I’m currently playing Ikenfell (by the way, I highly suggest it if you want a turn-based RPG with that Mother essence) on PC and I wanted to move to Switch, which means I had to move the save file.

Usually this is not a big issue: a lot of games use the same save file structure, so if one has a modded switch they can easily inject the PC save and the game works as expected. However, when I tried with Ikenfell not only the save was not read but the entire game crashed immediately! Clearly there are some differences.

The PC save is just a text file with a variable and a value at each line, so nothing too fancy. I’ve generated a fresh save on the Switch, to see its format and a cat later… it’s the same: a text file with the same structure as the other one. Then why the Switch version not only was unable to parse it, but also crash the entire game? Maybe the end of line char… no, same.

It was time for an hexdump, and the difference between the two saves was immediately clear: the PC version is ASCII encoded, while the Switch one is UTF-16! I don’t really understand why there is this difference, but an iconv later and the save was correctly read from my Switch!

conv -f ASCII -t UTF-16 save0 > save1

Hope someone will find this useful.