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…
That sounds like a you problem. I respect the terms of their license, and have no intent or desire to distribute any modified versions of their software, should I ever even care to try modifying anything in the first place.
If you do happen to find ways to improve their software, maybe consider applying with FUTO…
They’re not worried about individuals like ourselves making our own private modifications if we so care to. They know 95%+ of individuals out there aren’t even coders anyways, they just expect the few that do happen to go out of their way to modify their apps don’t distribute their mods without authorization.
The main infrastructure of their license is to make sure the big companies out there can’t legally rip off their code, alter it and sell it under their own branding or such.