Most people, I'm sure, are familiar with the bonus material from Final Fantasy X, the Al Bhed primers. We're all RPG fans here, and it's hard for one as huge as FFX to slip under the radar. However, if for some reason you missed this instalment of the popular series, perhaps because you don't own a PS2, or because you only buy good games, not girly crap like this, I will explain what the Al Bhed alphabet is all about and how this style of item hunt can be implemented in RPG Maker.

The basic premise of the Al Bhed side-quest in Final Fantasy X is that these foreign-speaking inhabitants of Spira are not understood by our heroes, whom are keen to on listening in on everyone's conversations. The curious aspect of this so-called 'language' is that it is actually just English, but with letter substitutions, just like Russian is in the real world. Primers exist around the world, coming in 26 different volumes, revealing which letter in Al Bhed corresponds to what letter in English. By collecting all volumes, our eavesdropping heroes can hear all the mundanities that Al Bheds speak whilst pondering "What was the point?"

But where Final Fantasy X was a huge disappointment, your game need not be. The idea has potential. Perhaps you can use it for a benevolent group of Russians who are desperately trying to tell you the location of nearby buried treasure, only for you not to understand? Only by finding the James Bond DVD set and studying the villains' dialogue can you learn their mystical language, fend off the pirates and steal their loot. The possibilities are endless.

The process could be impractical using conventional processes, but it can be quite easy. We'll be using "strings" for this, something the RPG Maker doesn't really support, but by abusing a function we can in fact do an Al Bhed language with primers.

Here's the trick: Add 26 heroes to your database, one for every letter of the alphabet. Hero 1 is A in the English version, Hero 26 is Z, but since we want it to be a 'foreign' language, use any letter for Hero 1 through 26, jumble them up.

So, if I wanted to type the message: "Why doesn't Tidus have boobs?" you would type out the message:

Message: "\n[23]\n[8]\n[25] \n[4]\n[15]\n[5]\n[13]'\n[20] \n[20]\n[9]\n[4]\n[21]\n[19] \n[8]\n[1]\n[22]\n[5] \n[2]\n[15]\n[15]\n[2]\n[19]?"

Now, since there is a rename hero command, when we find a primer we can change hero 4 into "d" from whatever letter it was. Simple! Of course, if you want capitalisation you'll have to use 52 heroes. That's all there is to it.