the player was expected to write all this down and re-enter it back in on reload.
But it was checked with some checsum characters at the end(s), making it rather difficult to make a full hack savegame.
Strangely enough though, their own chesksum algorithm 3P5 repeated as such exactly 8 times manages to unlock all 4 characters, max them out, and even defeat the checksum field without even having to bother with it.
So when you next take the SNES LOTR journey, take the power of 3P5 with you…
Well clearly you’ve identified the problem. If your dogs poo every time you walk them, then stop walking them and they’ll stop pooing, problem solved 👍