Dark Duel Stories save breaking bug fixed?

[Nirvash]

This is something that I found almost nothing in the many times I searched for it. But this happened to me once on my original copy of the game on GBC, and then it happened again years later when I played on an emulator.

Dark Duel Stories has this progression system where each card has a "price", and your complete 40 cards price cannot exceed your deck capacity. Each time you win a duel, your capacity goes up. And me being the obsessive little kid I was, I would grind the hell out of this game. I would duel each character like 50 times because I wanted to find every card part.

However there is an odd bug where randomly out of nowhere, when you go to start your next duel, you'd get a warning message saying "You have exceeded the deck capacity" and you would get booted back to the previous screen. This can happen even if you are hundreds of points below the capacity. And after over 20 years of googling, people never really seemed to find a cause or a fix. Sometimes it would just magically go away, other times it would brick a save forever.

Since I doubt the game included here has any bugfixes, and it's most likely just a rom dump, I do still wonder if maybe this re-release will see people finally figuring it out once and for all.

[mantidactyle]

Do you still have the save where it happens ? And if it happens, can you do a save state of it ? I pretty much reverse-engineered most of Dark Duel Stories, I'm interested in looking into this glitch you report.

[Nirvash]

I do not. The gameboy save was like 25 years ago. And the emulated save is like 12 years ago on a long-gone laptop.

If your google-fu is good enough, you can find a few very remote examples of other people complaining about it. And this would be impossible to find, but I also remember seeing youtube comments about it on some speedruns or longplays.

The main thing to note is when it happened to me, I recall not really changing the deck very much. Once you reach a certain level of power to consistently beat certain people, you just keep going and going, and then randomly get the message. So maybe it is some weird hyper arbitrary combination of numbers in the level and capacity that bugs out some other unrelated piece of memory.

[Moon Breaker]

My first thought was a Deck Capacity overflow ... but ... that sounds like something that could've been caught and safeguarded against after Japanese DDS. (Confusingly enough, the US version of DDS was instead based on Tri-Holy God Advent.)