About the game
Inindo: Way of the Ninja (Koei, 1991 JP / 1994 US) is a turn-based RPG set in late-Sengoku Japan. You play a ninja whose clan was wiped out by Oda Nobunaga, and the game blends a party-based JRPG combat system with classic Koei strategy mechanics — recruit historical generals, take provinces, raise armies, navigate regional politics. The systems are unique, the atmosphere is fantastic, the soundtrack slaps.
The catch: the level curve is brutal. Once your party crosses level 50, every additional level demands a flat 45 000 EXP. This page lets you patch the per-level requirement curve to taste — without writing a single line of code. The SNES port already caps level at 99 and the attribute fields are bounded, so there's nothing else to touch in the ROM.
Before you patch
This page does not host or distribute any Inindo ROM. To use the “download patched ROM” button you must supply a copy you obtained legally (e.g. dumped from a cartridge you own). All patching happens in your browser — your file never leaves the page.
The patch targets the US release (Inindo: Way of the Ninja, SNES, 1994). The offsets were reverse-engineered against that ROM; the Japanese version (Inindou: Datou Nobunaga) lays out its tables differently and will be rejected by the “looks like Inindo” header check.
If you can’t share the ROM with the page, you can still download an IPS patch and apply
it locally with any IPS tool (e.g. Floating IPS, Lunar IPS, the flips CLI).
Patcher settings
No ROM loaded.
What does the patch actually do?
- Overwrites Table 1 (50 × 16-bit LE words at file offset
0x01539E— ninja class). - Overwrites Table 2 (50 × 16-bit LE words at file offset
0x015402— monk / onmyoji classes). - Patched-ROM download only: recomputes the SNES internal checksum and complement at
0x7FDC..0x7FDFso ROM tools stop flagging the file. (Cosmetic — emulators and real hardware don’t verify it.) - IPS download: one record (the threshold tables), no checksum patch (computing it would require the full ROM).
- Nothing else is touched — no graphics, no music, no level-cap or attribute patches, no other data.
Per-level EXP requirements
old → new · unchanged
No level-cap patch needed
We empirically confirmed that the SNES port of Inindo natively caps level at 99: the game's
own orchestrator passes a cap of $63 (= 99) to its clamped-add primitive every time it tries to
bump the level field, so the level physically cannot climb past 99 through normal play.
Character attributes are safe too. Intel, Speed, Luck, and Power are 8-bit fields and the
game's orchestrator passes a cap of $FF (= 255) for them — they can't overflow. HP and MP
are recomputed from the level at every level-up event, so once the level reaches its 99 cap, those fields
hold automatically.
The widely-cited "post-100 crash" warning (e.g. secky.org) is for the PC-98 original, not this SNES port. Koei evidently fixed the level-table overflow when they ported the game; the bug isn't reachable on SNES. So this editor only patches the per-level EXP requirement tables — no level cap, no attribute cap, nothing else.
See DEBUGGING_NOTES.md § "Errata: the SNES version natively caps level at 99" for the full trace and the byte-diff against the original ROM that confirmed nothing else needed touching.
Two tables, picked by class
The game stores two per-level EXP curves in the ROM and picks one based on the class of the levelling character — not the party slot they sit in.
- Table 1 — ninja class. The protagonist is always a ninja, and any other ninja party members use this curve too. (Verified end-to-end: live trace of the level-up code, plus a successful patched-ROM test.)
- Table 2 — the spell-casting / priestly classes: monk (僧) and onmyoji (陰陽師). Slightly easier curve early on (15 EXP for L1→2 vs 18), converges with Table 1 at the level-50 cap of 45 000.
Bugs & feature requests
Found a bug or have a feature in mind? Please open an issue on GitHub.
For bug reports, please attach a save state if possible — it makes reproduction dramatically easier.